Item — HN Reader

The 2.0 version of Skype is Microsoft Teams, and they built it from scratch.

Along with the Skype code, the Skype brand was also thrown in the trash. You could question that decision—perhaps keeping both brands for different target demographics would have been a better move. Teams could be for work and business, while Skype (powered by Teams' code) could remain for regular consumers. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s better to strengthen a single brand rather than maintain two separate products.

That said, I do have an issue with the name Teams—it doesn’t quite fit the use case of calling your grandma overseas.

4 comments

Teams also has a lot of technical debt in it's own given that they essentially combined Yammer with Sharepoint and Office to make it!

Thanks, that's a good point that makes the most sense to me - MS didn't rewrite it because they essentially didn't need to, they already had something else.

Totally agree about the brand fumble. I think Teams is the least known/used brand by consumers, but honestly maybe these days that really doesn't matter that much from a money-making perspective.

> and they built it from scratch.

They are still building on it. For some reason, noone at Microsoft has any idea how the final product shall look like, so they are changing the UI/UX every couple of months.

Yeah, the consumer side Teams app is already different in UX than the corporate one. Wouldn't have been terribly difficult to brand that as Skype and market it as such.