Microsoft Teams is Replacing Skype for Business To Put More Pressure on Slack (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Teams isn't even a year old, but it's about to replace Skype for Business. At Microsoft's Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida today, the software giant is revealing that it plans to kill off Skype for Business in favor of Microsoft Teams. Skype for Business took over from Lync, Microsoft's previous business chat app, back in 2015. Microsoft's original Teams launch made it look obvious that Skype for Business would eventually disappear, given the fact that Teams integrates most of Skype's functionality already. Microsoft says it has been building a new Skype infrastructure that has been "evolving rapidly," and it will serve as the enterprise-grade service for voice, video, and meetings in Microsoft Teams. A new Skype for Business server will be available in the second half of 2018 for customers not ready to move to Teams, but Microsoft is pushing Office 365 users will to move over to Teams as the key communications client instead of relying on Skype for Business.

Comments

This is the exact opposite of what they should do.

[Lordpidey]

Replacing a fully functional product that a company probably spent a lot of money hiring people to implement and integrate with the company network with another product just seems moronic.

If I were a buisness that used Skype, I'd be pissed off and probably change to Slack, rather than change to Microsoft Teams.

Re:This is the exact opposite of what they should

[Junta]

I would say they should have named it 'Lync' again. Skype for business has been the most confusing thing to talk about, because it has *zero* to do with Skype, except in the minds of MS marketing people.

As a result you can't just say 'Skype' because people won't do the right thing, you always had to say 'Skype for Business' which is a misleading mouthful.