Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft

https://slackhq.com/slack-files-eu-competition-complaint-against-microsoft

by mattmarcus • 6 years ago

256 329 6 years ago

fasicle• 6 years ago

"Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers"

Is teams auto installed with the Office suite and can it not be uninstalled?

microcolonel4• 6 years ago

I think the application proper can be disabled, but it's built into basically every Office application at this point, as far as I know. It's like wondering if you can uninstall ffmpeg from an Electron app.

ndespres4• 6 years ago

Yes it is auto-installed and auto starts and is very annoying to get rid of, as a sysadmin. It also installs itself per-user, so non-admins get prompted constantly to install it themselves and can do so even with limited privileges. It is persistent.

nojito2• 6 years ago

You can disable teams entirely from your deployment.

jedieaston2• 6 years ago

What's the annoyance? It's an MSI. Use msiexec /x to remove it (probably via PDQ Deploy or SCCM or a PowerShell Script), and then block the installer from running again during an Office install with GPO [0]. It's definitely easier than cleaning up some of the other garbageware in Pro.

0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...

freehunter2• 6 years ago

I’m not sure on Teams specifically but years ago (last time I tried to install the Office suite) you had to install basically all or nothing. I just wanted OneNote but the installer forced me to add Word and Excel and Powerpoint, similar to this forum post: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...

If they’ve added Teams to that installer, I’m not surprised.

gruez4• 6 years ago

you had to install basically all or nothing.

but from the link you gave:

BUT, if you are willing to invest a little effort, there is a business specific tool you can use. It is called the "Office Deployment Tool". You will have to edit a simple text only "XML" file that tells the tool what you want it to do.

kevingadd• 6 years ago

Under normal circumstances Teams can trivially be uninstalled - it's just an Electron app. I have Office and Teams installed on my PC and can freely uninstall or install either of them, and I had to install Teams manually. The android and iOS Teams apps are definitely manually uninstallable.

My guess is they may be referring to enterprise setups or perhaps an enterprise office 365 installer. I'm using 365 but not an enterprise 365 account so I can't speak for how it would behave there. Bundling Teams in with the other stuff that gets installed might be an option individual companies can opt into.

raxxorrax2• 6 years ago

Certainly wasn't in our case (EU E3 or E5 licenses). You can also disable the license for all users. Now, the practice of enabling licenses for new apps by default could be improved...

corty• 6 years ago

You can disable the license, but it keeps nagging all your users to ask IT for a MSTeams account/license...

"btw, teams is installed, try here" "login failed, maybe you are not allowed by your admins, nag them about it"

repeat every 2 weeks

microcolonel4• 6 years ago

Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.

I feel like it's bad for a society to place no weight on agreements. “Force installing” is a pretty bold claim, given that Office is a piece of self-updating software that adds new components on a regular basis, and which says as much when you install it. Teams is a component of the Office suite in the same way that Microsoft's SSO system is.

If this point is considered to contribute to a successful claim, I think it says something sad about the EC.

untog• 6 years ago

"force installing" in this context means "you want X? you're getting Y too, whether you like it or not".

No, you're not forced to install both X and Y. But it's pretty clearly taking advantage of a dominant market position.

microcolonel4• 6 years ago

“I want to install Discord, but without FFMPEG” is not grounds for a complaint.

I don't like Microsoft's software, nor do I use it, but if this is illegal and the Apple App Store isn't, the EC is none but a lawfare weapon for many-billionaire companies.

Kliment• 6 years ago

Adding a new component that is really difficult to disable or uninstall, auto-starts on boot and gets put in place without asking for everyone who uses your office suite, which you basically have a monopoly on, is bullshit. Teams is a component of the Office suite but it doesn't behave like the other components (staying out of the way until you ask for it).

hkt3• 6 years ago

European approaches to antitrust differ to the American approach. It is much more about fairness to market participants and the result is that we avoid Microsoft having an unchallenged avenue to dominance in yet another market. Optimising markets is a vital role of the state in any country where inhabitants don't want to see regulatory capture or market dysfunction (as with say, the American broadband and mobile data markets). It is likely to preserve choice, encourage innovation, and allow new market participants if Slack's case is accepted.

ndespres4• 6 years ago

It's about time. I don't know exactly what Prince means by "gateways vs gatekeepers" in this context as Slack is itself a pretty closed system, isn't it? It's not using open protocols or interpretable with competing chat systems as far as I know. However I do find their allegations that Microsoft forces a subpar uninstallable copycat product to be accurate and credible. Teams is a bottom tier application and they are so aggressive about forcing it on users, it's a little silly.

paweladamczuk• 6 years ago

Came here to comment on the gateways vs gatekeepers as well. Ironically enough, it wasn't so long ago that Slack decided to stop supporting their IRC and XMPP gateways.

nullc2• 6 years ago

They served their purposes of drawing users from those places into slack's walled gardens.

skc• 6 years ago

This is so strange. I seem to remember Slack somewhat mockingly welcoming the competition in this space when Teams launched.

microcolonel4• 6 years ago

Honestly, Slack has become so baffling to me. As somebody who used it every day for a couple of years at work, then not for a year or so, it is completely unrecognizable today and (in my opinion) a lot more complex to use. I have a hard time reading and understanding the layouts in Slack as it stands today.

jamil7• 6 years ago

The (newish) mobile app on iOS is really confusing layout wise, I thought I'd get used to it but it confuses me every time. It's also weirdly slow for a native app, I'm not sure how they managed that.

searchableguy5• 6 years ago

It hit them where it hurts - profit. /shrugs

Consider open source alternative such as zulip or matrix. Zulip is used by rust team :) and has a pretty good threading model.

1) https://zulipchat.com

2) https://element.io

3) https://mattermost.com

rpdillon2• 6 years ago

Right. I think the issue here, based on the title, is that this behavior is anti-competitive.

Arathorn6• 6 years ago

On one hand, the playbook of exploiting Office's dominance to push Teams is very very reminiscent of exploiting Windows' dominance to push IE.

On the other hand, Slack's walled garden is also effectively anti-competitive; trying to create a monopoly via vendor lock-in to the Slack product & ecosystem.

It feels like a better bet would be for both of them to adopt and support open interoperability standards, so users can avoid being locked into any single vendor, and have full sovereignty over their conversation data. (Disclaimer: as project lead for Matrix I may be biased :)

Arathorn6• 6 years ago

actually, come to think of it, an excellent way for Microsoft to fend off this anti-competition accusation would be to go embrace Matrix for use in Teams and demonstrate they support data portability, and are serious about not locking users in. On the Matrix side we'd be happy to help them do so (we have a few big undisclosed projects already on the go to expose existing chat systems natively into Matrix :)

searchableguy5• 6 years ago

Are there any alternatives to matrix protocol right now?

I use matrix and like it but I would love to see more competition in the federation space.

jnsaff2• 6 years ago

"for Microsoft to <snip> go embrace Matrix"

This may not have come off as you intended ...

Hokusai• 6 years ago

adopt and supporting open interoperability standards

Can you imagine not being able to send a UPS packet to a DHL address or not being able to call an AT&T phone from a Verizone one? And how long until I cannot send mails from my Gmail address to you Outlook one?

We live in the Wild West of the digital age.

I still remember the times that Microsoft was trying to own the WWW thru non-compatible Internet Explorer extensions. And, also, the time that Microsoft tried to own Java by adding Microsoft extensions to it. (https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-microsoft-settle-java-suit/)

Companies have many incentives to create lock-in software and proprietary protocols that go against the interest of their own users.

sascha_sl2• 6 years ago

One of them being complexity and and how fast you can move on new features. Adding features to a spec'd standard is a horribly slow process, this is the reason the developer of Signal decided against decentralization. You end up building XMPP, and that doesn't go so well if your specs are not very explicit. You can see this in how unreliable OMEMO is with multiple resources connected.

The Web is already a mature platform and has not actually made things more interoperable. It replaced a lot of the previous internet infrastructure that was (IRC, Newsgroups, SMTP which still somewhat clings to life)

pjc50• 6 years ago

Can you imagine not being able to send a UPS packet to a DHL address or not being able to call an AT&T phone from a Verizone one?

