Still find it absolutely wild that Microsoft fucked up during the global pandemic and allowed Zoom to slide right into the communications spot Skype should have been.
Fucking idiots.
Hey, RIM/Blackberry’s CEO went to mobile world Congress in 2010, 3 solid YEARS after the iPhone launched, was dominating and defining the smartphone world and said, “we feel touchscreen is not the future of mobile phones” and rolled out another hybrid touch/keyboard model like the 5 they already had
Blackberry was $150/share as of 2009 with the entire world in front of it. It’s now worth $3.59/share.
to be fair i miss physical keyboards on phones. i wish we still had space for it.
Blackberry and Nokia were so slow to react to the iPhone, it was painful to watch.
And then, to bring us full circle to OP, Microsoft made it’s strategic acquisition of Nokia long after they had squandered enviable market share to Apple and Google 😂 https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11766540/microsoft-nokia-acquisition-costs
Their stuff was better, but disadvantaged by public perception. A perfect storm one can say.
Intel thought the iPhone market was going to be too small so they didn’t agree to manufacture their CPUs
Microsoft has 1 massive disadvantage when it tries to enter new markets.
It has to deal with brutal cutthroat competition from its worst enemy: Microsoft.
Ms internal politics destroy almost all its successes, their politics are why theyve never really been a threat, for every skype there’s a teams which cuts them off at the knees lest it cost a division head their chance at a promotion.
I personally blame stack ranking, invented by Jack Welch to justify cutting 20% of the company.
If you want to get mad, the Behind the Bastards episode on him explains why corporate America is what it is today.
I heard about that, some call it the “wasted decade” at MS. Top engineers refused to work together due to the stack ranking, not wanting draw the short end of the stick in the evaluations, when compared to each other.
A company I worked at 10 years ago also dabbled with it a bit, luckily not seriously. It was a consultancy firm who hired top graduates from prestige universities, so it made even less sense. Dude, nobody is average or below here, you hire the best people after grilling them in interviews and a whole day assessment center. The bell curve just doesn’t make sense
IMHO, the pandemic just allowed everyone to see how much better of an experience Zoom had over Skype.
I worked in an office where half of corporate used Skype, and the cooler sub-brands used Zoom. No one in the main corporate office was happy about using Skype. Microsoft had been neglecting it for quite some time.
Microsoft had been neglecting it for quite some time.
You’re right but that’s why they’re idiots 😄
Yeah, right before the pandemic it was becoming clear that Skype was in Keep The Lights On mode, and MS wanted to funnel all of those users into Teams. But Teams also sucked.
It’s a lot better than it used to be, but it still takes MS an ungodly amount of time to build basic features that have been in Slack / Zoom for a decade… and MS is one of the biggest companies in the world.
Did they really? Microsoft championed Teams and its pretty accepted in corporate environments today, especially if they are already on Microsoft.
Afaik, Skype for Business was merged into Teams. Skype for non-business consumers has been virtually dead for longer. The way I see it, Microsoft let go of the brand, the value of which is questionable in this decade. When they bought it, I remember the rumors saying it was because of its voice codec, which probably got used in everything from xbox live to teams in the end.
I couldn’t get my head round this at all. Everyone used Skype where I worked, and it seemed hugely popular. By the time COVID happened, I was in another job, and all of a sudden everyone was going mad about this Zoom program. I’d never heard of it, but it just came out of nowhere and everyone on the planet was using it. How on earth Skype fumbled it so hard is absolutely staggering.
Skype didn’t fumble it, Microsoft just doesn’t know how to strategy. When they bought Skype, they killed MSN and told people to move to Skype, whereas they should’ve integrated the two to make the transition seamless. Then they had both Teams and Skype for Business at the same time by the time COVID happened.
They messed up on every turn.
