The goal of this technology is to offer developers rich, secure communications, integrated directly into their web applications. Last week according to the Chromium blog, the technology has made another giant leap where Chrome and Firefox can “talk” to each other for the first time. I first wrote about WebRTC last year where it was still in infancy stage. Just recently, Microsoft added the promised Office 365 Groups support to Yammer.However, now a technology that enables browser-to-browser communication called WebRTC spearheaded by Google and Mozilla is about to change the way that online users communicate. Microsoft has ended up siphoning off much of Yammer's technology for inclusion in other products, and it's struggling to keep the rest of it alive by refocusing it on team collaboration. Microsoft bought enterprise social-networking vendor Yammer in 2012.

I have to admit I'm confused in where Yammer sits in all this. A spokesperson provided the following statement: 'Microsoft is always building and testing new solutions to help people collaborate and get more done, but we don't have anything specific to share at this time.'

I asked Microsoft officials for comment on Skype Teams and for more on how and if it will help Microsoft against Slack.

' Skype Teams is the future of collaboration and messaging,' said the posting, which doesn't mention Slack or any features of the forthcoming Skype Teams offering.'This is an influential role on an influential team, and you'll be expected to work across the entire engineering team as needed to be successful,' the Skype Teams job posting said.

Skype for chromebook 2012