Skype has been around for decades. Pre-Pandemic, Skype was a global standard. Microsoft had high hopes when they purchased Skype at a very high price in 2011. Around that time and in the coming years, some had heard of Zoom, and there were many other competitors as well.

Let’s remember that Skype as a Microsoft product was easily accessible via the Microsoft O/S to all PC owners (tens of millions of people), and Microsoft also came with Teams, another free virtual collaboration product. The issue here is not that Skype and MS Teams are not being used. They are!  The issue is that Microsoft could have become the global leader in virtual collaboration software yet totally lost this opportunity to Zoom. Why does this repeatedly happen to large companies? Superbly capable companies abandon (or miss) major opportunities AND startups win massively.

I have been using virtual collaboration software for decades and introduced my own platform, ProVoke LiVe NetWork to the world in 2012, way before the world was excited about virtual collaboration. However, the world at large started getting involved with virtual software starting in February 2020. In February and March of 2020, I was seeing people excited about Microsoft Teams (mainly because it was easy to administer and it was free) and saw very few business folks using Skype. Then, Zoom rapidly became the global standard. Clearly, we knew we were facing a global long-term pandemic, so how could Microsoft not see this and position Skype and Teams to win?

Furthermore, Zoom is not free, yet businesses (and schools and families and everyone) quickly and without argument, shifted off of free products (Like Skype & Teams) and signed up with Zoom. Why?

An explanation may be that Microsoft ‘assumed’ that they had this in the bag, so no extra effort was made? Or, they did not anticipate how large this market was? Or they simply did not think Zoom could hack it? The fact is that this is a major opportunity lost. The new revenue coming to Microsoft from the global virtual collaboration space would have been massive and could have positioned Microsoft in a new trajectory, instead of the majority of their revenue coming from Office 365 and Azure. (BTW while Zoom hosts on AWS, Microsoft has its own cloud service, Azure. Yikes.)

More than anything, Microsoft lost a key opportunity to innovate and push the boundaries. MS would quickly have gotten into VR and much more. Instead, MS stood by and saw this market go by. Large corporations often miss a big wave, by calling the little swell at the start as ‘too small of a fish for us to go after.’ By doing so they miss out on the massive innovations ahead.

Somewhere at Microsoft perhaps an exec is planning to acquire Zoom. If they do, I hope it will not be buried and unattended to like Skype!