I guess MS-internal politics? They had their own Teams and that was the preferred product?
That is why there are now Webview2 usage all over the place, and after 5 years WinUI 3.0 is still behind the WinForms, WPF and even MFC development experience, even though it should have been a plain port of UWP/WinUI 2.0 into standard Win32 infrastructure, so adding almost another 10 years on top (WinRT platform came out in 2012).
EDIT: it was actually 2012, not 2014.
Teams used to use Angular 1 and I think they are still migrating out of it. Microsoft would need to pay me a lot of money to want to dive into that mess. I imagine there are a lot of devs who would love to be VSCode core developers though.
I really don't know what the Teams team does all day long.
I imagine the Teams project gets a lot of pressure to deliver features instead of fixing the underlying problems. While the VSCode project probably only occasionally gets a push from upper management (like to add copilot stuff)
Delivering features on top of an unmaintainable mess just makes the mess bigger.
Afaik Skype was a buggy mess and thereby not a good foundation for development, and very much had a reputation of being software for consumers, not businesses, so not a good foundation to make money.
Microsoft meanwhile is a corporate powerhouse, not a consumer powerhouse. Most of its profits are from corporate software and servers.
So it made sense that they developed MS Teams as a corporate product for their Office product range.
It's closing in on half a billion users and its annual (!) revenue already exceeds the purchase price of Skype. 90% of fortune 100 companies use it, and I think it's the go-to product for virtually all corporates that run on PC/Windows.
Not doing this sooner (14 years ago) is where they definitely dropped the ball. But during covid? I think MS completely nailed it with a hugely succesful rollout of an integrated tech in MS Teams.
Whenever I reboot my computer, Skype installs an update.
Even with Skype they rebuilt the entire backend as well when they moved it from a decentralized platform to a centralized platform.
I struggle to believe that this theory holds any water.
It also lends support to an old conspiracy theory that the primary driver for Microsoft buying Skype was so that the service could be centralized so that communications could be monitored and intercepted.
Ironically, I think this list includes Teams.
(if strings, binary layout and even some subprocess names are to be believed)
1 to buy the users
2 to reign in an upstart empire
3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand
4 to be able to peddle 'Lync'
They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly; they changed skype from something to chase and desire, to something to avoid :-/.
A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync, which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product. As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'.
It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to.
For a range of years, the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other..
/s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call..
/s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service
- "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices",
"you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",.
So, skype going from 'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to 'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!'
Enshittification galore.