How Microsoft crushed Slack

https://www.theverge.com/22150313/how-microsoft-crushed-slack-salesforce-acquisition

by atarian • 6 years ago

135 257 6 years ago

cratermoon3• 6 years ago

Ah, the sleeping monopoly wakes. Github, Slack, Azure. What next?

acwan93• 6 years ago

I know you probably mean this tongue-in-cheek, but perhaps task management (Asana/Trello/etc.) and customer helpdesk (Zendesk/Freshdesk/etc.)?

Having all those tools integrated with the rest of another suite like Microsoft 365 would be enticing to corporate users. It would definitely starve out competition, but isn't new in Microsoft playbook.

Terretta• 6 years ago

Yep, they need something that beats Confluence and Jira and works as a tab in Teams.

And no, anything based on Sharepoint is not that.

Closey• 6 years ago

Well Microsoft’s Trello is just Planner / Tasks, so they are already playing on the field.

cratermoon3• 6 years ago

Nope, I'm completely serious. What about Microsoft Planner? Supposedly it integrates with Teams and Azure.

tiew9Vii2• 6 years ago

If you think about it, they own the entire business stack or have the potential to. Give it time.

Atlassian are working incredibly hard to control the dev stack. Tight integration between Jira, Confluence, BitBucket. Bringing documentation, development, estimation, backlog together in a unified view.

Microsoft now have all the pieces. Office 365 managing users and the business side, SharePoint, GitHub, Azure, Teams.

When they start working to unify/integrate these pieces together in to a seamless experience so you can communicate, plan, build, track and deploy all on the Microsoft stack it’ll be very compelling product for businesses and very difficult for any competitor to compete. Not only would Atlassian need Jira/Confluence for example, they’d need their own Cloud for you to deploy to.

evanmoran• 6 years ago

I love how you wrote this list and didn’t even include LinkedIn. They are very well positioned indeed :)

waynesonfire• 6 years ago

ding ding... did you too buy some MSFT stock?

ohthehugemanate• 6 years ago

Yes, that's been the explicit strategy since Satya took over as CEO in 2014. Often verbalized, very public. Microsoft's USP is the complete integrated enterprise ecosystem that will work with whatever else you have, too. That's what they call the "intelligent cloud".

So your contacts app knows just which contacts to highlight/suggest based on your org chart (active directory), communication history (outlook, teams), and subject matter (documents/SharePoint/teams message history/etc etc). And it's all subject to centralized authentication, access, and audit controls.

The integration goes into the azure products, too. Your kubernetes RBAC can be based on AAD, so your running containers have an identity that could access Teams and email of you want. Your serverless functions, ML toolkits, etc etc run with their own AAD identities, too. Oh and of course monitoring integrates with their world leading business intelligence tools, including Excel.

This is all there already. Azure DevOps does exactly what you describe:

you can communicate, plan, build, track and deploy all on the Microsoft stack it’ll be very compelling product for businesses and very difficult for any competitor to compete.

And those features are coming to GitHub Enterprise, so you can do it with the developer product you already know and like. And of course, with tight integration to do it from your IDE if you like.

coldtea• 6 years ago

Microsoft hasn't been a monopoly for a long time.

And they didn't crush Slask by being one.

Actually, they didn't crush Slack, period. Slack was just sold for tens of billions. Many multinational giants would only wish they were "crushed" like that.

As for the "Teams has 115M users over Slack's 12M" - isn't that because it bogusly counts non-users with access to Team (which is everybody having Office 365, which was already in that range).

judge20202• 6 years ago

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/10/2...

DAUs - so unless it auto-embeds somewhere and counts those users (which it doesn't, but I'm only in one O365 org) it's legitimate users.

ViViDboarder2• 6 years ago

Microsoft didn’t buy Slack. Salesforce did.

georgeplusplus• 6 years ago

I find Teams has a subpar UI and UEX compared to slack. I catch myself still saying “slack” me much like how “let’s call an uber” became synonymous with ride share. I really wish slack had a fair chance to compete with Microsoft.

_chris_• 6 years ago

Slack is a lot better than Teams IMO, but it's hard to justify putting company stuff (like documentation and wikis) into a proprietary platform that could raise prices or disappear at any moment.

With Teams, if you're already under the MS umbrella, it's an easy sell.

phs318u• 6 years ago

This. And the ability to universally manage data protection across the entire platform. Critical for highly regulated industries.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/business/data-...

mewpmewp2• 6 years ago

Has Teams actually overtaken Slack? This is anecdotal of course, but all the companies I have worked at and all the companies I know of use Slack and are fairly happy with it. No plans to use Microsoft products at all. But as I said, this is anecdotal and I'd be interested in knowing more.

I don't see actual numbers for comparison anywhere. Slack has published concurrent users count while Teams has published DAU, which are obviously different.

ssss11• 6 years ago

Alternatively all the companies i know of use Teams.

These are huge corporations that already have tons of MS.

augustocallejas• 6 years ago

12 vs 115 million, according to the second paragraph of the article:

In its letter, Slack warned Microsoft that “Slack is here to stay,” adding, “We’re just getting started.” But the 4 million users it had at the time would increase to just 12 million four years later, while Microsoft — which added Teams to its 365 bundle without increasing the price — took Teams from zero to 115 million users.

rozab• 6 years ago

Teams got autoinstalled onto my 8 year old Windows 8 desktop.

Jakobeha• 6 years ago

idk where they are getting those numbers though. I've had classes, jobs, etc. which all use Slack, I've never used Microsoft Teams even once. Both my undergrad and graduate colleges give me a free 365 subscription though, which means that me and every other college student could have been counted

tiew9Vii2• 6 years ago

I’ve contracted at a couple of large orgs.

Previously when I’ve been at them they where on Slack, more recently they use Teams.

People complain about using Teams compared to Slack but Teams seems good enough for the people paying for Slack to decide to stop using it.

Teams being bundled with Office 365 is a huge value proposition. It’s not a case of who’s best, Slack seems more useful but can never compete with free which Teams is if you already have Office 365 which most large orgs do.

Teams video chat is way better than Slack also which may of helped this past year with working from home.

cagey• 6 years ago

Agree. At my employer the largest engineering BU has been a zealous user of Slack for many years. Problem is, Slack seat licenses aren't free (and are thus rationed) and TPBT are balking at adding any more Slack seats now that corp IT is aggressively pushing Teams which is apparently free (since the overall corp has grown a dependence on some mishmash of O365). The Slack zealots thus appear to be fighting a (losing) rearguard battle against being forced onto Teams.

robjan• 6 years ago

Teams tends to be used by bigcorps with tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of staff. Why buy and audit another tool when you already have a Office 365 subscription for the Org.

