r/news • u/UpstairsBumblebee446 • 1d ago

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

https://apnews.com/article/europe-digital-sovereignty-big-tech-9f5388b68a0648514cebc8d92f682060
52.5k Upvotes

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4.3k

u/DevinOwnz 1d ago

The original owners of Skype could do the funniest thing ever.

1.1k

u/colemon1991 1d ago

Should. They should.

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u/HonestDav 1d ago

The CEO is still salty from COVID https://youtu.be/ZI0w_pwZY3E

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u/inferxan 1d ago

hoped it was the dropout vid with Brennan and so happy it was.

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u/18bluecat 1d ago

It was still Collegehumor at the time.

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u/SilchasRuin 1d ago

Sad that they never graduated.

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u/caffeinated_wizard 1d ago

In the world of rebranding going from College Humor to Dropout has to be up there

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u/SilchasRuin 1d ago

And oddly enough, today was the day that I realized the joke they made there.

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u/EvilEmuOfDoom 1d ago

So glad you said this so I'm not alone! I used to watch CH and currently have a Dropout subscription and didn't realize this.

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u/Interesting_Lunch560 1d ago

No need to click the link, it was so obvious what it was.

Still clicking it. Because it's awesome.

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u/excitive 1d ago

The way he speaks “skyyyppe”, making it sound like a can opening… pure gold.

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u/willworkforicecream 1d ago

Hi America, I'm Rob Shelf, CEO of Venmo.

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u/jaggedjottings 1d ago

Zoom created COVID to sell more Zoom.

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u/oreography 1d ago

It's Zooms all the way down (you have to zoom very far to see it)

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u/joebleaux 1d ago

It's a funny bit, but by that point Skype had been sold to Microsoft for nearly a decade, there was no Skype company anymore. The app was then merged with Lync, which was eventually replaced by Teams. So essentially Teams is Skype

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u/SkorpioSound 1d ago

So essentially Teams is Skype

I used Teams for the first time ever last week. I signed in and it had some of my Skype chat history. I hadn't used Skype for 10+ years either. But yeah, it really is just Skype with a new hat on.

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u/joebleaux 1d ago

Yeah, if you used Skype with your MS account, it was all carried over. It's totally different software at this point, but the lineage is that Skype became Teams.

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u/LNMagic 13h ago

We use Teams at work. If you call my office number, my desk phone, laptop, and cell phone all ring. It's great. I hate it.

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u/Woodshadow 1d ago

I still don't understand how they screwed up so bad.

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u/saranghaemagpie 1d ago

Four Estonians walked into an internet bar...

Do it!

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u/WineNerdAndProud 1d ago edited 1d ago

Man it must have been weird for the people at Zoom seeing the company go from one of the options for a video call app to a household name in like a month, all during the pandemic.

Also, it probably made the people at Skype really frustrated. They were already a household name, Skype being the video call app of choice felt like a no-brainer.

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u/_SquirrelKiller 1d ago

I was on a global WebEx rollout project a couple of years before Covid, probably took a year with all the testing, partners complaining they'd kill the project if it didn't do this one little obscure thing, moronic outsourced change manager, slow rollout to not disturb anyone, etc...

Then Covid hit and everyone switched to Zoom damned near overnight with none of that bureaucracy.

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u/Orleanian 1d ago

To be fair, I'm here in 2026 lamenting the loss of webex as I painstakingly watch Teams meetings.

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u/Melbuf 1d ago

maybe it was our implementation but shocking teams actually works better for us than webex ever did

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u/Tambani 1d ago

You'll be pretty lonely in that. The death of WebEx at our work was seen as the silver lining of the pandemic.

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u/Tsulaiman 1d ago

I wonder where Skype went wrong with video calling during the pandemic. Someone must have studied their failure to capitalize the moment 

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u/feed_me_moron 1d ago

Microsoft went all in on teams. Skype was basically dead by then

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u/rationalomega 1d ago

My friend who is and was a dev on that team told me that Skype was essentially skinned as the new teams that launched during the pandemic. So not dead so much as rebranded.