For much of the 20th century there was exactly one phone company in the US, and it insisted on total control of all equipment connected to it. Even non-electrically connected mouthpieces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...

O_H_E2• 6 years ago

And how long until I cannot send mails from my Gmail address to you Outlook one?

FWIW, a few of my friends at an Elite engineering undergrad program didn't think that was possible. I was baffled.

ascorbic6• 6 years ago

Even if they were both open standards it wouldn't affect this. The issue here is pricing, and specifically bundling. There's no way anyone can compete fairly when Teams is bundled with a seperate monopoly product.

threeseed3• 6 years ago

a) Office isn't a monopoly.

b) Slack could just build their own Office suite. Google did.

O_H_E2• 6 years ago

as project lead for Matrix I may be biased :)

I actually chuckled.

whywhywhywhy3• 6 years ago

very very reminiscent of exploiting Windows' dominance to push IE.

The idea of Windows pushing IE by bundling it seems laughably quaint to me these days where most people can't even install a different rendering engine on their device than the stock and choice is purely illusionary and very few seem to bat an eyelid or even notice.

NoSorryCannot• 6 years ago

The only common platform I'm aware of that has this limitation is iOS. Are there others?

gthtjtkt• 6 years ago

very very reminiscent of exploiting Windows' dominance to push IE.

Reminiscent? They recently pushed out a mandatory windows update that caused IE to take over your entire screen upon restart, pin itself to your taskbar, and attempt to set itself as the default app for numerous functions: https://www.theverge.com/21310611/microsoft-edge-browser-for...

smileybarry2• 6 years ago

attempt to set itself as the default app for numerous functions

That's false, if you install any new browser -- Chrome, Opera, Firefox -- the next time you open a URL or HTML file, Windows will ask you if you still want to use your existing default browser or change it. This is done because apps can no longer set the default browser themselves and must ask the user to do it.

Regardless, your existing default browser is still the top choice, clearly spaced from the rest: https://techdows.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/popup-dialog... (in this example, Firefox Nightly was recently installed, causing the prompt)

Pinning itself to your taskbar is debatable because it effectively replaced Edge, which comes pinned to taskbar out of the box.

unixhero2• 6 years ago

Can we ditch the disclaimer already.

Fair notice yes, but you do not need to post a dis claimer. This is an internet chatroom, there is no need to file a disclaimer as if it has any legal currency.

In this case: Thanks for your fair notice, that's interesting you're working on Matrix, I'm intrigued and I might have some interesting comments and it got me thinking further. But no no I won't sign your disclaimer. There is no legal effect or otherwise statute limiting outcomes of posting a disclaimer.

And why not? We all have biases, and posting a disclaimer won't absolve you of still having the intentions you may have and bring to a discussion. That's the nature of human society and simply by being an actor you already accept this fact. So in conclusion, nope, no disclaimer needed.

SahAssar• 6 years ago

I like the disclaimers. I don't think they always need to be there, but when someone is working for or on a competitor or for the company being discussed I think it helps keep the discussion above board. It also means that there is less risk that the person is being accused of shilling since they have been up front about their association.

simonebrunozzi2• 6 years ago

You are wrong. Disclaimers are a quick and simple way for users to let others know that there might be some specific view, or conflict of interest, or bias, so that the others can take that into account.

rickycook• 6 years ago

i _adore_ matrix! keep up the good work!

suifbwish• 6 years ago

I have used slack at 3 different jobs and they seem to have lost touch with what the user wants and struggles with in their environment. Before launching some anticompetitive tirade they should focus on becoming a better product. There is no way I’m going to side with them while they auto hide contacts that I talk to throughout the day just because I have a list of several hundred. Also what’s up with not allowing multiple tabs open to view multiple conversations at the same time? Even Facebook has that feature. If anyone at slack is listening.. get off your antitrust high horse and get back to coding, you’ve let your product become inferior and this just sounds pathetic asking for the government to step in and help you do what your design/dev team cannot do for you.

Dwolb• 6 years ago

Good for Slack. Filing a major lawsuit against one of the biggest tech companies is an incredible decision to make.

Microsoft has been doing this for years with basically all of its products and hasn’t really changed its behavior [1]. They continue to get fined for not abiding by earlier EU judgements and rulings.

Curious to see what regulators end up doing to force compliance since these fines don’t seem to do so.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/business/dealbook/eu-anti...

kodablah2• 6 years ago

Can I be against MS bundling Teams and against Slack using the government to unbundle it? I know that public companies attack for growth at all angles, including litigious ones, but this turns me off of Slack's general business strategy (if I wasn't already). I yearn for the company that accepts modest growth, applies its principles to itself only, and remains technically focused no matter how large.

hkt3• 6 years ago

There are two main conceptions of antitrust: making markets fairer, and controlling price for consumers. The latter is the American approach, the former the European. It is worth considering the fact that without adequate competition prices will rise and quality will fall. Slack are essentially asking for a market optimisation to allow them to continue improving their product without Microsoft maneuvering to reduce its effective price to zero. This, I would say, is a net gain for everybody.

kodablah2• 6 years ago

That's the point, they don't need market optimization to continue improving their product. They are just leveraging it because it's a weapon provided to them. There is no lack of adequate competition in the chat space and no need for the government to make MS stop including the products it wants to in its office suite.

While this individual action may appear on the surface a net gain for everybody (though you surely meant everybody but Microsoft), the net negatives of continued unnecessary government interference in tech are harder to recognize since each just increases legislative momentum. Then we get surprised we weren't stauncher and more principled when the heavier hand is shown.

qwe098cube2• 6 years ago

So this is another reboot of the browser wars but with messengers? Is this the new era of messenger wars?

72deluxe2• 6 years ago

Yes it seems so! But it's different to the browser wars because the browsers used to used sensible amounts of RAM, and these "modern" chat systems seem to like ballooning quantities of RAM for displaying text and pictures, eg. Slack on my Mac is using 365MB of RAM via its 5 processes.

If only the wars was about efficient applications then we would all win.

I recall using MSN Messenger on a machine with 64 MB of RAM I think and it did approximately the same - instant messaging.

qwe098cube2• 6 years ago

well chrome has won the browser wars in the long run and chrome is notorious for its memory hunger. So maybe RAM hogging is the key to success. Interestingly Teams uses >1.2GB of RAM via its 6 processes on my mac, same as Outlook.

toyg4• 6 years ago

Sounds like a pretty desperate move to me. Teams is not preinstalled with Windows; it's part of a suite of products. Office products these days don't even need to be installed (in fact, I bet MS would rather prefer that you did not).

Imho it's a very, very weak complaint.

treis3• 6 years ago

Teams is not preinstalled with Windows; it's part of a suite of products.

Most businesses are buying that suite for Word/Excel. Teams comes along with it for free from their perspective. That can definitely be anti-competitive.

I agree that Slack's case is pretty weak here. It's hard to see the harm to the consumer when Microsoft's bundle is cheaper than Slack's lowest paid plan.

nojito2• 6 years ago

How is buying a productivity suite anti-competitive?

There is nothing stopping businesses from using Slack.

coredog64• 6 years ago

Skype for Business (or whatever the legacy chat product is or has been called) dates back to 2007 and was typically present in your EA seat license bundle. Slack might be better than Skype, but it’s weird to suggest that getting into a market with an established history suddenly becomes anti-competitive only as soon as your competitor actually produces something that’s not a raging dumpster fire.

whywhywhywhy3• 6 years ago

If I buy Adobe Creative Cloud for Photoshop and Illustrator is it anti-competitive that I get Premier for "free"?

seventh-chord• 6 years ago

I'm curious in what way microsoft would not be interested in having users not install office. I thought that office was microsofts primary revenue source (maybe this is info from before cloud stuff though).

vladvasiliu• 6 years ago

I think GP meant MS might prefer people not install Office and use the online version instead. I don't know if there's a difference in pricing and if it's possible to only get the online or the offline version.

