What I mean by that is that besides using the same logo, there is very little they have in common.' Michal Nemcok, PR and marketing manager at LIFARS, a digital forensics and cybersecurity intelligence firm, explains: 'The main difference is that Skype for Business is not really Skype. Let's make one thing clear: this is not the same thing as regular Skype, and it doesn't mean that the Skype that we all know and (some of us) love has been discontinued. The integration of the two can be traced back (officially) to 2013, which leads us to the announcement at the end of 2014 that Lync would be relaunched and rebranded as Skype for Business. Many questioned why the Seattle-based company would buy a product that competes with its existing offering (anyone remember Windows Live Messenger?), and whether they would eventually merge into one. Separate from all of this, Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for the hefty sum of $8.5 billion. It offered features such as instant messaging, presence, voice and video calls, desktop sharing, file transfer, and mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Once upon a time, Microsoft offered a unified communications product called Office Communications Server (previously known as Live Communications Server), which was replaced and rebranded in 2010 with Lync. Let's quickly recap the history of this communications app.

Skype business video service