They’ve rebuilt popular software many times over in the past.
Even with Skype they rebuilt the entire backend as well when they moved it from a decentralized platform to a centralized platform.
I struggle to believe that this theory holds any water.
It also lends support to an old conspiracy theory that the primary driver for Microsoft buying Skype was so that the service could be centralized so that communications could be monitored and intercepted.
Can confirm, as a Teams and Skype protocol reverse engineerer for Pidgin, that most of the Teams protocol including text messages started as Skype (not the decentralised one) and has had additional layers of stuff added over the years on top. The calling for both Skype and Teams still uses a websocket with a "reverse webhook" called Trouter, which lets the client respond to events as if it were a webserver responding to webhooks, and then does a handoff to WebRTC. When I first started writing the Teams protocol plugin for libpurple, it was easier to start with the Skype plugin than to start from scratch.
No conspiracy neeeded. The simple reasons they bought it was:
1 to buy the users
2 to reign in an upstart empire
3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand
4 to be able to peddle 'Lync'
They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly;
they changed skype from something to chase and desire,
to something to avoid :-/.
A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync,
which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product.
As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'.
It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to.
For a range of years,
the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other..
/s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call..
/s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service
- "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices",
"you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",.
So, skype going from
'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to
'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!'
