Skype For Business Begins Rolling Out Publicly Today
Microsoft's “Skype for Business,” which is designed to replace the company's older enterprise communication tool Lync, is rolling out publicly today as part of the Office 2013 April update, the company announced this morning.
Context & Ripple Effects
This rollout caps a fast preview cycle: just weeks earlier Microsoft launched Office 2016 and Skype for Business previews, and it had already committed to giving Office 365 users real phone numbers through Skype for Business. Rebranding Lync as Skype folds Microsoft's consumer-known calling brand into its enterprise communications stack, shipped not as a standalone product but inside the Office 2013 April update.
The strategic logic is bundling — meetings, conferencing, calling, and messaging ride along with Office rather than being sold separately, which is why the platform kept expanding across platforms afterward, from an iOS app coming out of preview to a Mac Preview with Outlook calendar integration.
First-order effects
- Lync customers get their migration path immediately: the Office 2013 April update converts existing deployments to Skype for Business, so enterprise IT admins are managing a rebrand-and-upgrade on their own tenants starting today.
- Office 365 subscribers gain a unified client for messaging, meetings, and voice without a separate procurement decision — Microsoft's own later move to give enterprise users full meeting and calling features shows the rollout was the entry point to a broader feature push.
Second-order effects
- By attaching telephony to Office 365, Microsoft pulls PBX and standalone conferencing spend toward its bundle, pressuring rivals whose products compete feature-by-feature against a suite buyers already pay for.
- Standalone workplace-chat vendors face a competitor pre-installed in every Office deployment — pressure that culminated two years later when Microsoft decided Teams would replace Skype for Business outright to attack Slack more directly.
Third-order effects
- Enterprise communication stops being a category and becomes a suite checkbox: if the pattern holds, unified messaging, voice, and meetings consolidate into the productivity subscription, and dedicated tools must win on collaboration depth rather than presence.
- Skype for Business itself proves transitional — Microsoft's pivot to Teams signals that brand consolidation around a consumer name was less durable than channel strategy, and enterprise communications platforms now churn faster than their installed base can migrate.
The trend: Enterprise communications is being absorbed into office-productivity suites, with Microsoft using Office 365 distribution to bundle chat, meetings, and telephony against standalone rivals.