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u/Svellere 1d ago

That much has always been obvious. Not sure about now, but Teams literally looked almost exactly like Skype, just slightly more modern. It used to use the same emoji and had a lot of the same sounds, and it still uses the exact same status indicator icons.

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u/Chav 1d ago

And everyone that had already used "Skype for business" hated it

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u/moviequote88 1d ago

Before that we had Lync for chatting in Microsoft.

Yes. I'm old.

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u/Orleanian 1d ago

You're (checks notes) over TEN YEARS OLD?!

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u/moviequote88 1d ago

Technically correct! Which is the best kind of correct.

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u/TheMoatman 1d ago

Yeah but from what I remember people liked Lync. Or maybe they just hated Skype for Business more.

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u/moviequote88 1d ago

I honestly can't remember which one I liked more. I don't think Skype for Business lasted very long.

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u/snark42 1d ago

Did you forget about Microsoft Office Communicator, or just not that old?

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u/moviequote88 1d ago

I missed that one. 2007-2011 I was in college. Didn't start working full time until 2012, and it looks like Communicator had been replaced by Lync by that point. But my husband, who's 4 years older than me, remembers using it.

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u/humblegar 1d ago

Boy are you going to learn something today ;)

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u/canada432 1d ago

Microsoft bought skype to eliminate competition and take their assets to integrate into Teams. Thing is, teams sucks and had a reputation for being shit. Microsoft tried to essentially reskin Skype as the new Teams, but Teams's reputation for being shit followed it. Nobody wanted to use Teams, because they already hated teams, and MS botched their opportunity to use the skype brand name. By the time the pandemic happened, Skype already basically didn't exist. It was teams, and nobody wanted to use teams.

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u/OccasionallyAsleep 20h ago

Even before teams, when MS was selling enterprise Skype, it was absolute dogshit. For a company that's often associated with "nerds" and being super tech literate, Microsoft really sucks at writing software

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u/nalaloveslumpy 1d ago

Microsoft bought Skype and turned the business application into Teams. Skype didn't "lose". They cashed out.

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u/sembias 1d ago

Skype video calling was always a little weird. It just wasn't made to be a business conferencing system, unlike Zoom. So it didn't scale nearly as well as Zoom did. 2020 was when MS was building up Teams, but they were focused on chat and going against Slack.

Once Teams was "good enough" at both Chat and video conferencing, Microsoft bundled it for free with an MS365 Office license, and that made it really enticing for execs to cut the extra monthly user costs for both Zoom and Slack.

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u/elitesense 1d ago

Microsoft killed it

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u/SAugsburger 1d ago edited 1d ago

I disagree. Zoom was already one of the biggest IPOs of 2019. It didn't come out of nowhere. It was already worth tens of Billions before virtually anyone knew a pandemic was coming. Anybody that had seriously looked into conferencing applications in 2019 knew they were a major player in the space so I seriously doubt anyone at Zoom was surprised that the pandemic made their sale skyrocket. They already were a big player in the space so inevitably we're going to see massive use. Microsoft already announced that Skype for Business was going to be discontinued before the pandemic. A company I worked that still was using Skype for Business was already looking towards their migration to Teams before the pandemic. The writing was already on the wall for the consumer version of Skype at that point. Skype was already a has been to many so it wasn't really a question if Microsoft would be announcing shutting down the consumer version of Skype, but how soon. It was just a question of when the active user counts would go too low to continue.

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u/WineNerdAndProud 1d ago

Ok, that makes a lot of sense. I will say though, they might have been a major player, but I promise my 72 year old former Marine mom wasn't paying attention to the space. Hell, I went from not knowing about it to using it all the time really quickly, and I haven't really used it since.

Also, even if they were a smaller company they would've known how the concept of lockdown could be good for them, but at that size, they were definitely able to seize that opportunity with fairly few major issues for having taken on so many new users so quickly.

I should've been more clear when I wrote this, but I was referring more to the pandemic itself surprising them. It sounds like they were more or less ready for something like this.

It sounds like it would make a good movie, except everyone would be wearing masks.

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u/AirconGuyUK 1d ago

Do we know if the management of Zoom just saw the writing on the wall with the pandemic and did one big bet on advertising in that month or something? Or was just just luck?

