In my cynical frame of mind I imagine those execs then golden-parachuted off to Google and were responsible for the Google Pay, GPay, and Google Wallet debacle.

I had a friend who worked high up at Lync before they were sold. Microsoft flew him out and threatened lawsuits to coerce them to sign and play ball.

I was working at Microsoft during the switch to Skype for Business and the employees were dogfooding the beta. Terrible time to be alive.

Communicator -> Lync (after the computer system of a dystopian videogame?) -> Skype for Business (because everybody knew Skype, so let's make this completely unrelated thing) -> Teams.

Every step was about as fucked-up as every other.

Linq is a C# DSL for SQL. You must have been thinking about Lync.

IMO, the thing that went wrong with Lync->SFB transition was they bought Skype based on the idea that they could do something to merge the code with Lync, but over a year or two found out that that the only value was in the Skype branding, and the code and architecture of it was a dumpster fire. While the whole org was distracted by that, Teams came along and showed them what a rewrite from the ground up could do.