Using the online versions allows them to have everybody at the same level all the time, which might mean easier support.

I for one prefer the online versions. They work fairly well in Firefox on Linux. Outlook online is way nicer to use than the installed one. Much, much snappier...

chirau2• 6 years ago

Office365 is cloud based. The more you use it, the more you use Microsoft's resources, the higher the cost for them and maybe the higher the strain on resources available to others.

So for an Office365 bundle with x products, you pay the same price whether you use all x products or fewer. The fewer you use, the better for Microsoft and they don't take a hit on revenue.

ascorbic6• 6 years ago

Office 365 is more of a monopoly than Windows now. This kind of bundling and cross-subsidy is classic monopoly abuse, and is almost identical to the IE case.

arethuza3• 6 years ago

What about Google G Suite - a lot of people claim that it is comparable with Office 365?

bzb3• 6 years ago

When you update Windows you get a Teams ad and, I believe, it gets installed automatically off the Store.

jpalomaki• 6 years ago

I've been using Slack for a while and quite much like the basic functionality (chat) when you working in single organization context.

However recently I've been playing around with Teams quite a bit and I'm feeling this integrated experience with all the tools is the future. Even when running just in browser it is already pretty good. You have chat, calls, mail, can collaborate on documents etc. Having everything in one package feels convenient. Not saying it's perfect. There are bugs and for example different file storage backends (Sharepoint vs Onedrive) are a bit confusing.

It will be challenging to for these "best of breed" apps (Dropbox, Slack, Zoom) to compete with the integrated offering from Microsoft. It's just so easy to get everything from single vendor. One user/group management, one invoice etc.

toyg4• 6 years ago

It will be challenging to for these "best of breed" apps (Dropbox, Slack, Zoom) to compete with the integrated offering from Microsoft.

It has always been. Windows has had Dropbox-like features all the way back to 1998; but they sucked (and there wasn't enough bandwidth...), so people didn't use them. We've had corporate IM offerings since forever, and Skype existed waaay before Zoom. The likes of Dropbox have thrived by focusing on building better products, more powerful and easier to use. There is space for everyone in the market, if they have the best product and/or the best timing.

VWWHFSfQ• 6 years ago

Slack's "Dear Microsoft" [0] letter in 2016 looks even sillier now.

Dear Microsoft,
Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition.

Uh yeah, I don't think you are..

[0] https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft#

ProAm• 6 years ago

When your products next innovative feature is a lawsuit the future looks dire.

mikece• 6 years ago

Either that or they are fishing for an acquisition offer from Oracle.

rpdillon2• 6 years ago

I think they're making a distinction between 'competition' and 'anti-competitive behavior'.

SaltyLemonZest2• 6 years ago

Sure, but their distinction seems kinda silly. They're arguing that because the Microsoft Office suite has been so successful, adding any new product to it is anti-competitive.

scoutt3• 6 years ago

Of course IANAL, but I wonder if that letter can be used in court.

"We ... know you’ll be a worthy competitor."

Yeah, until we sue you...

simion3146• 6 years ago

I don't know if you can call competition when the other guy is teleported directly at the finish line. This issue affects open communication applications too not only Slack. What would be ironic is if EU forces all of them to use open standards so I could integrate my open source app into Office too

ascorbic6• 6 years ago

Whether or not they actually welcomed competition, this lawsuit is perfectly consistent with that letter. The allegation is that MS is engaging in anti-competitive behaviour.

spians2• 6 years ago

Also from the same blog

We know that playing nice with others isn’t exactly your MO, but if you can’t offer people an open platform that brings everything together into one place and makes their lives dramatically simpler, it’s just not going to work.

dijit2• 6 years ago

I hate teams with a burning passion but:

it’s just not going to work.

Some people love teams, and it’s enough people to stifle the company from spending even more money; and, crucially, from having sensitive data spread across multiple companies instead of just one.

stefan_• 6 years ago

Gee, how hard can you celebrate yourself for putting a lockin on IRC.

dijit2• 6 years ago

“But it has emoji’s and we have a built-in bot that will fire off http requests to endpoints you choose!”

searchableguy5• 6 years ago

I predict amazon will buy slack. This move makes sense if you think about it.

0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/04/amazon-licenses-slack-for-wo...

alex_suzuki• 6 years ago

Amazon is one of Slack‘s largest customers.

rvz• 6 years ago

This is the premier way of detecting a company shaking in their boots towards new competition, especially Microsoft: Writing letters to their competitors. Who does that?

Facebook Inc. fought off the old giants: Google, Apple and Microsoft (which even has a stake in FB) when they revealed their 'social networks' and they all failed. Facebook owned that category. No stupid letters or any overreactions.

The same Slack that said "What we’ve seen over the past couple of months is that Teams is not a competitor to Slack" [0]. The IBM deal is essentially keeping Slack alive. Maybe IBM could be thinking with Microsoft "Just like old times?"

From [0].

“I think there’s this perpetual question, which at this point is a little puzzling for us, that at some point Microsoft is going to kill us,”

Right, predicting Slack's own death, even worse when he knows who will kill Slack.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/1/21244158/slack-microsoft-t...

mensetmanusman• 6 years ago

It’s definitely monopolistic to include Teams into Office(Excel,Word,PPT) only after slack shows value. As a user though, Teams is working out well for us.

This is MS’s version of sherlocking. Every big Tech company does this.

I think one work around would be to have an independent council that recognizes these events, and forces the big players to pay out $100M per incident. This might satisfy most parties involved.

hkt3• 6 years ago

Most regulators play pretty much that role, and the EC has that sort of power. Doesn't seem to actually achieve much though - they stop short of breaking up companies which is probably the issue.

samfisher83• 6 years ago

Teams from what I understand is pretty much free with office. Slack is going to have a hard team competing with free. It also doesn't have the same video desktop sharing capabilities as teams from when I last used it.

hyperdimension• 6 years ago

Well, without a strong opinion either way, I'd just point out that IE was free with Windows (where their competitors were not,) and that point didn't work out all that well for Microsoft in the end.

FDSGSG• 6 years ago

that point didn't work out all that well for Microsoft in the end.

But in the end it worked perfectly well for Microsoft. The settlement was essentially a slap on the wrist.

tedk-422• 6 years ago

Sounds like a typical corporate move by Microsoft. I side with slack on this one in that Microsoft is using its position with Office as a dominant productivity tool and wedging their Teams product in there.

Vox had an article about it a year ago: https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government...

It's the long game they can play because they have the resources for it. If they bankrupt slack by offering an alternative that's free and almost at feature parity, then it's an easy win for them to absorb the short term running costs of their own chat product Teams.

k__• 6 years ago

Is this as big of a problem as with IE6 back in the days?

I haven't been using MSO for years now and most companies I work with use Google Docs.

lou1306• 6 years ago

I don't think so. IE6 was bundled with Windows, a software that came bundled with nearly every retail PC and that was basically essential for said PC to be used (in the eyes of the layman, at least).

Teams is bundled with Office, which is neither bundled by so many hardware vendors, nor essential for operating a PC, nor free of competitors.

minhazm• 6 years ago

What about Microsoft bundling OneDrive? Or One Note? Should they be forced to remove those too? I don't understand how Microsoft is in the wrong here. This isn't like them bundling it into Windows. O365 is a paid product and users are specifically paying for a productivity bundle, where Teams makes perfect sense as a product. They previously bundled Skype here IIRC, which was also a chatting app, they just replaced it with Teams.

If you want to argue that Teams ripped off of Slack, I won't disagree with you there. But Slack was just an evolution of IRC + plugins also. So it isn't a novel idea that they came up with, it was just well executed.

I don't even like Teams, I much prefer using Slack. But Microsoft having a productivity suite where they're offering a productivity app seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Google is doing the same thing with Google Meet/Chat, it's going to get bundled in Google Apps for Business.

tedk-422• 6 years ago

I don't mind products competing against each other and copying features from each other.

But to make a clone of a product, and slip it into your existing offering which is very popular amongst the general populous is an anti-competitive practice.

