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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Microsoft Teams soundly defeat Zoom, Slack, and all the others? I was under the impression that Teams has at least an order of magnitude more active users than any competitor.

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It does, but Teams is mostly a thing within businesses. Skype is a consumer side brand, which MS is scuttling in favour of Teams (which is a really weird brand to try to use for consumer-side customers). They could've used Teams architecture/app and branded it as Skype, it would've made way more sense than Teams (free) which is what they're doing now. Consumer side Microsoft Accounts and business are different worlds, it'd help MS a lot to speak about them clearly.

But MS and good product naming, well...

Teams has more users but most of those users didn't choose Teams - it was thrust upon them.

When it's bundled with O365 and shares admin tools, accounts etc, there's no wonder companies pick it.

I don't know anyone who uses it outside of work.

I tried for a bit.. it really sucks outside the work context, and much like when there were too many competing IM products, it just doesn't work without all the people.

Wasn't too bad when most were under ICQ, AIM or Yahoo messenger... but after FB, Google and MS got in the mix it just went to hell mostly. Still is. I mean I have half a dozen messenger apps on my phone each with half a dozen contacts that thing $FOO messenger is better for privacy/comms/etc.

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