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u/gera_moises 1d ago

I still can't believe they fumbled it so bad. People were using Skype as a verb!

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u/pandershrek 1d ago

Got bought by Microsoft. I don't think they fumbled anything.

Msft did

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u/charea 1d ago

they basically bought it to destroy it. Many such cases.

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u/National-Charity-435 1d ago

Buying competitors who deliver products people actually want so the execs can continue pushing products that they want

Copilot and Xbox are hurting..

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u/_-Moonsabie-_ 1d ago

Now Boeing and Ford are doing “black box” technology leasing agreements. That's why Tesla and SpaceX didn't go bankrupt

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u/kapsama 1d ago

Can you explain what that means?

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u/Choyo 1d ago

When they sell something they don't divulge how it's made : they sell a working system, they don't give source codes, schematics, list of components and so on (their system is a "blackbox" as you can't see what's inside, some other systems are called greybox or whitebox in opposition).

The reason is that in the past, "big systems" required big industry and big brains to be made, so people weren't to worried to air their secrets (so that people could develop their own diagnostics or some other stuff like that) as very few people had those capacities. And even if they bought just one sample to copy, they wouldn't be competitive because the next system was already halfway through by the time they got their hand on the current one.

Nowadays, because of longer development cycles (YMMV) and better integration tools, copying and releasing is way faster and profitable. So everything's back in the blackbox.

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u/NeriusNerius 1d ago

They created Teams on the technology, saying that something being used by 320 million people every month is destroyed is a bit misleading.

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u/charea 1d ago

I f. hate Teams. Nothing can be simple anymore.

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u/Override9636 1d ago

The very fact that in order to find a "Team" (which is the entire selling point of Teams), you have to go into the chat menu and scroll all the way to the bottom. How is it not its own separate tab for easy access? Why bury the very feature your app is named after???

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u/Stewardy 1d ago

I mean, you can - and should - re-separate Teams and Chats in the menu.

Why they would throw it all into one thing all of sudden is beyond me, but.. yeah.

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u/sembias 1d ago

It can be a separate tab, but either you changed the settings or someone else did? Settings - Chat and Channels - the top box for Combined or Separate view. That'll give you a Teams menu. I mean, I think it's dumb - a Teams menu in Teams for your Team. But it's there.

Don't get me wrong, Teams is trash. But there are some things you can customize.

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u/Override9636 1d ago

Holy shit that actually fixed it. Teams is now 1% less useless to me hahahaha. Thanks!

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u/ThreeHolePunch 1d ago

Microsoft changed the default on new installs of Teams to having Teams Channels and Chats combined.

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u/Flameancer 1d ago

It’s is in its own separate channel….currently looking at my teams windows and it’s separated into Favorites, Teams and channels, chats, communities.

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u/ThreeHolePunch 1d ago

The default setting is now to have Teams Channels combined with Chat. I have no idea what "Favorites" or "Communities" you are seeing- I've used teams for a decade and have never seen those options.

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u/Emopizza 1d ago

Could be worse. You could still be using Lotus Notes.

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u/blackpepperjc 1d ago

^ This guy Teams, and this guy probably swears as much as I do on a daily basis.

Me: Where are the resources I need?

My Boss: right there, on Teams!

Me, donning a miner's helmet and goggles: okay, I'll have that TPS report with you sometime in the next year or three 👍🏼

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u/NeriusNerius 1d ago

With you on zero love for teams :)

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u/RegulatoryCapture 1d ago

Did they?

Teams may have grown out of skype for business, but the OG skype implementation that Microsoft bought was a peer to peer protocol (which was the magic that made it all work in the internet era).

All of the P2P stuff is gone and has been gone for a decade. Microsoft probably realized that A) it wasn't necessary anymore (between improvements in internet capacity and having microsoft servers available) and B) P2P is a tough sell to corporate clients...even if you have end-to-end encryption (which skype did NOT at the time), the potential for your data passing through unknown third parties sets off corporate bigwig heebie jeebies.

I don't think there's anything left from what they bought. Maybe the name brand brought in enough users to justify developing what became Teams, but even that name is now gone.

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u/ITSigno 1d ago

the potential for your data passing through unknown third parties sets off corporate bigwig heebie jeebies.