Microsoft consistently walk a fine line with this sort of crap. Whenever I update my PC, I DO NOT want to know about the new features of Edge and then be prompted to replace my default browser with it.

Firefox, Chrome and other browsers don't charge for their product but Slack does. It's this sort of thing that in which Microsoft need an occasional slap in the face for.

goguy• 6 years ago

I personally see this as a weak move. Surely a bundle of software can include whatever they desire to include.

What next a law suit for bundling Access? Don't get any ideas Oracle...

72deluxe2• 6 years ago

Yes, I am personally disgusted that installing Office FORCES a word processor and spreadsheet to be installed when all I wanted was WMF clip art!

ndespres4• 6 years ago

One funny thing about it is that it's not bundled with the Office suite the way Word, Excel, Powerpoint and sometimes Access are. Teams is part of your "Microsoft 365" subscription, which could include your rights to the Office suite, Exchange Online email service, etc. So within the ecosystem Teams isn't part of the Office package, it just works with it, sort of.

That's part of what makes the anti-competition claim hold true to me. If Teams were pushed as a first-class component of Office to paying users (maybe the way Groove was at one point) but not forced upon every user regardless, it might be different.

ascorbic6• 6 years ago

Surely a bundle of software can include whatever they desire to include.

Not when the bundle is a monopoly. This was established with the rulings on MS bundling IE with Windows.

spians2• 6 years ago

Not exactly related but how is Microsoft's approach to Teams any different than Google's approach to Google Chat (or Hangouts Chat) that also is component of G-suite?

ascorbic6• 6 years ago

G-Suite isn't a monopoly, but Office is.

whereistimbo6• 6 years ago

According to https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370 Google holds more marketshare with G Suite with 59.91%, compared to Microsoft Office 365 with 39.96%

physicsguy• 6 years ago

Find it odd that so many people hate Teams so much. For me, it works considerably better than using Slack did in my previous position; the only downside for me personally was the lack of a Linux client initially, which is now present.

It's also considerably better than Slack for mixing other communications in, which is widely used in corporates: video calling, screen sharing, and the fact that you can hook it in with phone systems. Given it's effectively replaced Skype, that's not really surprising. Prior to teams being introduced at my current company, we were using a mix of Jabber, Cisco WebEx, and other ad-hoc tools in various teams. Now we can use Teams to do all of that.

gruez4• 6 years ago

Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.

So what's the core issue here? That Microsoft bundles Teams with Office 365, or that it gets auto-installed and can't be removed? If that's considered anti-competitive, is it possible for eg. Evernote to go after them as well, because OneNote is also bundled? What about Dropbox, because Onedrive is bundled?

simion3146• 6 years ago

Not OC, IMO MS should be forced to offer 2 different products, Office without Teams and Teams should be an independent product you would have to opt-in and buy. Then if Teams and Office communicate then this protocol should be open so anyone could use it.

Semaphor3• 6 years ago

but what makes teams different from the rest of the suite? to me it sound like arguing that bundles should not exist.

albertzeyer2• 6 years ago

I really think we need some laws which require companies to open their protocols to allow seamless integration with other companies or open source implementations. There is no real reason why this should not be possible. E.g. take chat protocols. WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Hangout, and all the others. It would be easy to have some way that they could communicate with each other. But companies don't want that, because they want the vendor lock-in. This is bad for everyone in the end. The only real way to solve this is if this is enforced by some law. I'm not really seeing that some law like this would be possible in the US, though. But maybe in EU...

sputr• 6 years ago

That's why EU is so important. Its the only institution with even a chance. The US is far to captured to ever start thinking about basic anti-monopoly regulation.

Because that's all you are describing is: basic antimonopoly regulation.

chirau2• 6 years ago

You can't force someone to use open protocols. What if their value preposition is exactly that, superiority to open protocols?

albertzeyer2• 6 years ago

You can't enforce that, but you can enforce that they open their own protocol, and also that the API is open to be used by anyone else, i.e. anyone can develop an own client.

withinboredom• 6 years ago

Can someone explain to me how the “leading channel-based messaging platform” can complain about a smaller competitor bundling with a large product?

searchableguy5• 6 years ago

Team is already bigger than slack.

Slack previously revealed it has 12 million daily active users back in October, but the company has not publicly updated this number since. Microsoft Teams usage has soared over the past year, reaching 44 million daily active users during a big increase in demand earlier this month. Slack has instead been trying to steer the conversation to how many actions are taken in Slack compared to its competitors, and how much people love to use its app.

0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195092/slack-new-user-r...

jedieaston2• 6 years ago

Blocking it's removal? How? Teams was installed with Office on my current system, and it pops up in Add/Remove Programs. IT Admins can prevent it from being installed with Office (and remove it from all of their machines if it has already been installed)[0]. It's not included with Windows either (just as Office isn't). And Slack isn't blocked from being installed either.

What's the anti-competitive angle here, other than the OS is created by Microsoft, the IM system is created by Microsoft, the Office suite is created by Microsoft, and the licenses are often bundled? Apple would be guilty of a similar thing by shipping Messages.app and iWork with macOS, no?

0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...

marcinzm2• 6 years ago

Microsoft has basically a monopoly on enterprise tools such as word/excel/etc. Apple does not.

jm43• 6 years ago

There are so many more choices than there were 20 years ago. Microsoft makes a kick ass office suite. There's nothing monopolistic about it. They've been in this game longer than anyone and that's reflected in the feature set.

Their products and licensing provide more value now than they have in a very long time. There's also G Suite which is pretty cool. Or you could use Libre Office.

Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.

TulliusCicero5• 6 years ago

Isn't G Suite fairly popular these days as well? What's the market share for these productivity suites?

addicted6• 6 years ago

Google Docs/Sheets?

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more google docs/sheets created on certain days of the year than there are Word/Excel documents.

whereistimbo6• 6 years ago

No, according to https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370 Google holds more marketshare with G Suite with 59.91%, compared to Microsoft Office 365 with 39.96%

annoyingnoob6• 6 years ago

As a person that sets direction for IT in an organization that uses Office 365, I can say that I didn't appreciate that MS forced Teams on us. And the controls that you mentioned were not available from day 1.

I don't support Slack here but MS really forced Teams on us like it or not.

pmontra2• 6 years ago

I'm not familiar with Office licensing. Do you have to pay more because they bundled Teams (maybe) or do you have to use it? (that would be surprising)

Anyway, at least you can self host Exchange. Slack is centralized.

hcurtiss3• 6 years ago

What do you mean MS forced Teams on you? IT has always been able to control what apps install with the office suite, including Teams. Teams being freely offered as a bundled service certainly incentivizes its use, but there has never been any penalty for using an alternative service other than, of course, the cost of layering on another service.

beezle• 6 years ago

Not being an office 365 user, how is it any different than other software? For instance, I believe the LibreOffice installer defaults to install all the modules. But I can change it to just install writer and calc.

radley• 6 years ago

It's not included with Windows

While it may not be included in the OS, it is certainly promoted in Windows. I saw a full-size pop-up ad in Windows telling me to install Teams. I did not have Office installed.

waddlesworth• 6 years ago

For me, Microsoft Teams installed itself one day, unprompted. In order to remove it, I uninstalled it.

The following day, it came back. It turns out you have to remove both Microsoft Teams and something I think was called "Teams Machine-Wide Installer." Only then would it stay removed.

smileybarry2• 6 years ago

It turns out you have to remove both Microsoft Teams and something I think was called "Teams Machine-Wide Installer."

Isn't that because your org chose to deploy Teams, though?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/msi-deployme....

msoad• 6 years ago

Messaging is big and Slack is too small to compete in this space. The only viable way out for Slack is to join Google. Because we all know Google can't build messaging apps!

echelon• 6 years ago

Dear Slack,

You're selling something that isn't a product. Standalone chat is a feature, and you won't win against a full product offering unless you drastically reduce your prices. You need to get acquired (by Google or Facebook), because I don't think you can innovate an office productivity suite fast enough to compete. And that's clearly the enterprise puzzle piece where chat fits into nicely.