HeyLaughingBoy• 6 years ago

The only anecdote I have is that we started out with Slack and moved on to Teams, which we prefer. It was just an easier integration with our existing systems.

Nextgrid5• 6 years ago

Teams has only "won" in large enterprise environments who are already full-Microsoft and who used Skype for Business/Lync before. I'd argue this is not really Slack's competition as Slack would've been a non-starter for many of these companies to begin with.

Teams however definitely didn't win the small business/startup game where tools are actually chosen based on functionality (and where end-users have a say in which tools to use) and Microsoft's market-penetration is lower or non-existent (so the bundling of Teams with Office 365 has no effect). In these cases, Slack wins by a large margin on functionality and performance alone considering how bad Teams is.

dagw4• 6 years ago

I work at largish company (13k employees worldwide), and a couple of years ago there was a fair amount of Slack (admittedly mainly free tier) being used ad hoc around the company. Then word came down from up high that the company was standardizing on a single chat platform and that platform was Teams. Now there is basically no Slack being used (and certainly no paid Slack) any more.

The main argument was that Slack for 13k employees was incredibly expensive, while Teams was 'free' and already integrated into most of their infrastructure.

the_arun• 6 years ago

All we need is a similar tool from Google :)

mbakke• 6 years ago

We had one, but it was discontinued back in... 2010!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

htrp• 6 years ago

just wait for Google to revive And re-launch Wave

ViViDboarder2• 6 years ago

They’ve got an alternative. Its called Chat. It’s not the same though. More focused on threaded conversations.

deathanatos• 6 years ago

It's not the same though.

It's not even remotely in the same league as Slack.

hawski• 6 years ago

Google would gain 100 mln users and then they would shut it down or replace with something half baked.

908B64B197• 6 years ago

Reading back the NYT full page add Slack bought when Teams launched is really interesting[0]:

"We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade."

It seems they were right about the "something just like it" part!

[0] https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft#.os9n0emzt

singhrac4• 6 years ago

The more I consider it, the more I think that bundling is anticompetitive. I guess there are some synergies to having Teams and Word integrated, but they don't seem very large. It seems if you want to do chat, you must also do all productivity software to compete, which is a real shame.

The ideal world (to me) is that Microsoft is forced to charge some price for Teams being turned on in a 365 subscription, which means that some companies can justify paying for 365 + Slack, not that Slack is acquired and bundled in with Quip. Honestly I think Salesforce will lose that battle; Microsoft's Word/Excel monopoly is unbreakable. I wish that didn't mean that they could weaponize that into destroying Slack, instead of competing with them in a regular way.

That's an idealist's take, though, it seems impossible to write reasonable rules that produce that kind of outcome without harming innovation.

Analemma_• 6 years ago

It's tricky, though. Technical aspects nonwithstanding, suppose what we call "Microsoft Office" had never been separate programs to begin with, and right from the beginning had been a single binary that did Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. depending on what you clicked, and then that binary had just gotten new features every time Microsoft discovered a new thing they thought it needed.

Would it be anticompetitive to add a chat feature to that program? If so, when do software updates become anticompetitive? If not, what is the functional difference between that and the situation we have now?

TheOperator3• 6 years ago

One will recall that Internet Explorer was literally integrated into Windows 98, replacing the file explorer at one point, so Microsoft could argue they couldn't unbundle it.

WeChat and Indian "Super Apps" followed this model to grow to success. WeChat Pay in 2013 was basically like Facebook taking WhatsApp and using it to become a player competing against MasterCard/Visa.

Yes you can build a giant do it all monolith app to duplicate your competitions features and then crush them. The fact the apps are packed as a single program instead of via distinct programs isn't THAT meaningful and I'm kind of happy it isn't otherwise we would veer into lawyers designing programs more and more.

The Slack/Microsoft thing smacks of anticompetitive behavior simply because Teams is essentially free and on Microsoft's lowest cost plans and Microsoft is transparently attempting to crush Slack to death in a price war to secure a monopoly. The underlying quality of the two products is rendered a moot point.

lazylizard5• 6 years ago

which parts of a toyota must not be made by toyota though? tires? air bags? seats? audio? air con?

wp3816402• 6 years ago

Toyota aren't a monopoly and the auto industry is one of the most regulated on earth

throwaway2011035• 6 years ago

Most of those things probably are not made by Toyota. Maybe the seats are.

hedora2• 6 years ago

The classic analogy says Toyota shouldn’t be allowed to own the roads.

These days, bundling fueling stations (Tesla) and access to streaming audio services (some head units) arguably crosses the line.

Some cars won’t start if you replace the radio with a third party unit. I’m not sure when that started being a common thing.

dheera4• 6 years ago

Is it just me or does anyone else find Microsoft Teams horribly unusable? Every time I try to log in (for a client's project) it wants a goddamn SMS authentication and Slack never had me do that BS. I don't even use SMS and so I have to dig through Twilio API just to log in.

stingraycharles• 6 years ago

I have multiple office365 accounts and within those accounts, and in a large number of different teams. The UX of switching between these is absolutely terrible.

011000112• 6 years ago

It has its problems but so does Slack. It seems to be getting better quickly though. I applaud MS for having a Linux client that actually works. The biggest annoyance is that it doesn't remember my phone number when using phone audio for meetings. The UI is a bit confusing at times but I'm getting used to it.

detaro2• 6 years ago

It supports other 2FA methods too (although it's possible your client has set it to force SMS, maybe that's possible)

dagw4• 6 years ago

it wants a goddamn SMS authentication

That's a company policy setting and not something inherent to Teams.

madrox4• 6 years ago

I remember, a long time ago, I went to a barcamp-style event hosted at Google in Mountain View. This was maybe a year after Google Maps was released. I forget how it came up, but at one of the sessions, an attendee got into a heated debate with a googler over whether it was ok that Google was able to release Google Maps to the world for free, essentially putting for-pay map services out of business. Apparently, Google Maps put this guy's startup out of business since there was no way to monetize anymore.

Was Google Maps anti-competitive? Perhaps in the sense that it was incredibly hard to compete with, but that benefits the customer.

And let's be real, it's not like Microsoft had never conceived of a chat client before Slack came around. Slack rode the chat trend. It didn't create it.

singhrac4• 6 years ago

It's funny how we've taken it for granted that the service of maps and routing (one I consider a technological marvel) is free just when Google starts to put ads in Maps. I guess it must have been hard to convince venture capital in 2005 to fund the innovation necessary (or, more likely, early Google engineers were incredibly good).

fgonzag• 6 years ago

What happens if Google decides to exert its authority with its monopoly (charging a ton, charging businesses to appear, etc)?

Now there is no service for customers to switch to. Anti competitive behavior benefits the customer as long as the company wants it that way. The moment it decides otherwise, customers hurt a lot more than they would have by paying for the service since its inception (where there would be alternatives to the service)

vl• 6 years ago

The only redeeming quality of Google Maps is that it is incredibly good product.

