Ummm .. Lync / SkypeForBusiness / Teams has been Microsoft's core communication product for long over a decade now.
It has always been part of their basic/essential packages because they know that everyone needs a communication platform.
How you managed to work at Microsoft on Teams and think that nobody knows about it, is a bit astounding.
Teams was a product for 3 years before Covid. A large amount of companies had been running it for 1-2 years at that point.
The idea that Microsoft built Teams as a Skype for Business replacement, but didn't design for scale or reliability is an absurd statement.
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Either you are
(1) lying
or two
(2) worked on teams but had no understanding of the product or userbase.
... which kind of does sounds like how teams might have been built
Teams was very much the sleepy rest-and-vest corner of the company that people transferred into to quiet-retire. Teams is not just a reskinning/re-clienting of SfB's backend. They are separate systems.
We all know the code and development direction in teams is lacking. This is one problem.
Microsoft scrambling around COVID times with Teams had more to do with the load / demand / capturing market share, than anything else.
SfB stopped releasing in 2018, 2021 it was lights out no matter what .. everyone was already moving to Teams.
Trying to pretend that their main communication platform is not a "core offering" when it is the definition of one of their core offerings makes no sense.
And trying to say nobody knew about it, when everyone knew about it also makes no sense.
SfB was dead by the time covid started. Where do you think these people migrated to?
Also consider, Teams for Education as a market segment basically didn't exist before COVID.
My point is, many organization had a Teams license but never really pay attention to it until COVID. Which was another problem for Microsoft because although op costs for Teams went up like a hockey stick, they weren't monetizing that growth until a bit later.
We are in the post COVID years now and more and more organizations are using it today.
Is it accurate to say they have no incentive to improve, given their dominance in the enterprise space and the complicity of some finance/IT departments into forcing it on their employees given the cost savings and the convenience?