Microsoft isn't being anti-competitive here. Out of all the FAAMG, they're the one that least resembles a monopoly.

You're struggling because you are selling chat as a service. Something that has been free since IRC and AOL Instant Messenger. Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets. You built a pretty (through opinions vary) version with access controls.

You had a chance to build a moat and make acquisitions to fortify your position, but you didn't do it. You invited competition from Microsoft and instead of doing something, you rewrote your Electron layout six times and made a WYSIWYG that everyone hated.

You had four or five years to do something. You had a chance most startup companies dream of. But here we are. You squandered that chance while you reveled in hubris.

You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.

thinkingkong• 6 years ago

Slack is in a tough position but they don't really sell "chat as a service" as much as they sell an incredibly convenient workplace experience. They're like the netflix / amazon of enterprise; convenience and ease of use is their product more than anything else. From everything I've read, heard, and experienced, Teams is way worse of an experience. What MS _can_ do that Slack can't is append Teams as a line-item it to an existing invoice, or shift spend within a contract. It happens; Salesforces does this with Heroku.

nickpeterson• 6 years ago

Slack has created the blueprint of what to make. It’s much easier for MS to copy those features until the difference between the two products is small. I think Slack is hoping their focus will save them, but in the end they’re going to lose most of their MS oriented customers

basch2• 6 years ago

You need to get acquired (by Google or Facebook), because I don't think you can innovate an office productivity suite fast enough to compete.

Dropbox, Box, Asana, Airtable, Zoho, Amazon, Adobe. There's other ways they could grow to become Microsoft that don't start with document editing. Adobe in particular would be an attractive mix. Google and Facebook sound like mediocre homes, because they already offer such overlapping suites, but maybe its just about user acquisition. Oracle would probably be interested in monetizing chat.

At the end of the day though, they will need a competitive spreadsheet offering. Everyone needs spreadsheets.

lewisjoe• 6 years ago

Yes, unlike other softwares office suite is too complicated a problem to pursue. Zoho's cloud office suite is the only thing that comes close to Microsoft's offerings. And Zoho does offers a spreadsheet software as part of its suite.

mavsman• 6 years ago

Love, Kevin O'Leary

TazeTSchnitzel4• 6 years ago

Why can't a chat platform be a product? Chat has only been free when run by volunteers or funded directly or indirectly by ad revenue or bundling with another service. Slack is not MSN messenger, it's an team communication package for companies in the same way that, for example, Zoom is, though the two have different primary focuses.

raesene9• 6 years ago

IMO it's too easy for competitors to create a similar level of functionality for it to be a standalone product.

If Slack charges too much, there's a host of free alternatives that can be used, meaning they have limited ability to increase prices.

Compare that to office suites. There's not that many options here and it's pretty difficult to build something that would have the functionality that enterprises think they want/need and compete with incumbants like MS.

The main free alternative (libreoffice) has had recent struggles with funding, due to the level of work needed to maintain and improve their offering

scoutt3• 6 years ago

Why can't a chat platform be a product?

It can be a product, but I guess it will have the same fate as Web Browsers. Who buys a browser product nowadays? Web-browsing is a feature.

team communication package

A.k.a chat program.

xnx• 6 years ago

Slack doesn't need to be free, but it's overpriced for the value it's offering. Same story with Zoom.

_jal• 6 years ago

I generally agree. I think Slack had a very small window to keep pushing and missed it. (The complement didn't have to be an office suite, but that's the most obvious one.)

What it needs now is someone who can add (for want of a better term) "knowledge management". The search sucks; it is just garbage. But beyond fixing search, it needs... something. I started sketching an idea involving users tagging comments as a baseline something to try to make it more than a realtime stream of undifferentiated business info.

Your Slack history contains a ton of info your company needs. Too bad you can't find it if someone said it last week.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 6 years ago

A simple thing that could improve Slack would be to be able to retroactively mark where a conversation started and ended, what the topic was, and what the conclusion was. It would be especially good to be able to move unrelated messages that appeared in the chat at the same time to be in their own conversations.

ThrowawayR2• 6 years ago

"Your Slack history contains a ton of info your company needs. Too bad you can't find it if someone said it last week."

Amen. It's deeply ironic that email threads actually work better at this use case than Slack does, despite it being Slack's alleged raison d'etre.

mercer3• 6 years ago

What Slack also needs is a good set of native clients.

I try to think from the 'regular user' perspective and often assumed that they just don't care. I figured they'd have Slack open on their desktop all the time at work, or just not care about load times or battery drain. I figured that was just one of those '(web) developer things'.

But I've been surprised at how much friction there is to using Slack with various non-nerdy clients I have. They'll constantly send me messages via WhatsApp or even Telegram. The ones that I've convinced to use Trello often start using it for their own stuff.

But Slack is a slog to them. Mostly the desktop clients, but I've heard a number of them complain about mobile (which I don't use much, but I thought was native?).

Whatever Slack is doing right, whatever its other problems, surely the fact that 'regular folks' feel friction using a chat app that one is supposed to regularly use is a cause for concern!

pwinnski3• 6 years ago

I somewhat agree with you, but I remember how Steve Jobs said much the same thing to DropBox, but DropBox beats iCloud in nearly every way to this day.

bhupy• 6 years ago

Yup, and as commendable as it was for Dropbox to beat those odds, I guess the idea is that Slack ought to do the same without filing a lawsuit. Dropbox didn't get to where it is today by suing Apple.

larrik• 6 years ago

Except price. $10/month minimum is a steep cliff, and I just can't justify it.

mercer3• 6 years ago

A few years ago I'd have agreed, but I actually stopped using Dropbox because both Apple and Google offer something that is finally 'good enough' and I couldn't justify 10 euro a month for a tiny bit of convenience.

And at least anecdotally, Dropbox has completely disappeared in the world around me. I used to get links to stuff in someone's public folder, or be added to a company/person's dropbox to collaborate, and all of that's gone now. It's usually Google Drive, sending stuff around on Slack (which I'm not a fan of), or back to email attachments.

Maybe that's just very particular to my situation, but considering the variety of people I interact with as a freelancer/consultant, it doesn't bode well for Dropbox in NL at least.

vmception4• 6 years ago

You're struggling because you are selling chat as a service.

Yeaaahhh I used to think that. Until I expanded to Asia.

Chats as platforms and general portals to the internet is pretty amazing, despite the drawbacks to the centralized control that some of the chat app implementations.

For the last several years when I open a new business bank account for an online-only service and the banker asks for my website, I correctly tell them I don't have one, as everything happens over chat apps, and "websites" are an antiquated, useless, unnecessary form of validation for North American and European markets for a pyramid of ad/web design/tracking services and are simply not a barrier in selling a product online.

Bots for slack/discord/telegram and platforms in asian markets all leverage pretty robust environments. Whereas in the past (and many people still do this) it was necessary to build a whole website and your own platform with the hope of reaching users like with mobile apps that have so much friction to reaching you. Can they complement each other? sure. But you should just keep selling those shovels to other companies stuck in the last decade, while building something with much lower barriers and efficiencies for yourself.

I think Slack is on the right track. They can monetize their api and bot marketplace.

mercer3• 6 years ago

Perhaps that supports OP's general claim though?

I've been excited about what the general 'chat UI' can accommodate and love API's like that of Telegram that allow a ton of custom UI and functionality that augment chatbots.

And it's been frustrating to learn how in Asia this unified interface offers portals to tons of stuff that in the west I need to visit (shitty) websites for (putting aside the issue of the web technically being more open than something like WeChat).

My impression is that Slack hasn't really done much to try and bring the 'chat UI' to the masses, even though they have a lot of power to try and do so. Telegram seems to have done more, including of course native desktop apps that I feel comfortable having open all the time.

While it's true that other chat-offering companies haven't done much either (WhatsApp doesn't even have bots?), or perhaps it's just really hard to change a culture, it still feels like Slack could've put a ton more effort in trying to bring what's clearly working in Asia to Europe/US/etc.