But at the same time it’s extremely anti-competitive: essentially very few companies can invest many billions of dollars it took Google to collect the data for a product which is still very poorly monetized. Instead Google chooses to offer it for free to moat Search/Ads.

swyx• 6 years ago

Ive heard a bit about these barcamp style events (I'm not in SF) and I'm interested in replicating this culture or event format. might you have a link or search terms where I can find more info about how these are like?

Closi2• 6 years ago

The problem with the trend is the next step, where significant monetisation only starts once a monopoly has been created (first kill the competition through subsidisation from a big company and a price tag of £free, then create a poorer product with loads of ads to profit once the original company is dead).

bluejekyll• 6 years ago

Microsoft's Word/Excel monopoly is unbreakable

Is this really true? For installed software this is true. But at least with everyone I work with, it’s all Google docs now. I was honestly floored the other day when I got a presentation in an email rather than a link to one online that could be collaborated with. Maybe I’m in a bubble, but I can’t imagine going back to Word or Excel.

kailswhales• 6 years ago

Pretty sure you’re just not the intended user. Many in finance are pretty much forced to use Excel, and specifically on Windows because there’s functionality that isn’t available on OSX

hedora2• 6 years ago

We use a few things at work (including google docs by not office). Quip is by far the universal favorite.

Its main advantage is that it presents an extremely good history of who said what when, and what parts of the document were updated. It also has a cross-document “inbox” of relevant updates.

The main disadvantage is that we can’t use it with collaborators outside the company. I’m not sure if that’s specific to our company or a product limitation.

devtosales6• 6 years ago

In over 10 years I’ve rarely received a google drive doc / sheet or presso. Can’t imagine relying on those school child level tools to be honest.

I’ve worked at SAP, Oracle, and a few large consultancies. Most of my customers are in the enterprise size range. Office is used heavily by the larger companies of the world and therefore is used by their software and service vendors. The only company I’ve ever worked with that was totally google drive was an American startup. Office is still very much the dominant suite of software across most companies although there are plenty of smaller American companies trying to work without it. I personally can’t tolerate the the lack of basic formatting that docs offers are how limited sheets and slides are. Just adding section numbers in docs needs an add on and if your collaborators don’t have the same add on they just add new sections without numbering. I can’t imagine large documents without numbering...

bladegash7• 6 years ago

Having worked in a number of large commercial enterprise (non-IT product) and government environments, next to no one uses Google Docs. The ones that do, are looked at sideways and are a pain to work with due to interoperability issues with Word/Excel and Docs/Sheets (yes, they do exist).

Microsoft has also taken some pretty big steps forward over the last couple of years when it comes to document collaboration/sharing. Most Office applications now allow for live sharing/collaboration via the desktop apps.

There’s also the O365 web-based capability similar to Docs/Sheets. Plus, these are integrated with other O365 products like OneDrive and SharePoint (laugh, but SharePoint is unlikely to go away anytime soon with enterprise customers).

I have yet to find a product differentiator that GSuite (or whatever they call it now) has over M365/O365, except maybe sometimes price. On the other hand, Microsoft has a number of differentiators over Google’s products. Even with the price differences, Enterprise customers get significant volume licensing discounts and see cost savings through not having to retrain everyone from IT administrators to day-to-day users.

bladegash7• 6 years ago

They kind of charge for Teams already, at least for some customers/users. In order to have a teleconference dial-in number, the user that created the conference has to have a license (I believe it’s somewhere around $10 p/mo). In my company, this is more or less a fundamental requirement if you interact in a customer facing role.

Word and Excel integration is one thing. In my opinion, the integration with Outlook is the bigger selling point. I want to schedule a teams meeting with a customer? Create a calendar invitation and click a button to make it a Teams meeting. Dial-in information is then automatically placed in the invitation. That same meeting (and the rest of mg Outlook calendar) is also now synced with my calendar in Teams, so now I receive alerts in Teams when someone starts the meeting, the meeting start time, etc.

Other services have integration with Outlook, but nothing like what Teams has, and to go against the grain a bit, that aspect of Teams’ UX is fantastic.

I think one thing many are missing is a lot of new Teams users aren’t using it for the Slack-like features (e.g., channels). Most of the people I’ve worked with on teams over the last 6 months use it solely for direct messaging, file sharing, direct phone calls to coworkers, internal meetings, teleconferencing, etc. for those purposes, Teams’ UX is more than adequate and I actually prefer it over Slack.

That is not to say it’s perfect though (dear Microsoft: please make changing input/output device settings more intuitive and well-behaved...).

tjayy• 6 years ago

Zoom has most of this as well, one click creating meeting in calendar invite with all your dial in information

Outlook reminders will say click to join zoom meeting.

And the zoom client will have a list of your upcoming meetings

stevefan1999• 6 years ago

well I'd say Slack is lucky to survive after kicking the Microsoft's nest, you know, the last two times when Microsoft is really pissed off, you got .Net and the death of Netscape. And an antitrust of course.

DedlySnek2• 6 years ago

I'm not aware of why Microsoft was pissed and created .Net. Can you link to some article or video that provides some context/ backstory?

batrat• 6 years ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/03/02/why-did-micros...

romanoderoma2• 6 years ago

Unpopular opinion: I never loved Slack and the Linux client wasn't working really well for me so I had to use the web one

I work for a company with thousands of employees and we used Slack in our small team, we chose it because the majority was already familiar with it (I voted for Mastodon) and we spent part of our team budget to pay for it

When COVID hit the fans and we started working from home, the company chose Teams as the collaboration platform for all of us

I don't love Teams either, but I honestly have to admit that the voice/video calls are incredibly reliable even on some shitty DSL connection I found myself using that had a packet loss ratio around 50% and no other alternative worked

For everything else Teams is worse than Slack, except for the integration with the AD domain and sharing documents with colleagues that never used anything else than Windows

On average Teams is as good as Slack and for casual users that only use chats and calls there is no difference at all

I can see why companies are switching to Teams, they have been MS customers for years and Teams comes bundled, it's one less contract to sign and one less vendor to start a relationship with.

judge20202• 6 years ago

(I voted for Mastodon)

Does Matodon do well as a chat app? It doesn't feel like 'Twitter for companies' would do good in that respect if everything has to be a threaded conversation.

DenverCode• 6 years ago

Curious, what was lacking with your experience of Slack on Linux? I haven't experienced any issues at all.

romanoderoma2• 6 years ago

Not lacking, it simply didn't work as expected.

I'm on Debian + KDE Plasma 5 and the tray icon disappeared, the UI froze for no obvious reason, sometimes only the frame of the windows was visible while the rest was a black square, notifications were hit and miss, sometimes the mic wasn't released after a voice call and I had to restart pulseaudio to free it and sometimes the client couldn't detect the audio devices at all.

