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Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365
- EduardoBautista 10y agoWhen Office 365 came out, I mostly compared the price to Google Apps and didn't really think Office 365 brought that much value. Now, you can have a Google Apps, Slack, Trello, and Evernote alternative for your business under one subscription. Even if you choose the plan for installed Office applications on your computer, the price is still much more attractive than having to get a subscription for every one of the competitors. Edit: They even have a Zapier and IFTTT competitor: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/
- j1vms 10y ago> Now, you can have a Google Apps, Slack, Trello, and Evernote alternative for your business under one subscription. Actually you made a great case for why these guys should partner, integrate their products in a clean, natural way, and then make it as easy as ever for existing and new customers to hop onto all at once -- combo SaaS.
- basch 10y agoPowerBI and Skype PSTN/PBX and OneDrive/SharePoint too.
- pzenger 10y agoWhat is the Trello alternative?
- zengr 10y agoPlanner https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-planner https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-planne...
- chrishas35 10y agoPlanner. https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-planner https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-planne...
- sumitgt 10y agoMicrosoft Planner I guess
- icu 10y agokantree.io I actually changed from Trello premium to Kantree.io on the strength of it's offering and the easy import from Trello.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- boundlessdreamz 10y agoThe only problem is the products I have tried on mac (OneNote, OneDrive) & Android (OneNote) were very buggy/slow/missing features in other platforms. I wish it was otherwise. As you said, they do have a good suite of apps at a fair price
- sz4kerto 10y agoReally? OneNote lacking features?
- thesimpsons1022 10y agoprobably means the buggy part. i worked at microsoft and one note worked great on windows but was shit on my mac. it wouldn't even sync properly
- boundlessdreamz 10y agoThere are lot of missing features too - See "Key OneNote Features from Windows Missing on Mac" http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/essential-guide-onenote-mac/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/essential-guide-onenote-mac/ It was extremely slow and buggy on android. It wouldn't sync
- majewsky 10y agoThis is part of [1] why I won't be getting another Macbook when work gives me a notebook, and go back to Windows instead. Our IT relies on a lot of Microsoft stuff (Office, Exchange, Skype for Business, etc.) and that works much better under Windows. 1 A notable feature that we're missing on Macs is recording in Skype for Business (aka Lync) meetings. We only have two Windows notebooks in our team of 20, so we have to rely on them joining every important meeting to capture a recording. [1] Another part of the decision is WSL, which might enable me to abolish my work VM.
- monkmartinez 10y agoHave you used it lately? Works very well on my 10.11.x Mac... I also use a Asus Vivo note 8, and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (my old work horse) and they all sync perfectly... at least now they do.
- delegate 10y ago> Now, you can have a Google Apps, Slack, Trello, and Evernote alternative for your business under one subscription. Long term/philosophically this is is unwise, because you're locking your business' data into one company and then it dictates the direction in which your ideas can expand. Google Apps aside, all these apps are developed by highly creative and agile (fast) companies. MS is just an executive switch away from being a monolithic elephant once again..
- evilDagmar 10y agoOh don't worry. I'm sure the first right of refusal agreements Microsoft has with their larger customers will ensure plenty of people will switch from whatever else they've been using, whether they like it or not.
- Touche 10y agoWhats funny is that Google Wave was basically a direct predecessor to these types of apps and they killed it before the technology really had a chance to catch up to the vision.
- gremlinsinc 10y agoI never really thought of it like that, but you're absolutely right! IF only they'd followed through and tweaked their vision.. of what google wave was, or pivoted in the right way.
- Analemma_ 10y agoYes! I'm so glad somebody else remembers Wave, it seems to have disappeared into the dustbin of history. I loved Wave before it was killed, and while I know a lot of people still hold grudges over Reader, Wave is the axed Google product I miss most. The fact that you could have multiple threaded conversations in the same chat room was one of the best features for me, and Teams seems like the first descendant to have that. That alone is a plus over Slack.
- addicted 10y agoAh, wave. I wish instead of just throwing it at the world, hoping for people to figure out what to do with it, Google had used it as infrastructure to build a variety of applications. The problem with Wave was that it was too open ended for most people to figure out. Those who did figure out, loved it, and were burnt when Google shut it down. I still don't think there is a good equivalent to wave at the moment.