I might be wrong though; I've mostly been reading up on this on occasion and never really dove into any of it beyond building Telegram bots to scratch my own itch. But I picked Telegram because it has much better apps for all my devices, so there's that at least.

By all means correct me though. I really, really want chat-based solutions to so many things. It's nice, for example, to be able finally order most of my takeout online with so much less friction than in the past. But it feels silly to have to make an account with at least two providers, open their 'bespoke' apps or website, learn their UI, and so on, when I'd much prefer having an ongoing 'conversation' with the restaurants of my choice where, say, I can re-order an earlier order or pre-populate an order by scrolling up the chat history and picking an order I liked. or to be able to chat with the courier/restaurant about delivery rather than having to deal with whatever shitty home-built interface the restaurant or delivery service offers.

s_dev2• 6 years ago

I think Slack is on the right track.

If the Developed world can't afford Slack what chance has the Developing world really got?

Slack wants €200 for a 15 member team or somthing. Per month. While Google will sell us all the same stuff and more (GDrive, Corporate Email, GCalendar, Hangouts Chat etc) for a lower price (GSuite), all of which we need anyway.

the_duke• 6 years ago

I've heard enthusiasm about these Asian "universal chat apps" several times now.

Any recommendation for experiencing it?

Can we get some of them on Western app stores , and still get a representative experience with integrations?

ceocoder• 6 years ago

I see this IRC argument come up quite a bit every time Slack or like thereof are mentioned, especially on HN because - you know hackers, quite a few of us used IRC and still have a bit of nostalgia about it. However, please consider this as a thought experiment - how many of your family members, co-workers (especially people from non tech/non STEM backgrounds) were able to successfully use IRC or you used IRC to communicate with. When we had IRC server at my current job before we switched to Slack, it was an insular club of engineers with a high bar of entry - you need to know how to setup clients and create alts if you wanted to use on multiple devices and know decent amount about IRC to use IRC. Now contrast that with Slack, it is used across Sojern by 100% of our team - commercial, marketing, product, c-staff, and engineering alike. UX is designed to get out of your way and make it easy to communicate rather than act as a "filter" or "bar" or "must be this haxx0r to use", in addition my family has a slack workspace we use for various things and that includes - again the least technical member of my family - my mom, who is a Pharmacist but not the most tech savvy - she has zero issues using Slack.

It is easy to dismiss something as "just a chat product" but then again, it is incredibly hard to make a product that is so easy to use that everyone can use. Reminds me of that comment about Dropbox from years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

addicted6• 6 years ago

MSN Messenger. AIM. Yahoo Messenger. Skype. GChat. iChat. etc. There was a whole list of extremely popular chat products that were used by people who wouldn’t even have been able to log into Slack with the level of computer literacy they had at the time.

Personally, I think what happened was that GChat became popular, and killed all the alternatives, and then basically stagnated and confused the shit out of its users through hangouts etc.

Slack was one of the first products that realized that since GChat had gone, there was a huge gap in the market.

I’m hard pressed to think of any area where they were beyond predecessors in either ease of use or features (I can’t remember if persistent chat rooms were available in all the other messengers) beyond those little custom emoji things.

craigsmansion• 6 years ago

an insular club of engineers with a high bar of entry

and all the teenagers in all the high-schools who otherwise had no affinity with computers whatsoever.

/slap

But that was 20 years ago, of course. You can't compare the technical prowess of a random kid back then with a current well-paid software professional with access to portable hardware 100s of times more powerful.

cik• 6 years ago

I think they're actually jilted by Microsoft kicking the tires, then deciding not to buy them. By expanding Teams and integrating it into Office... well, when I work in that way the experience really is way, way, way, way (did I say way) better. Slack doesn't fit in nearly the same way, within that ecosystem.

At the same time, I think Slack has an exit problem. As you've said, they're selling chat. They have to hope to be acquired - but by whom? Google already has 12 platforms. Facebook has 2, and famously doesn't compete on this part of the business side. Similarly, many of my friends companies have left Slack for things like RocketChat, Chanty, or Mattermost.

fauigerzigerk2• 6 years ago

They have to hope to be acquired - but by whom?

I think Amazon may well feel a need to go up against its cloud infrastructure competitors Microsoft and Google with its own set of office/collaboration offerings. And they have a pretty deep cooperation with Slack already.

(Disclosure: I am a Slack shareholder)

swebs• 6 years ago

FAAMG

Seriously?

kkotak2• 6 years ago

You're right, it should be FMAGA.

rgrs3• 6 years ago

Are you sure that it is just a chat as a service?

My freelancer friends write bots for Slack that integrate various other products to work within slack. They would say Slack is a "platform" for communication.

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

Microsoft isn't being anti-competitive here. Out of all the FAAMG, they're the one that least resembles a monopoly.

Ouch, what happened to Netflix?

tabbott• 6 years ago

I run an open source team chat product (Zulip) and I have no love for Slack (https://zulip.com/why-zulip/). But I also think Microsoft's behavior in the team chat market is definitely anticompetitive.

* Many businesses have purchasing rules that discourage buying 2 duplicate products -- so by bundling a bad team chat product with Office 365, they significantly reduce Slack's ability to get paying customers simply because of their monopoly position (not because of their product's quality).

* Microsoft is in a market position where they can effectively bribe potential customers with discounts on other services they sell (E.g. we'll add another $250K in Azure credits if you agree to go all Microsoft).

You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.

This I agree with -- but the reason is that we're in a world of essentially unconstrained monopolistic tech giants, and it's basically impossible to stop a tech giant 100 times your size from taking your market if they really focus on doing so. And Microsoft is clearly very focused on the team chat market.

There are very few markets where it's possible to create a moat that can resist a monopolist copying your product (however badly) and then making the price of their copy zero (or negative!). I don't think we should accept a world where the only long-term outcomes for a fast-growing technology company are to be acquired or destroyed by a tech monopoly.

Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets

This is a common misconception. While you can make "chat" as a demo with any web framework, nobody would willingly use that tool. Creating a team chat user experience that isn't terrible requires a huge amount of work because there are hundreds of features that significantly improve important workflows for large classes of people (if you don't believe me that it's hundreds, read https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/changelog.ht... and https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen...).

legopiece• 6 years ago

Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets.

This is clearly a case of confounding an app being easy to use, with it being easy to build [1]

[1] https://graymatters.substack.com/p/-why-easy-to-use-apps-are...

runevault• 6 years ago

The thing this has me thinking about is, assuming Slack wins this lawsuit, can MS no longer add any more fully featured products to Office? Not saying that is good vs bad, it just becomes interesting if their position suddenly means they must create new bundles for new offerings and cannot ever leverage existing offerings to get into a market.

Perhaps that would be fair, being such a massive company. I just don't know.

bearjaws• 6 years ago

Slack needed to learn 4 years ago that it takes more than a decent chat app to make a company fully remote. It's a critical piece of it, but your wiki, knowledge base, and business planning software are all part of it too. Microsoft bundles all of these into one package, I fail to see how they are anti-competitive when they aren't even selling the same products.

Slack failed to see how fragile their product was and now needs to be acquired or make their own productivity suite.

whywhywhywhy3• 6 years ago

You can tell they didn't truly consider the full working remote scenario because their video/voice call and screen sharing functionality is below average.

Slack on its own isn't usable for remote work, it has to be Slack + Google Meet or Slack + Zoom. Slack's tech in that area just isn't up to industry standards.

llimos2• 6 years ago

The thing is, Teams integrates with the rest of Office 365 much more than IE did with Windows. It's very easy to argue that it's a core part of the product.

In general, Microsoft has really nailed how if things work well together, they become more than the sum of their parts. That's why each individual part doesn't need to be the best in class in order to win. Which is bad news for Slack, but it's hard to argue that it's bad for consumers.

pmontra2• 6 years ago

Well, I use Ubuntu. No problem with my two customers using Slack (one is Mac basede, the other one is more or less BYOD). All of us install the desktop app and it's done. If they switch to a more integrated system like Team maybe (and only maybe) it could be difficult for me to keep using Ubuntu when working with them. So too much can be bad for some consumer.

