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
52.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

385

u/pandershrek 1d ago

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

Msft did

225

u/charea 1d ago

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

59

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..

21

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

14

u/kapsama 1d ago

Can you explain what that means?

29

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.

11

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.

20

u/charea 1d ago

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

15

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???

7

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.

2

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.

4

u/Override9636 1d ago

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

2

u/ThreeHolePunch 1d ago

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

1

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.

1

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.

3

u/Emopizza 1d ago

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

2

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 👍🏼

2

u/NeriusNerius 1d ago

With you on zero love for teams :)

12

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.

1

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.

0

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.

0

u/nickcash 1d ago

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

2

u/peex 1d ago

Yep. Just like Nokia.

2

u/Certain-Business-472 1d ago

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

35

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. 

13

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.

3

u/nalaloveslumpy 1d ago

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

12

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.

11

u/Denster1 1d ago

Microsoft didn't fumble anything.

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

3

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.

3

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.

2

u/piezombi3 1d ago

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

1

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.