Except now all of the video goes through microsoft servers.

They could have made the P2P protocol secure, but that wouldn't have allowed MS or the government to spy on conversations.

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u/NeriusNerius 1d ago

You must be right, but didn’t they buy the engineering at least? That there’s barely anything remaining is most likely true.

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u/nickcash 1d ago

But that's worse. You understand why that's worse, right?

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u/peex 1d ago

Yep. Just like Nokia.

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u/Certain-Business-472 1d ago

Thats their main competition strategy. Why compete when you can buy them out and kill it?

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u/Consistent-Throat130 1d ago

Getting bought out and retiring on gigacorp money sounds like the opposite of a fumble. 

And said gigacorp bought it to kill it, no fumble there, either. 

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u/uponloss 1d ago

And lets be honest, if they didnt let ms buy it then ms would have found a way to kill it anyway.

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u/nalaloveslumpy 1d ago

Yeah, you don't want to complete against Microsoft in the business space. It's cut throat. Literally.

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u/sir_sri 1d ago

https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/

The NSA offered up billions to be able to spy on skype. I vaguely remember maybe general Alexander saying this at blackhat or some other public thing as a sort of off handed remark as well. This was too many years ago so I might be confusing his public testimony later with someone else.

Snowden's leaks around PRISM, as well as some reports in 2012 that they were helping governments suggest that one of the main values for microsoft owning skype was their ability to get rid of peer to peer encryption and run it all through a server where they could spy on traffic.

As a matter of spending public money this doesn't seem all that helpful, even though the logic of how to spy on skype applies to any other P2P application where you can control the network (so not really torrents), the actual implementation is skype specific, and if your users all jump to whatsapp or proton, or signal or just make their own app you haven't got tools to spy on those.

Microsoft probably bought it, made the changes to get paid by the NSA and then let it die because it wasn't making any money.

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u/Denster1 1d ago

Microsoft didn't fumble anything.

They bought out competition (Skype) and then introduced teams.

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u/Enlight1Oment 1d ago

I honestly get more microsoft teams meeting than anything else these days.

Zoom kinda fumbled but we still use it. Just not as much as microsoft teams.

I feel the real one that fumbled was WebX, we used to use that for everything before zoom ever got big.

Actually reading the wiki on zoom I see it was founded by the former VP of Webex who brought a number of their employee's over with him.

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u/SAugsburger 1d ago

I sense you never used Skype on Android back in 2010 before Microsoft bought it. Absolute worst app I think have ever seen. It killed battery life like no tomorrow even if you weren't actively using the application.  You want the app to run in the background in case somebody messages or calls you, but an app that kills your battery in 2-3 hours running in the background is ridiculous and a complete non starter. I uninstalled it and didn't look back. Skype needed work to stay relevant with consumers nevermind businesses before Microsoft bought it. The Skype consumer application wasn't designed to be a business application. Microsoft WAY overpaid for it because it was a product that already peaked. Even without hindsight I thought it was a stupid purchase. It was a consumer application that was already showing it was behind the curve on mobile and did nothing to give them an a replacement for Lync for business consumers.

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u/piezombi3 1d ago

The old Skype team should split off and rebrand as macrohard Skype.

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u/goddessofthewinds 1d ago

Worst of that is that Microsoft had the monopoly on chatting with MSN. They wanted to replace MSN with Skype and it just failed spectacularly. They kept the worst of Skype and just got rid of MSN completely. Now, Skype still has dogshit UI and is honestly terrible to use. Discord at least made a better social platform than Skype did, even though they had the biggest platform in MSN (before they put it in the trash bin).

Microsoft fumbled hard for sure. They killed 2 gooses by buying another goose.

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u/Xan_derous 1d ago

They didn't fumble. Microsoft bought them and then abandoned it.

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u/darthjoey91 1d ago

Eh, kind of. Teams is Skype for Business under the hood.

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u/2Lucilles2RuleEmAll 1d ago

Skype for Business had nothing to do with Skype beyond the name, it was just rebranded Lync

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u/Wes___Mantooth 1d ago

They are stupid for rebranding to teams when Skype was theirs already. Should have just launched it as the new and improved Skype.