Btw, people consume t-shirts, but office suits?

pnt12• 6 years ago

Teams has a browser app that works just like the desktop client, which is probably just a thin wrapper around a web app.

The only thing ive missed there is the ability to take control of someone else's pc.

anoncake• 6 years ago

Does Teams integrate with the rest of Office using only public APIs or does Microsoft behave anticompetitively in that regard?

llimos2• 6 years ago

Pretty much all of Office 365 is available through a single unified API. Whether they use that API for their internal integrations, I couldn't say. But I would guess any integration they're doing could also be done by a third-party who was that way inclined, yes.

artpi• 6 years ago

There was previous discussion around written asynchronous communication being a superpower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577228

I feel that Slack dominance is hurting the productivity, because:

- It's impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki, google doc or an internal blog

- Slack is incentivized to keep you IN Slack, for engagement. They don't have their own permanent-knowledge-base-software, so they pretend it's not needed.

It's a different case with Teams, because they offer quite a roster of software to write things up permanently - like sharepoint or office365 and will likely pursue integrating tighter and tighter.

Because Slack is a standalone product, they will push for using chat in the workplaces MORE. Microsoft can offer chat as a "when needed" basis.

The logistics of trying to be productive on a company group chat led me to create a free "Win at Slack" mini-course: https://deliber.at/chat/

brightball• 6 years ago

The company wiki/internal blog depends on people reading it though. The perk of group chats is usually smaller messages that can spark interest in discussions.

Zulip honestly seems like they've solved this problem better than Slack though.

lukethomas• 6 years ago

This is right on. Slack's pricing is based on regular usage, so they have an incentive to keep you distracted (to put it bluntly).

Microsoft sees chat as a piece of an overall communication "puzzle". They have Sharepoint for more persistent information and Yammer for "outer-loop" communication.

My startup (https://www.friday.app/) is based around the idea that there needs to be a "home" for the most important stuff at work that complements workplace chat. It's somewhere in-between Slack and a wiki (which most people don't use regularly).

Workplace chat tools like Slack are wonderful for quick collaboration, but if you over-index here you will run into trouble. That's why Zapier, Automattic, and Stripe have all built their own internal tooling to help.

basch2• 6 years ago

impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki

Every Team, by default, has a Posts, Files, and Wiki tab. Designing a way to roll up those Wiki pages, like they do with Sharepoint hubs, would be a good move.

hjnilsson• 6 years ago

From this perspective, Notion would be the perfect acquisition for Slack. Adding a wiki / todos / workflow / document editor to Slack with deep integration.

https://www.notion.so/

monocularvision• 6 years ago

I will be the weirdo and say I would rather have an amazing search feature in chat than have to go through moving knowledge into a more “permanent” location.

Permanent, searchable chat in Slack has been way more powerful for me than all of the other options for knowledge capture (SharePoint, Confluence, etc). I can almost always find what I need and if there is more up to date information, Slack seems to surface that first.

It seems like the difference between real-world usage and theoretical solutions in this case is wide.

shreyshrey• 6 years ago

You are spot on. For effective team communication, one need a healthy mix of sync (voice/video calls, chat) and async communication (wiki, task management and documents) . That is the whole premise of our apps (https://www.airsend.io). It brings both sync and async tools in one space to minimize context switching. MS Teams is better in that respect (context switching) when compared to Slack. But Teams UI/UX is really confusing and thier forced integration of tools just adds too much complexity.

luka-birsa• 6 years ago

It is quite amusing to see Slack filing competition complaint after being so brash in bashing MS at the launch of MS Teams.

Remember the full page ad they ran in NYT? https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-...

My oh my how the tables have turned. There is something to be said about Microsoft and their ability to execute in the office space. Even my Dad, an architect at 70yrs old, is using MS Teams, while he never heard about Slack or any other collaboration tools.

And looking at their product portfolio around MS Teams, if there is a company I'd be willing to bet that they win the workplace transformation race is Microsoft. It's easy to forget when you're working comfortably in the Silicon Valley tech scene, that there is a real business world out there and MS is the ruler.

dehrmann2• 6 years ago

Playing devil's advocate, Slack is just asking to compete on a level field. When Apple Music launched, it was preloaded on iOS. It's now the second largest streaming player. Amazon's offering comes in third. First-mover advantage seems to be best, but bundling in your platform five years late looks like a solid path to #2.

addicted6• 6 years ago

I’m failing to understand the playing field Slack is wanting to compete in. Is it the Office 365 playing field?

Like do they want to be an optional add on into O365?

whereistimbo6• 6 years ago

Well Slack needs more than an enterprise chat app when Google G Suite which hold 59.91% marketshare [1] also bundling a chat app.

[1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370

duderific2• 6 years ago

My company recently moved from Slack to Teams, for financial reasons.

I'm sorry but Teams absolutely sucks compared to Slack. There are tens of thousands of people voting for feature requests on the Teams community site, to bring Teams to parity with Slack. The killer one is that when you start a thread in Teams, it will be pushed to the most recent spot every time someone comments on the thread. In Slack, the original post that started the thread is stable, and threads are in a side panel, so the order of original posts is maintained chronologically.

There are other examples as well, but just in general I find myself spending way more time just navigating around in Teams and losing productivity trying to work within it.

pinewurst• 6 years ago

Not sure why this is downvoted. I work for people who have both and while I'm definitely not a Slack fan, find Teams to be pretty much unusable outside of video chat. I have trouble even considering the two as covering the same space when I think about it...

LoSboccacc• 6 years ago

its market-dominant Office productivity suite

is it really that dominant nowadays? I think it was around late 2000s when I last saw a 'use MS Word format' in any personal/corporate document exchange

skywritergr• 6 years ago

The additional problem I see with Slack is that their calls/video chat option is really inadequate and almost everyone is opting for Zoom. Zoom + Slack is a very steep price point for a lot of companies, especially in an era of cost saving and insecurity about the future.

My company opted to move to MS Teams because the experience is better as it integrates calls + chats and we were already using office365 for emails and documents anyway, so it was "free". As someone said already, it's hard to compete with free.

I can't see Slack getting out of this in one piece. I see Amazon being the obvious choice here.

tweetle_beetle2• 6 years ago

I'm no Microsoft fan, but this press release is a bit embarassing. For most business use cases Slack is more expensive, and less featured than Microsoft 365, and it's having to work very hard to justify its existence.

Slack could be accused of creating a "weak, copycat product" in their file hosting, document editing, video calling and workflow automation features.

I think this is a long continuation of the awkward brand strategy Slack has had for some time. "...an open platform is essential" [1] just doesn't ring true from a closed source SaaS, but it's a good marketing message - so vague that you can't really disagree. And weirdly it's gone from being a poorly conceived guerilla marketing strategy (almost complete with bespoke emoji [2]) to a legal case.

It maybe explains how Slack has been racing to embrace Microsoft recently - in a bid to show how "open" they are, and therefore how much they have been damaged by "closed" Microsoft? But wouldn't that swing both ways - if they integrate so easily, then where is the monopoly?

Nov 2016 - Slack declares how thoughtful, craftmanship-y, open, loving, long term-y and un-Microsoft-y they are [1]

Jan 2018 - Teams launches app store

Aug 2018 - Teams offers free tier to compete with Slack [3]

Mar 2020 - Slack starts integrating Teams calls [4]

Apr 2020 - Slack launches Outlook and One Drive apps [5]

[1] https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft [2] https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793870058955104257 [3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563710/microsoft-teams-... [4] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197091/slack-microsoft-... [5] https://slackhq.com/increase-everyday-productivity-with-offi...

pwinnski3• 6 years ago

For most business use cases Slack is more expensive, and less featured than Microsoft 365, and it's having to work very hard to justify its existence.

I think that's exactly the complaint: that Microsoft is hiding the true cost of Teams, using anti-competitive "bundling" to make Slack seem more expensive by comparison.

Not saying I agree, but that does seem to be exactly the complaint.