I believe it has to do with my configuration, but I never had the same problems with the Teams client.

AzzieElbab2• 6 years ago

I find it funny how some companies first refused to adopt slack due to lack on onsite storage, later adopted teams with no such reservations

TheOperator3• 6 years ago

Microsoft is much more capable of meeting any compliance demands around cloud data storage than a company like Slack is. Microsoft builds clouds for militaries.

gumby2• 6 years ago

Because Microsoft promised to eliminate the perceived risks of remote storage while slack couldn’t make that promise (if they even tried) to the kids of people who care.

Slack was more focused on the end user while Microsoft focuses on the customer (which for most of their cash cows, Windows and Office) is IT.

Presumabably you think this concern is somewhere between overblown and absurd. I do. But if you’re State Farm* you have to either find a solution or get air cover for your decision by offloading it on your long term, trusted vendor. (This is basically half of the thesis of the article).

The need to have a story for all these special cases is why Microsoft’s messaging is so confusing and their products frequently (but not always) unwieldy. But it lets them hoover up the cash for all those special cases...and since others can’t afford to deal with every one, they can charge more.

AzzieElbab2• 6 years ago

But I have seen no evidence of such promises by ms. Everything seem to be build on assumptions

mantap• 6 years ago

History is strewn with chat apps that had their heyday and then died. It's a very dangerous business to be in.

Slack is a total anomaly. Technically it's not very good considering the resources poured into it, but it has had a very outsized period of dominance.

AtlasBarfed2• 6 years ago

I don't know how "tight" Teams is coding and architecturally, but Slack didn't do itself favors with electron.

It's the rare example of the "total rewrite" absolutely being needed and (maybe) coming a bit too late.

Slack's revenue is rounding error on Office's revenue. And while I still fervently distrust Microsoft due to its past sins, monopoly defense development isn't exclusive to Redmond.

weikju• 6 years ago

Teams is electron too, and really hungry on battery, and slow, and only recently re-added the ability to open chats in separate windows (ability lost when migrating from Skype for Business), and even that is slow and clunky and only for individual chats, not for group chats or "channels"....

userbinator2• 6 years ago

There are third-party native Slack clients, but I'm not sure if anyone has made an attempt at doing the same for Teams?

ability lost when migrating from Skype for Business

...which also used to be native code (like the original Skype).

It's really disappointing to see that Microsoft, of all companies, seems to have no interest in writing a native Win32 client for its own service, and instead effectively strengthens Google's monopoly by using its browser engine.

lovetocode2• 6 years ago

I hate Slack and MS Teams. There are just too many features and the UI for both is clunky.

I would love to see IRC used more. Can’t we just bake video chat into that?

turtlebits• 6 years ago

These comments are getting tiring. I'm not a big fan of chat apps in the workplace, but I can see their necessity. How about you get your org to use IRC and show your results.

lovetocode2• 6 years ago

I know you are being sarcastic but the entire US Iraq and Afghanistan wars were being operated out of mIRC chat.

pkaye• 6 years ago

I would love to see IRC used more. Can’t we just bake video chat into that?

Then it will get too many features and get an even more clunky UI.

jsnell• 6 years ago

There's a lot of things that day to day businesses users will need that Slack (and the clones) provide but IRC basically can't. And they're kind of way more fundamental to the basic interactions than your idea of adding video calls.

- User authentication, preferably via some semi-standardized form of single-signon (e.g. SAML, or maybe OAuth).

- Users being able to receive messages even when all their devices are offline.

- Users being able to connect from multiple clients at the same time, with good UX. With IRC, people doing that will have to have a separate nick for each client they connect from. And people who want to @ them or /msg them will need to know which of the near-duplicate nicks to actually choose. Choose poorly, and your message might be sent to a device where it won't be read for hours even though the recipient really is actively online.

- State sync across the clients. If I've read some specific messages on one client, they should not show up as unread on my other clients.

- A consistent user experience. In IRC there's no reliable cross-client way of tagging a message for the attention of some set of users. Sure, clients will do various levels of nick highlighting. But the exact patterns will vary between clients, and the sender can't even know whether they got the format right since the decision on the highlighting happens purely on the receiver's end.

And that's not even getting into the things that IRC can reasonably do, but that are incredibly kludgy. Say history search in a channel. No organization wants to run channel logging bots, and no normal user wants to go to a totally separate service to do a search.

tored• 6 years ago

Funny thing is that ICQ basically did all of that in 1998. We are going backwards in software development.

petepete• 6 years ago

None of these would have been insurmountable had the standard not been stuck in the mud for twenty five years.

neodymiumphish3• 6 years ago

For me, the near-perfect solution has been available for a long time now, only costs the data overhead, and you have total control over the data. Granted, some companies prefer that another company manage that data security, so there's less on their IT hands.

Mattermost/Nextcloud/Jitsi

scarface74• 6 years ago

When will companies ever learn that “welcoming” a huge competitor into your market with an ad, never ends up going well.

https://www.incimages.com/uploaded_files/inlineimage/630x0/w...

https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-the-...

nemothekid• 6 years ago

I feel like Slack deserves some blame here for their poor uptick during COVID.

Slack's audio/video product has been abysmal, and hasn't improved during the lockdowns. If you use Slack on iOS and someone shares their screen, you can't see what they are sharing. My teams have never been comfortable using Slack for audio calls, and there were enough problems that calls were just done over teams instead. I know many companies that used Slack, and then used Teams (or Zoom) for audio/video. How does Zoom factor into all this which grew like crazy? Teams is technically competitive but Zoom really nailed an important part of the product.

mcintyre1994• 6 years ago

I do agree with this, but at the same time - where was their above-baseline growth from COVID actually going to come from? We already used Slack even when we were all working in the same office with occasional remote work, we use it more now and rely on it more but that doesn’t affect their bottom line until we grow our team. I don’t think there’s many teams that wouldn’t have benefited from Slack before COVID and would after.

Whereas with Zoom, we used to use Google Meet (never had much luck with Slack video either), it was pretty rubbish but it was fine to keep the one person WFH in the loop on the standup or do an occasional all remote one. Once it was all remote all the time there was a motivation to move to the best tool in the space. I think that’s why Zoom has insane growth compared to before and Slack doesn’t - you needed Slack anyway, you could get away with worse alternatives for Zoom.

Zoom also has massive growth outside of its enterprise space with family/friends using it to stay connected. Slack doesn’t really get anything much above baseline there either because people already had ways to text large groups. And their free tier/pricing doesn’t work well in that space either compared to competitors, whereas Zoom has an individual pricing plan that does.

halfdan• 6 years ago

What frustrates me most about Slack Video/Audio is that they bought and shut down Screenhero. Screenhero was an excellent tool I got to use for audio calls and screensharing about five years ago. It was clearly an acquihire but somehow when they integrated the product into Slack it became the shit show it is today.

