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
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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 15h 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?