Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. It’s probably worth talking a little bit about what’s happened at Microsoft since the acquisition. So, for a long time, you know, let’s talk about what’s going on at Microsoft during the period of the Skype years. So, they had Office Communicator that was part of the Office Suite when you subscribed and you entered an enterprise engagement and, you know, you got Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio – the entire Microsoft Office Suite. There’s obviously varying levels of that that would come with Communicator, which I believe in… I’m going to get the date wrong, but at some point it was rebranded as Lync which was something that never, I mean that was an Enterprise offering that people who had Communicator in their workplace then knew “okay, we got Lync”, and that was never a brand that was on the typical consumer’s tongues. And in acquiring Skype, then there was this like very interesting dichotomy of while we’ve been building this thing called MSN Messenger, which was our consumer offering for a while, there was Office Communicator which became Lync. Now we have Skype. So they’re sort of these three different chat-looking things that all seemed to sort of do the same thing, and it’s taken probably 3 or 4 years to really start to narrow that. So, MSN Messenger has been killed. Lync is dead. It’s formally changed into and using kind of a mesh code base. But, Skype for Business. So there’s Skype for consumers and Skype for Business for businesses, and you know, this is in Outlook.com when you log into your consumer mail offering, you see Skype automatically is there. There is all sorts of apps for every platform. It’s baked into Windows. It’s really kind of like across the whole Microsoft ecosystem at this point. Yup, and let’s not forget a year later Microsoft acquires Yammer.…

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