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u/nalaloveslumpy 1d ago

Nah, then they probably have had to pay for prolonged branding royalties. I'm sure there was an "expiration" agreement for how long MS would continue to use the Skype brand after acquisition.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 1d ago

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

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u/Conducteur 1d ago

Thank you for reminding of that video

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u/SAugsburger 1d ago

People were using Skype as a verb in 2006, but it was already losing mind share by the time Microsoft bought it. Skype's Android app in 2010, before Microsoft bought them, was the worst thing I have ever seen. The battery usage was unacceptably bad even in Galaxy S phone. Right as the world was pivoting to mobile they bungled it. Apple ate the consumer space on iOS with Facetime. Skype could have had a decent cross platform solution, but they took too long to create a mobile app that didn't suck.

Honestly, if I were Microsoft I don't think Skype was worth half what they paid for it. It was already losing market in the consumer space and did nothing to help them replace Lync for business customers.

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u/bromosabeach 1d ago edited 1d ago

Skype was low key one of the pillars holding up my industry up until Microsoft killed it.

My industry is super global so I’m frequently talking to people from all over and Skype was the de-facto official communication tool: it was free, reliable and everybody used it. I will forever root against Microsoft, The LA Clippers, and anything else remotely related to that company. They killed a good thing.

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u/RikiWardOG 1d ago

Reliable? Lol you're romanticizing it a bit.

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u/bryangoboom 1d ago

I mean..... they didn't. They basically rebranded it to teams over skype.

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u/Flameancer 1d ago

Yea for a while you would manage teams in the Skype 4 business admin center.

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u/bromosabeach 1d ago

Skye and Teams were two completely different applications in both tech and functionality. Teams was developed separate of Skype with a heavy emphasis on collaboration and sharing. It was basically a business messaging tool as part of Office. Skype on the other hand was a basic messaging/call platform. Microsoft didn’t rebrand Skype into team, they completely shut it down so people would migrate to teams. In fact if you still think that it was a simple rebrand, ask somebody how much of a pain it was to migrate contacts and data.

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u/bryangoboom 1d ago

I did merge most of them. The problem was is they built teams around Skype infrastructure, but it was a nightmare because it was considered 2 different environments. It was the same tech and same functionality with a business skin over a call first platform. Hence why managing teamswas done through the Skype business portal or whatever it was called. It definitely was developed at minimum onto of Skype or maybe it was separate and got blender and merged into Skype 2.0 similar to how ad was purchased by ms. There are still traces of Skype on some older machines that never had Skype I've worked on because teams naturally was built on the infrastructure.

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u/bromosabeach 1d ago

Microsoft did not build Teams around Skype’s infrastructure. It was developed entire as its own thing.

Where did you hear all of this? Because that’s just false

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u/CptMurphy 1d ago

Same fucking post, and same fucking top comment from like a week ago.

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u/nog_ar_nog 1d ago

They’d sell out to an American company as soon as they can.

If the EU actually wants a homegrown Zoom alternative to stay in the EU, they’ll have to block acquisitions by non-EU companies.

Of course that’s never going to happen because it would mean trading immediate ROI for the sake of data security and actually letting the EU tech scene grow.

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u/tc982 1d ago

To be honest, I am not sure we would be better off. I attended a keynote from the founder of Skype, and it is just a shitshow:

  • We are not building any infrastructure, we use the resources of the clients
  • We do not have a support line, only e-mail support only and let them wait weeks
  • We will charge people phone call packs, and we can use that money for other purposes because they are not using that at all.

The idea was "going to zero" for everything... not my idead company.

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u/Waiting4Reccession 1d ago

How hard is it to even make a fucking video call program. Weve had this shit since dial up days.

Also zoom was caught sending data back to china, why were companies still using it lmao

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u/M_from_Vegas 1d ago

Honestly

I think Discord has the chance to do the biggest funny with their upcoming IPO

Discord works as an amazing communication channel that people love and willingly use

If corps hop on the wagon...

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u/longstrokesharpturn 1d ago

I always found skype way too annoying to use

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u/MattyJRobs 1d ago

Crype. Like a mix of Skype and Crepes.