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Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

Skype has a very, VERY small subset of Teams features. Teams is the nexus for a much broader, fully integrated ecosystem - Azure AD, Azure itself, Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, M365, Todo, etc.

Anybody starting a new enterprise project in a Microsoft shop will look at building it around these technologies first. We are talking about compute, storage, front-end, back-end, integration, etc. all hosted on this stack, with Teams providing the entry point for the experience.

Skype, Zoom, Slack, etc. will never compete with this vision.

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But why didn't they leverage the Skype brand? Wasn't this the whole point of Skype for business?

Obviously the consumer product we were all once familiar with wouldn't suffice in terms of features, but I never understood why they didn't stick with the Skype brand.

Possibly getting that talent to work on what became teams?

Skype is mainly a consumer product and that's where they have their users.

That's only because they never invested in the corporate side of it.

Both Google Meet and Zoom have both consumer and business users. Skype could have done the same if Microsoft didn't let it rot.

I'm not even sure when or why people (including myself) stopped using Skype... I used it constantly a decade or so a go both for business and personal. It's like Microsoft just forgot about it while other competitors entered the market and ate away at their market share.

A strong Skype brand and decent Skype for business product would have made so much sense. Regardless of quality, wherever I've worked Teams always felt like a soulless forced corporate product. The brand is almost universally hated, and for what? They had a great brand with Skype it was just neglected.

They attached the Skype brand to an unrelated product (Lync -> Skype for Business)

From what I remember, the two Skypes were never fully interoperable.

I guess they wanted to start fresh rather than clean up that mess and didn't want a third incompatible Skype.

They did leverage the Skype brand, at the cost of the Lync brand people in business all knew. They made that one change because people in business all associated the brand "Lync" with a low quality product.

At the time of the pandemics, they decided to push the Teams brand instead of Skype because people in business all associated the brand "Skype" with a very low quality product.

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