TulliusCicero5• 6 years ago

Giving a discount by bundling products together is anti-competitive behavior? I don't really follow this reasoning. Bundling services together like that is extremely common in all sorts of industries.

dzonga• 6 years ago

one of those times, where I will say the big co isn't in the wrong. slack, has suffered the hand of the market. that the deck, the market dealt wasn't in your favor. is slack a product, could be ? but what are the advantages ? strategy 101. real business don't ride on fashion, but utility. teams is good enough.

Jaruzel• 6 years ago

Slightly off topic, but when you share this article via social media, the page title becomes:

"Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft - Several People Are Typing" [1]

Due to the og:title tag being different.

---

[1] Emphasis mine.

bkor• 6 years ago

Something I didn't see someone mentioning: Microsoft is moving everyone from Skype for Business over to Teams. Any enterprise customer will have to migrate. Skype for Business is quite different from Skype itself, basically a marketing thing.

Moving enterprise customers over from a chat&screen sharing app to teams is quite a change. There's loads more functionality, options, etc. I don't think if you had Skype for Business before you'd ever consider anything such as Slack or similar.

From what I noticed Skype for Business is used often within enterprise companies.

discordance• 6 years ago

Skype for Business was a horrible horrible product and i'm glad we were switched to Teams

benlumen• 6 years ago

I've been thinking about antitrust a lot recently. Years ago, Microsoft were losing in court over the right to ship their browser with their operating system.

Now, you get reminded how great Edge is when you try to change your default browser, you get the new one in a forced Windows update that launches the browser itself on startup, places shortcuts back in your task bar, etc.

shay_ker• 6 years ago

i do love one walled-garden suing another

mothsonasloth• 6 years ago

If someone could make a JIRA/Confluence/Slack for devs it would make my current life* very easy.

* life consists of Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Confluence and Sharepoint....

mnkypete• 6 years ago

If you are on Jira Cloud ping me, we have something very interesting launching soon ;)

perfectstorm• 6 years ago

Didn’t their CEO say that Teams is not a competitor.

Looks like he said it in May 2020. So i wonder what happened since then.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewar...

pedrocx486• 6 years ago

If I'm not mistaken their CEO (Stewart) is known for saying some... Weird things. And then changing his mind right after. (My experience is from as an user on early Flickr days and his game, Glitch.)

simonebrunozzi2• 6 years ago

Same guys that on November 2nd, 2016, run a full page ad on the NYT [0], titled "Welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution", and signed "your friends at Slack".

How ironic.

[0] https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft

aw1621107• 6 years ago

Wrong thread?

dang3• 6 years ago

We'll move it.

magneticnorth• 6 years ago

I think you commented on the wrong article?

dang3• 6 years ago

We moved it.

replyifuagree• 6 years ago

Slack has a quality problem that they really need to get on solving. Their desktop client has way too many weird quirks, and I just plain refuse to run their android client anymore.

That said,it sucks less than teams.

blntechie• 6 years ago

Can’t really shed tears for a company which wanted to kill email and wall off content into their own proprietary product. They have ridiculed email so many times that itself is ridiculous. They are still trying to figure out interoperability of one org’s chat spaces with other orgs when it was a solved problem 40 years back.

youeseh• 6 years ago

There are laws and companies will use those laws to their advantage as much as possible. Not doing so is stupid.

Just as Slack is trying to get Microsoft in trouble over antitrust, Microsoft is currently trying to get the US to investigate Apple over their App Store. Everyone is looking for an edge. It is better to use that edge while you're competitive than when its too late. Except in Microsoft's complaint about the App Store, the train left the station a long time ago.

outside1234• 6 years ago

But Google and Apple do exactly the same thing? Why no competition complain for them?

trekrich• 6 years ago

They are trying the sco business model, look how that turned out for them!

rydre• 6 years ago

The best move now would be for Slack, Zoom to merge, buy Airtable and Webflow, quickly try to build a moat. No one will get this opportunity again. But they might just build the next Google/Facebook/Apple this way.

gigel82• 6 years ago

I'm surprised Discord isn't showing up in the comments. We moved from Slack to Discord (even though we get Teams "for free" it doesn't get as much usage and setting it up to work with outside-the-org collaborators is painful), and I know of a lot of other companies / open-source projects moving to Discord too.

The only thing we're really missing from Slack is threads.

gverrilla• 6 years ago

yeah, I agree. Also, gamers and teenagers are using it and not Teams or Slack.

simonkafan• 6 years ago

We want to be the 2% of your software budget that makes the other 98% more valuable; they want 100% of your budget every time.

Please. You are a company in a capitalistic system, it's your goal to make money. If you'd have the chance, you'd also take 100% of your customers money every time.

6c696e7578• 6 years ago

Don't worry. Teams is terrible, you don't need to worry.

rosywoozlechan• 6 years ago

Idea: find some feature that's part of a software suite, like the ability to zoom on Windows. Build a business around just that feature, like sell a zoom tool for Windows. If the business flounders start an anti-trust lawsuit because Microsoft includes that feature for free in Windows.

betimsl• 6 years ago

IRC files a law suit against slack.

nullc2• 6 years ago

Next step is for microsoft to start running gateways into slack, leaving users on slack as second class citizens, and then shutting down the gateways when enough users have been pulled into their walled gardens to give them critical mass.

fblp• 6 years ago

Hey i am wondering if someone within knowledge of EU competition law can give their analysis on this.

The thing that stands out to me is that this is a private competition law action - it is not a government agency/commission taking action. This indicates that the government agencies in the jurisdiction don't currently see this as a priority. Many of the prominent anti trust actions in tech have been taken by regulators (eg EU commission vs Google).

From my brief understanding of competition law barriers to entry and consumer detriment are issues the court considers. As others have stated, Microsoft is far less dominant with cloud office products than they were with windows pcs in the 90s. They are also not the incumbent in the chat market trying to block competition out.

blackoil• 6 years ago

As a layman, it seems link companies looking to cut costs in current environment are finding Teams (free) more sensible option than paying millions to Slack. So while the WFH push is doing wonders for other communication platforms like Zoom, Slack is not seeing that benefit. Otherwise, it looks a bad time for a company to be distracted by political games.

shafyy• 6 years ago

I think there needs to be a law that forces companies that benefit from network effects to open their standards once they reach a certain market power (similar to antitrust and monopoly laws).

For example, Twitter would be forced to open their standard and then anyone can build clients (and host servers), just like IMAP and POP3 works for email.

I think this even will have a bigger effect than breaking up these companies, and it will be easier to push through politically.

Edit: Typo

markshepard• 6 years ago

I think Slack's case against MS has legs. I work for a company that makes a competitive product (https://www.airsend.io) to Teams/Slack. It gives a bit of insight on what is happening here.

Teams comes free with office 365 (now microsoft 365). For just 5$ per user/per month one can get email/one drive/office web apps and teams. There is no way slack can compete with the pricing. Slack's pricing starts at 6.67$. For businesses, office apps are a must have. When Teams is bundled with office apps, there is really not a reason for businesses to go and pay for Slack. So one can argue MS is using its dominant position in office suite to undercut the competition. The fair thing to do is charge some money for Teams. Personally I feel we need to have more diversity and choices in the IT systems we use. Increasingly the tools we use are controlled by 2/3 dominant platforms (4 companies account for 49% value of Nasdaq 100). It is not good for customers in the long term. Once you obliterate the competition by bundling it free, one can always come back and raise the price.

There is some serious blood between MS and Slack (It all goes back to the time when MS tried to acquire Slack). FWIW, Slack's posture during that time was also not really good (Cocky). I am guessing - It hurt somebody's ego very badly in MS. So the leadership team in MS made it as a personal mission to obliterate Slack. The whole game is playing out now.

heapslip• 6 years ago

The battle of the glorified IRCs is on! Sure, Microsoft is shady as usual (not all of it, but a good part), but once Teams get stable and everything actually works, it should smoke Slack. At least Teams offers more than chat, and it has a justified need for running in a browser.

Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft

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