Closi2• 6 years ago

I think OPs point was that teams is effectively slack + zoom for most organisations, and that video calling was the ‘must have’ Covid feature, so while Zoom and Teams have won (because they both have great video calling) Slack lost.

ToniCipriani• 6 years ago

The only thing I need and haven't found in others is Slack's functionality of drawing on someone else's screen. Webex has it but it's super cumbersome to use.

apple4ever5• 6 years ago

Zoom has it and its really amazing.

I gotta say, of the products I've used, Zoom blows all the others out of the water (Teams, Google Meet, Slack, WebEx)

pkamb• 6 years ago

Teams is awful. Specifically the non-native notifications which have been complained about for 4 years with no action.

Fix that single item and I'd have a positive view of the product.

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

guidedlight• 6 years ago

Sure. Microsoft’s main customer are large corporations. I work for one, and I can assure you (for security reasons) my company does not want Teams messages to leave the Microsoft ecosystem for the sack of better OS integration.

Nextgrid5• 6 years ago

How does using the native OS notifications somehow make the data leave the ecosystem? These notifications are still local to the machine, just that now they respect the user's notification preferences (including those enforced by MDM like hiding notifications when the machine is locked, etc).

johnwalkr• 6 years ago

That's an awful one! Especially if you use zoom or something else, there's no easy way to hide notifications and the system-wide setting doesn't hide them! My main gripe is file sharing. It's unclear to users how share point is integrated, and almost guaranteed to cause a mess of local files vs shared files throughout your org.

But my favorite: ever since Teams started opening a new window for meetings, it has this really awful behavior: when sharing a screen in a meeting, it minimizes your meeting window, and shows the main window, which is most likely a private message you may not want to share.

mqus• 6 years ago

The new window is the "new teams experience" which you can thankfully disable in the settings. I don't know who had built it but leaving out the fullscreen option for watching a screenshare was pretty bad.

josemanuel• 6 years ago

I have both Slack and teams at work. Teams is really bad. It’s a pain to search for text and all its many random bugs just add to the frustration. Everyone feels they cannot rely on teams. To be honest teams just seems like a half finished project, it impacts productivity in a negative way.

AnonC• 6 years ago

We have been using Teams and the user experience is really bad. If anyone wants to point to Electron and blame it for high RAM usage (causing issues for other applications) and being sluggish, Teams would be the poster child that ticks all the boxes for such characterizations. Frequent disconnects on and before calls, frequent problems with connecting and maintaining the available/connected status, and a myriad other problems make it a big drain on time and productivity. Microsoft also seems to be pushing Teams as a replacement for Skype for Business (or that’s how it seems based on organization decisions).

thekooples• 6 years ago

I never had any problems with audio/video features, but the RAM issue is real: it uses significantly more RAM than VS Code, another Microsoft product, that runs way more complex processes behind the scenes.

oneeyedpigeon2• 6 years ago

IME, the thing that nobody seemed to get the hang of, over a couple of months, with Teams was the difference between replying to the last message as a thread and starting a whole new thread. It seemed every time I wanted to reply, I ended up.creating a new thread, and I was far from the only one.

hotsauceror• 6 years ago

This used to be a problem for us too but I believe the UX changed a couple of months ago. Teams now shows a largish purple button that says “New Conversation” at the bottom of the chat window, and they added a little more space between that and the bottom of the previous conversation. It made a big difference.

mike503• 6 years ago

I loathe Teams. Slack started right, IRC on steroids, then enhanced it like a web app.

Teams was done the typical Microsoft way. Seeing a competitor that exists, not learning from it, but making a poor response.

Teams wouldn’t get off the ground if companies weren’t already so entrenched with MS. Skype for Business (poor rebranding) made more sense for what it was to do. Teams is a monstrosity of Slack (without the simple automation? I haven’t seen anything like that) + a piece of Dropbox sort of (toss your documents in it) + Sharepoint, there’s a concept of channels, conversations, groups, meetings (that don’t end unless you force them to, I’ve had windows open for days before realizing it didn’t end when the meeting does), wiki, note taking, ... like, I can’t even figure it out sometimes.

Lutger2• 6 years ago

Teams is basically a different interface for sharepoint with video + chat on top, modeled after slack. They seem to have thought: slack is cool because it has integrations, let's do that even better by giving our customers an iframe into all their ms apps!

It is pretty amazing that it is so successful. But a lot of people have a really hard time just finding things. Like, on the level of how to open a program and find the right documents. Somehow the solution of merging everything into one 'teams' works out, even if the experience is extremely horrid and feels like going back ten years in time.

solarkraft• 6 years ago

I'd second your UX comment (I find it to be a mix of okay sub-systems but horrible connections between them), but also the other users' comments about the advantages over Lync/Skype for Business.

My work place introduced Teams after Lync was deprecated. We really got into using it during the start of the current pandemic, but almost 100% for video meetings.

Teams' "Teams" feature isn't a place to chat freely, it's more like a Yammer (something like MS's workplace Twitter) with its posts and comments. This works decently well to keep topic separate.

What's weird to me is that that feature is entirely separate from "chats", which is entirely separate from "calls" (which I've only had to open to answer a missed call; why not put it into the chat?).

Since a major use of Teams are meetings via calendar events it'd be great to be able to see all my events within Teams ... but nope, got to start up the Outlook app for that.

Integration is still a bit of a pain point with Teams (or MS stuff in general). What you can grant them is that at least most of the time thing at least kind of work (audio quality is fine, can always log in - looks like they hyper focused on removing blockers before anything else, which is a decent strategy. I just hope they'll polish the UX a lot in the coming years. I've never used slack, but from what I've heard it seems to be like Teams has already eclipsed it a bit and I think it's going to continue to do so.

harrygeez2• 6 years ago

I like to think of Teams as Skype for Business on steroids. If you look at it from that angle it's a much better product. I dislike Skype for Business with a passion.

globular-toast2• 6 years ago

Skype for business was great. That's because it was Skype, which they acquired. But unfortunately they then proceeded to completely destroy the non-enterprise Skype with the most braindead UI change I've ever seen, and completely neglect Skype for business for years.

dagw4• 6 years ago

I feel that for one on one chat and calling, Skype for Business was great, and better than teams. For groups and project wide chat Teams is better.

aejnsn2• 6 years ago

Ugh. Has the author had to use Teams at all? Seriously, call drops multiple times a day, horribly sensitive to VPN use, illogical UI, and the worst of all, it’s notifications are inconsistent, if not bad UX. Slack has its faults, but it’s reliable and sensible. Teams is none of these things.

foepys2• 6 years ago

That's exactly the authors point. MS Teams doesn't have to be good. People don't want to think about their tools and as long as they work reasonably well, people will use what they were given by their company. Since Microsoft included Teams in Office 365, companies decided to use Teams instead of paying extra for Slack.

yumraj• 6 years ago

Same is true, at least in personal experience, for Zoom.