- Analemma_ 10y ago> The problem with Wave was that it was too open ended for most people to figure out. Those who did figure out, loved it, and were burnt when Google shut it down. Yeah, this tallies with my experience. I was in two separate Wave teams (Waves?), one for a six-person software team and one for a large-ish social group of non-technical people. The software team took to it immediately and loved it; the social group was mostly baffled and used it sparingly. If Google had only iterated on it they'd be a in a great spot right now, but I guess eventually every big technology company has their "Microsoft moment" when they kill a product only to see that category take off years later.
- user5994461 10y ago> When Office 365 came out, I mostly compared the price to Google Apps and didn't really think Office 365 brought that much value. Opposite here. Forced to use Google Apps to write documents and it's a pain in the arse. Wish I had Office.
- thr0waway1239 10y agoBy that measure, SharePoint is also an alternative to a lot of things, but it is universally reviled. But your comment made me wonder about the problem of building a company which becomes a feature of a bigger competitor: I wonder what the folks at Slack, Trello and Evernote think about this new competition. Is this going to actually compete head on?
- Ftuuky 10y agoMaybe now my office will stop with those endless email chains.
- Edd314159 10y agoStrange choice of hero photo to promote a chat-based virtual workspace: a team of people sitting around a table, thus having no need for the product.
- LyalinDotCom 10y agoAs a Microsoft marketing person this really made me laugh :-)
- shostack 10y agoAs a fellow marketer can you comment on what the decision making process would be like for something like a product hero image?
- zengr 10y agoGSuite has a similar image. I think the idea is teams are collaborating over the internet https://gsuite.google.com/ https://gsuite.google.com/
- lkbm 10y agoGSuite seems to be suggesting that they're in different cities, due to the different buildings in the background. It's also full of things you'd want even when sitting at a table with people--docs, sheets, etc.
- jlarocco 10y agoI personally don't choose products based on their marketing photos, but that one seems fine to me. The group are obviously interacting and engaged in their conversation, which is probably what the marketing people were trying to convey.
- JBiserkov 10y agoMaybe the people sitting around the table are not a team, but friends who work at totally different organizations, and are currently using the product to stay connected to their teams?
- aarpmcgee 10y agoSeems like a shame that it is bundled with the overhead of Office 365. Makes Slack feel like a lighter-weight option.
- deanclatworthy 10y agoWhat overhead? If you don't want the other stuff don't use it.
- addicted 10y agoYeah I don't get it. Even if you completely ignore the non-Teams aspect of it, you are still paying less money than for Slack. Unless by overhead you mean whatever is the exact opposite of overhead.
- gtirloni 10y agoWould it be much cheaper and easier to activate if it wasn't bundled with Office 365? I think that's where aarpmcgee was getting at. In any case, this looks like a much better value proposition than Slack. However, I can test Slack in a second by going to their website. If I want to test MS Teams, I need to think about Office 365, sign up, find where to enable it, etc. Right now signing up for Slack is friction-less.
- douche 10y agoI believe that they are offering the tier of Office 365 that includes this (along with all kinds of other stuff) for less than Slack costs per month.
- brynjolf 10y agoIt takes nearly 2 seconds to switch from Teams to direct messages, that is inexcusable.
- basch 10y agoTeams is a webapp or a 68mb download. All of the other heavy lifting looks like sharepoint online in the background (onenote notebook, shared files.)
- andrewla 10y agoThe cheapest plan for Office 365 that includes this is the $5/user/month, which undercuts Slack's pricing. It also includes a bunch of other stuff that I'm far less excited about; I wish they had gone with a more a la carte approach. I'm not confident that I'll be able to easily integrate this with the identities that I routinely use. Also, it seems like an unwieldy name -- "I'll 'team' that to you", or "let's discuss this on 'team'"? I guess you'll just use "chat" and assume that context conveys the remainder.
