Lync's native protocol is SIP, a standard that Google could also have adopted years ago, but they went with the more modern and 'better' competing XMPP standard.
Microsoft went through a lot of problems implementing SIP it for Lync and its predecessors LCS and OCS, but they remained within the standard and worked on interoperability and improving the standard around security, even if it took more time than going it alone.
The roles of Microsoft and Google have certainly switched around.
To be fair, while the Office suite itself is pretty decent these days, Office 365 is terrible. Microsoft is still very much a software company and not a services company.
Numerous organizations have deployments of these and other, smaller XMPP IM servers.
As for cherry picking standards, isn't that exactly what you're doing with your statement on Chromium and web standards?