We pay for and use Zoom, as in not just the free account. But lately have started using MS Team a lot for smaller meetings. It integrates well with Outlook and works well.

Interestingly, we've never used Team as a Slack replacement.

Lutger2• 6 years ago

That's part of it. There are lots of workers who do care about their tools though.

There is just one little problem. They are often not the people who get to decide on where the company spends its money.

We are a Microsoft shop by and large. A lot of workers used slack, but management decided it had no compelling features compared to teams. We already got the licenses for teams, so slack was just costing us. So slack got ditched and now we all use teams.

Except we don't, not really. Not like we used slack. Somehow, teams feels like work and slack feels like community. A lot of people use teams chat like they do email: not for fun but to get things done. A lot of people used slack like how they would chat in person.

It's different, teams killed most of the joy of connecting with each other at the workplace through chat. Not for all I think, but in general I feel we lost a certain sense of community that slack brought to our company.

underwater• 6 years ago

Teams has high numbers, but I wonder how much of that is actually eating into the Slack use case. Most of it seems to be awkward KPI gaming by forcing people to click into it to read docs and make calls.

anoncake• 6 years ago

Teams proves that working reasonably well is not actually required.

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

In the enterprise world, the decision to adopt a technology is not done by the users but by the org leadership.

It doesn't matter if the UI is trash, or the product as a whole is trash. The only thing that matters is how well they can sell it to the leadership.

apple4ever5• 6 years ago

Exactly. See my post above for a great example.

slavik81• 6 years ago

I've experienced none of those problems using Teams for the past 6 months. Works great regardless of whether my VPN is on or off.

spockz• 6 years ago

For me MS Teams has been the most reliable experience after plain-old IRC but with the added video/audio/screen sharing features. The only bad experiences have come from somebody using a terrible wireless link, nasty Bluetooth devices, or just using the laptop audio devices in a noisy environment. This is our corporate ms teams so maybe we get allocated our own compute and bandwidth resources though.

Edit: now that I think of it, the key-press to light latency is horrible on macOS. Even worse than in IDEA. With sometimes just stalls after which the whole paragraph I typed pops up.

marczellm• 6 years ago

The latter issue for me is always caused by having one too many browser + CEF/Electron app open at the same time. Killing one of those usually fixes it.

harrygeez2• 6 years ago

I don't understand the need to separate "teams chat" and group chat, but seriously? The calls and screen sharing works pretty damn fine. I don't think I've used better.

Notifications default settings is a little bit unintuitive though.

brutal_boi• 6 years ago

Have not experienced that at all, and subject talking had been using slack (and loved it) for a couple of years before corporate forced us to use Skype for business. Made me reconsider career choices.

When I joined my cureent employer and they told me they were all into teams, the trauma from skype was still lingering.

But to my biggest surprise, it's actually fine; I'd even go the lengths to say it's good. Has most, if not all, features I think a developer would expect in 2020, plus they just work (at least so far).

Hard to believe msft could pull off something like that having seen skype for biz before.

4rt• 6 years ago

have you used it in the last year?

it's perfectly functional now, but 2 years ago it was pretty bad for the reasons you say.

loco5niner• 6 years ago

Teams has worked great for me. Love the collaboration that the screensharing has enabled for me.

peteretep• 6 years ago

I have Office 365 or something installed on my Mac to use Office tools. A few weeks ago, after a restart, Teams started at login. I’ve never consciously installed it and certainly never set it to self launch, but I wonder if I now count as one of those 115m users?

tsjq• 6 years ago

How Microsoft crushed Slack despite Teams being maha crappy than Slack.

Ans : just made use of their large install base and thrusted it on their customers.

Nextgrid5• 6 years ago

I bet the majority of the user numbers are either users transitioning from Skype for Business (ex-Lync) or those who just got it installed and on auto-start (it automatically logs you in using your domain account) but never actually use it.

In both cases these are users who were already within the Microsoft ecosystem. I am not convinced that Teams crushed Slack though, considering this ignores a significant chunk of the market in the form of startups and small businesses that typically don't have anything to do with Microsoft (Google Docs is way more popular in these spaces) and would absolutely reject Teams from a technical perspective based on how awful it is.

rsanheim• 6 years ago

I've used Slack forever. Before that was IRC, Campfire, then Github Chat (an internal product there), and others I've forgotten. I'm sure I'll use Teams at some point.

The thing I always think about w/ chat apps for work is you don't want it to be that good. DMs are often a cancer in terms of knowledge transfer. Unlimited history and search means that people don't write up ideas in a proper way in a more suitable place, whether that's a long email or an ADR or a google doc or a pull request. Threads are undiscoverable and missed by people who should be in the loop.

Most product managers building these apps want to engage their users via the standard tech metrics - usage stats, number of searches, messages sent, whatever. But if you are in your chat app all day and responding to notifications and watching 30 channels, you aren't doing work. You are just surfing your own internal twitter. I've been there, it feels fun but at the end of the day you realize you didn't get shit done.

All of the incentives are misaligned to actually build an effective chat app for the 'calm' organization. I have read about Twist (https://www.twist.com/) which I know is all about that focus, and I hope to be able to use it in earnest someday.

I know when I'm really doing well with my job I'm on slack for an hour or two a day at most, and very deliberate about when to keep it open. The rest of the time I'm coding or thinking or writing or working w/ colleagues. That takes a lot of discipline tho, and the allure of always on chat is a strong one.

mro_name• 6 years ago

I wish, I could upvote multiple times. 3rd party storage is a thing that keeps you locked in in loooong terms. Good just for the vendor and jumpstart, short-term users.

AlchemistCamp• 6 years ago

I've used Slack forever. Before that was IRC, Campfire, then Github Chat

That's what the founder makes it sound like in every interview I've heard, but the thing before (and overlapping with) Slack was Atlassian's HipChat. Slack was basically a feature for feature clone of HipChat for the first two years I used it.

distances• 6 years ago

And before HipChat there was (and still is) Flowdock [0]. I think they have the best threading model I've still seen on chat apps, so it was very weird seeing Slack get threading so wrong when there were much better examples to copy from.

I suppose Slack won that popularity race as they had a free tier; AFAIK Flowdock was always only available for a paid subscription. Slack definitely was for a long time the worse product. Though at some point much later Slack's larger dev budget finally tipped the scales in their favor I think.

[0] http://blog.flowdock.com/2009/07/05/announcing-flowdock-real...

66fm472tjy7• 6 years ago

The main reason we switched to Teams (besides the bundling) is that Slack calls are limited to 15 participants.

gonehome• 6 years ago

There’s some irony to me that slack did an Apple style “Welcome Microsoft” ad, failed to compete effectively, and then sued them for antitrust.

If you’re going to put out an obnoxious ad and act as if they’re not a threat then it feels like you shouldn’t be able to later whine about how the competition is a getting a little unfair?

That said, stratechery’s take on slack’s advantage seemed reasonable to me. There’s just something about this combination that bothers me.

Slack selling out to sales force also feels like a loss/failure. I think slack is a great product, this is just kind of a disappointing outcome.

nailer• 6 years ago

And yet, if there’s a lesson of the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got the company about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design.

It's ignorance like this that (asking with the clickbait) make me way of Vox. That's not Slack design. It's the design of chat apps. Hipchat looked like this, and IRC has looked like this for decades.

jrsj• 6 years ago

Is Microsoft really winning anything when they have to give this crap away for free with Office because no sane person would ever pay for it?

vorticalbox• 6 years ago

The development team I'm in used teams for a while but we go so annoyed with how teams handled code snippets, messing with spacing and such that we move the slack.

Nextgrid5• 6 years ago

Exactly this. Teams is only successful in environments where the end-users don't have a say in which tools to use and have no choice but to use whatever's handed down from IT.

In most environments where the end-users actually make the decisions, Teams is not a thing.

eknkc• 6 years ago

We recently switched to Discord from Slack after trying out Teams and some other solutions.

Despite the gaming community focus, Discord feels like a much better product. Maybe they should change their image or something.

keithnz• 6 years ago

We changed from slack to discord earlier in the year, works really well for us. I think if they had a "Discord for Business" offering that would be good.

tannhaeuser2• 6 years ago

Why are people speaking of Slack in the past tense? I'm as much of a software liberty zealot as it gets and will never understand people flocking to "platforms" when we had open protocols for chat for decades (irc, xmpp), but Salesforce certainly is a respected company having pioneered SaaS long before that became a thing in this decade, isn't it? At least I remember Salesforce being looked up to by the likes of SAP and Oracle 12-15 years ago.

Corrado• 6 years ago

My view on the acquisition is that Salesforce needed a "chat" communication tool so instead of building one they purchased one. This is smart. However, it will require Slack to change to fit into the product catalogue, and that change is what will kill Slack.

This is unlike the Heroku acquisition in 2011, where Salesforce just wanted to enter into the "cloud" market but didn't really need to bundle the product into the rest of their systems. As far as I can tell, Heroku came out fairly unscathed and used the money to improve themselves/continue operations.

I think the Slack as we knew it is probably not long for this world. It will be absorbed and mutated to live inside Salesforce.

tannhaeuser2• 6 years ago

Ah, I can now see the fear that Slack will be taken away from people who're used to it. Personally, I've had only a brief encounter with it, and that was clearly driven by a project lead in a SV bubble, as in, everybody's doing it, so must we. But I'd imagine that Salesforce management isn't so stupid as to spend that kind of money only to loose customers. I know that Salesforce has made inroads into eg time tracking and invoicing for freelancers at large consulting companies, so there's definitely a market to grow into that's not entirely alien to Salesforce's core business, even if they don't start from a tech but business administration angle. And Heroku still doing what they did ten years ago, if anything, is rather a sign that Salesforce will leave Slack as it is, isn't it?

mtts• 6 years ago

Meanwhile in education Slack never was a a thing, everyone already had Office 365 and some adventurous users had already started to experiment with that chat client thing tacked on to Sharepoint.

Then, when COVID-19 hit, what we needed was not a chat client with history and file sharing but a video conferencing tool and it turned out Teams could do that, too. Sure, Zoom was better at first, but Teams came with that shared files thing, it already had some basic education friendly extra features and, very important, it quickly improved. By a lot.

The first day all education institutions in my country worked from home, Teams collapsed under the load. Microsoft quickly fixed this, however - and then started adding useful features.

I’ve never been a fan of Microsoft, but that was really ace work.

Meanwhile, Slack was ... a chat service with extras.

scitechx352• 6 years ago

I don't think it's Microsoft. Slack became too stagnated. They build a great product but didn't evolve. They didn't seem to address the distraction part. It has created a culture of ASAP everything.

It just create too much anxiety with so much going on. It feels busy but not productive. It just seem the same product as it was 4 years ago. Also, it never felt like that they cared about our work-life. Slack took away all the structure from our work and left fragmented chatter. It never felt like they cared for our work-life.

It's UI is still limited and searching for something is painful even though search is it its name - SLACK. It started as chat but stayed as chat and did nothing to fix issues that comes with chat. With mail, you have one inbox. With slack, you have so many random inbox.

All messages are treated equally..from lunch chatter to some important announcement? How do I decide what to mute or unmute? Why can't there be a better way? If it's an FYI, don't send me notification. If my response is needed on something make those messages different. I mean there has to be a better way then just a single chat only fit for picnic planning.

I don't know, I just feel that slack could have become a huge independent company if they had cared more about the problems of users. Everything starts in a slack message but slack did nothing to helps us achieve it. Instead, it just became a mess of emojis and random time-sucking chatter.

oblio4• 6 years ago

It's UI is still limited and searching for something is painful even though search is it its name - SLACK.

I don't understand this part.

appehuli• 6 years ago

I read some people expand slack as "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge"

thu2111• 6 years ago

I don't know, is that really true? Slack organises messages by channel and you can absolutely mute channels, prioritise them, control notifications etc. As for work/life, I saw people complain about that but you see people say the same about email. I think honestly it's sometimes the person wanting to complain. I have Slack on my phone. It's set to never send any notifications to me at all. I use it every six months or so, if I need to look something up or send a message on the move. Otherwise I'm on Slack when I'm at my desk and never at other times. No problem. Work/life balance has always been fine.

I've used Slack and Office 365 for the last five years and honestly find Slack better in almost every way, even to Outlook. Yes, Slack isn't the ideal chat app. Yes, it's stagnated and has no vision for where it wants to go. Yes once it finished cloning IRC and Skype they ran out of ideas. All true. But Office/Outlook 365/Teams is just so terrible. For years the Outlook Mac client struggled with the basics of formatted text! Groups are weirdly different to mailing lists, threading doesn't work properly, search? Forget it. People know how to create Slack channels but don't know how to create and manage Office groups so everything is just giant ad-hoc CC lists. Forget being able to classify messages by topic or importance because nothing is organised to begin with. Forget joining a conversation half way through and having access to earlier messages/files. It's an experience straight out of 1985.

But Microsoft is still crushing Slack: we're due to migrate off Slack to Teams in the new year. The sole driving reason is cost. We're not a big firm but Slack now costs the equivalent of a full time senior software engineer for us. Teams is "free" because business people consider Excel and PowerPoint non-negotiable. Microsoft is winning by market dumping in effect: it's IE vs Netscape all over again.

I think Slack could survive and thrive even competing against free, frankly. People do pay for products even when there are free alternatives. And so far everyone in the Teams migration trial seems to love Slack and hate Teams. Slack's problem is it has a massively bloated cost base. It's a freaking chat app, how on earth do they have 12 million customers paying such high prices and still lose money? It's abundantly obvious that they suffered the same investor-driven Dutch Disease that every other Valley startup seems to suffer from, where money is free so they feel obliged to take it and spend it. Slack's costs feel totally out of proportion to what it actually does, so of course they're going to get smacked by Microsoft. If Slack cost $10 per person per year instead of per month they'd be in a far better competitive position.

scitechx352• 6 years ago

Those are really interesting points. I also thought about investor-driven approach. Slack had to justify massive funding it took over the years. It has 1500+ employees for a chat app. In comparison, Notion has <50 employees and they seem to release more stuff than slack (though it might not be a fair direct comparison).

Having said that, 28 Billion is a great success by any metric. It's just that Slack had lots of potential to upsell and solve lots of adjacent problems around project management & collaboration which could have made it more valuable and increased its Market. But for some reason, they just didn't move fast enough and build/experiment more.

apple4ever5• 6 years ago

Slack is definitely way way way overpriced. I know at a bunch of companies I was out it was never considered because of the price since its "just chat".

globular-toast2• 6 years ago

Slack is basically just IRC with stickers for children. Did they ever have a unique selling point? I'm not surprised that the winds of fashion have turned now to some other set of stickers.

Easy come, easy go.

octref• 6 years ago

It's almost 2021 and Slack still can't syntax highlight code blocks.

Nextgrid5• 6 years ago

Teams on the other hand still doesn't support Markdown-like formatting and does weird things when pasting text (it pastes as rich-text which screws up subsequent formatting without any easy way to reset).

Considering this, I will take Slack (and its imperfect highlighting) any day. At least I can still paste stuff and have it formatted properly in Slack. Teams can't even do that.

jillesvangurp• 6 years ago

The reason slack just got acquired is that it was the best outcome for them. The reason that it was the best outcome is that they no longer saw a path to continuing to inflate their valuation. They were out of ideas and growth was slowing down. And since they took big piles of investor money, an acquisition was the obvious move to provide these investors the ROI they wanted. It's well executed; I think they managed to sell at their peak valuation.

Technically, what Slack did was provide a commodity with a nice UX that was easy to copy. The moat to defend against competitors was completely non technical: i.e. an enthusiastic user-base instead of patented hard to copy technology or a data lake. As such, that moat was doomed long term unless they would have succeeded in piggy-backing more products and features on the success. That never happened. MS, Google, and others waking up and building similar products was a matter of time and that happened some years ago. So, an acquisition was a foregone conclusion once the market filled up with many products doing more or less the same things.

Slack could have succeeded by doing something that completely went against their instinct of proprietary everything: open up and become an open standard with them as the reference implementation. Take Outlook as an example: it supports sending emails to people not using MS Exchange. That's not because MS likes doing that but because it's a core feature of email to be able to do that. They lost that battle a long time ago. Exchange actually started out as a walled garden and then email happened to become the thing that drove internet adoption. MS was left no choice but to add email support to Exchange.

Federation and open standards ensure that email survives more than four decades after its invention. Slack tried to replace email in the work place but they overlooked federated protocols as the key to long term success and survival. Of course success is subjective. I'm sure the 27 billion in shares is considered a great success. And who knows, maybe Salesforce will even do a good job of managing it.

But the reality is that chat is a commodity. Chat apps have come and gone for decades. Anyone remember ICQ? Did a great job in the late nineties. No longer exists. I actually used that at work. Yahoo messenger? All but gone. AOL messenger (later merged with ICQ), gone. MSN, gone. Jabber of course tried federation and for a while it looked like Google actually was on board (Google Voice was initially jabber based). Technically it's still around but I don't have a working implementation on my phone because I don't know anyone still using it. And I have just about everything else on my phone: slack, skype, telegram, whatsapp, signal, etc.

IMHO where Slack dropped the ball was with audio and video integration. They didn't do a great job and world + dog kept using alternatives even if they paid for Slack. So, instead Zoom just became the new darling of their target audience. They bought Keybase, which tried to be a secure Slack alternative. On paper the combination could be a Slack killer. And the data security features of Keybase could be a killer feature in e.g. the EU. Who knows, maybe somebody bright enough is in charge at Zoom to not that mess up. They have all the ingredients to learn from Slack and do better. But I'm not optimistic that will happen and predict an eventual acquisition is more likely.

So, many walled gardens and I still use email because it's the one thing everyone is on. You might call someone on Zoom; but you'll likely set that call up via email. Success would have been if you'd be able to use Slack to setup a Slack call because everyone you'd want to possibly talk to would be reachable via it. That never happened because it's a walled garden and they never stood a chance to replace email because of it. True for everything else in this long comment as well: ten years from now, most of that stuff will be forgotten and we'll still have email.

SergeAx• 6 years ago

medium-term future of work is increasingly a choice between three giants: Microsoft, Salesforce, and (in a distant third) Google

I have a feeling that every 8 of 10 midsize companies has G Suite as an email provider. And you still can't do anything without email, despite Slack's statement of burying it for good.

powerapple• 6 years ago

Microsoft has very good sales team on Enterprise, even more so on Government front. They are offering teams as additional feature to their already popular package, it is hard to beat it. I personally find Teams interface very annoying. They introduced threads to work with channel with many users, I find it very ugly in my opinion. The webhook is also something not as clean as Slack. That said, you can't beat strong sales and existing customer base.

croes• 6 years ago

How MS crushed Slack. The same way they crushed Netscape. By exploiting their dominant position to eliminate their competitors.

sylvainr65• 6 years ago

No. I was using Netscape in the 90s. Somewhere, Netscape published a new version that was very buggy. I switched to IE because it was way more stable. And never come back.

Same thing for MS Word vs Wordperfect and Excel vs Lotus 123.

Threeve303• 6 years ago

We had this problem solved for years. IRC just needed a few updates and none of these walled chat gardens would have a chance.

tqi• 6 years ago

Lol would we say crushed?

aldanor• 6 years ago

I was always baffled at why Slack doesn't support syntax highlighting? It's almost as if Slack developers themselves never use their own product or never share any code - otherwise how come they're not frustrated at it?

Subjectively, Discord is just better. The client is faster and nicer, it's better at managing big communities, there's proper syntax highlighting etc.

How Microsoft crushed Slack

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