- dovdov 10y agoor Microsoft Squanch
- basch 10y agohttps://stratechery.com/2016/oracles-cloudy-future/ https://stratechery.com/2016/oracles-cloudy-future/ >Consider your typical Chief Information Officer in the pre-Cloud era: for various reasons she has bought in to some aspect of the Microsoft stack (likely Exchange). So, in order to support Exchange, the CIO must obviously buy Windows Server. And Windows Server includes Active Directory, so obviously that will be the identity service. However, now that the CIO has parts of the Microsoft stack in place, she is likely to be much more inclined to go with other Microsoft products as well, whether that be SQL Server, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, etc. True, the Microsoft product may not always be the best in a vacuum, but no CIO operates in a vacuum: maintenance and service costs are a huge concern, and there is a lot to be gained by buying from fewer vendors rather than more. In fact, much of Microsoft’s growth over the last 15 years can be traced to Ballmer’s cleverness in exploiting this advantage through both new products and also new pricing and licensing agreements that heavily incentivized Microsoft customers to buy ever more from the company.
- mercer 10y agoI once worked for a very big company that decided to use Microsoft SharePoint to unify all the forms of communication that had developed over the years. They hired a Microsoft consultant to help them out and I was basically her assistant during the entire process. This consultant was pretty expensive. What I remember most is that she acted more like a salesperson than an actual help at getting SharePoint working in the company. She'd relentlessly suggest features or solutions that happened to require a newer version SharePoint, and obviously there were all sorts of other Microsoft solutions that would ease the company's pains. It seems like a very clever approach, but I couldn't help but hate the role she had, and it made me want to avoid Microsoft at all cost... or at least until I'm not the one affected by the decisions she pushed the company towards, I guess.
- ungzd 10y agoI don't understand how chat service can be so intertwined with printer-first applications (Word, Excel).
- garysieling 10y agoA lot of large documents are team efforts, and you'd start with a discussion outside the document before it moves into comments inside.
- ungzd 10y agoSo if company prefers printed documents and bureacracy, why not just talk by telephone or use Microsoft Lync? Why they're trying to combine these dusty office things with hipster web interface?
- garysieling 10y agoIt's not necessarily a question of preference; sometimes your employer may be contractually required to write specific forms of documentation. Excel can also be very effective as a small database - I did some volunteer IT work for a co-op grocery store that runs their entire business operation off spreadsheets.
- Sanddancer 10y agoA lot of projects have multiple documents that need to be discussed. There could be a spreadsheet, a few word documents and a powerpoint presentation being discussed. These things are rarely created in a vacuum, so adding a communication facility that can pull up all these things seamlessly makes sharing and discussing that much easier.
- mhermher 10y agoAre they really printer first? I use excel almost daily and Word almost as much, but I don't even remember the last time I printed an excel or word doc.
- jagermo 10y ago
- snarfy 10y agoIt doesn't scroll new messages, but instead shows a button "New Messages" that you must click or mouse wheel scroll. We tried using Teams last night for release coordination. This misfeature made it practically unusable. It's a seriously dumb feature. I'm still a bit baffled that someone actually designed and developed it, thinking it was a good idea.
- Zikes 10y agoWatching the demo animation on the site it seems to scroll for new messages. Is it only when the application doesn't have focus that it stops scrolling?
- Voloskaya 10y agoI have been using Teams for a few months now, never had this issue.
- desigooner 10y agoThis might be elementary but does "Teams" show up in the App launcher? I enabled Teams from O365 settings this morning but I don't see anything pertaining to accessing the teams product.
- flaviotsf 10y agoI simply had to download the Mac / Windows (https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads) client and things worked. I never found a "web version" of Teams - but it probably exists somewhere. :)
- Voloskaya 10y agoThe web version is located at https://teams.microsoft.com/ https://teams.microsoft.com/, and you just login there.
- jpalmer 10y agoPresumably this works exactly like Skype. All new messages are scrolled but if you manually scroll up to read old messages you'll get a button for "new message" that you must click on to resume. Which makes sense in that you don't want the screen to automatically advance if you are manually scrolling for old messages.
- mtgx 10y agoWhatever happened to Microsoft's billion dollar Yammer acquisition? Has it already been added to the company's write-off fall of fame? Hmm, kind of looks like it, doesn't it? http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-is-killing-yammer-enterprise-in-january-2017-will-start-integrating-office-365-groups-first/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-is-killing-yamme... Is Skype next?
- seren 10y agoThe headline is misleading, it is only that Yammer is not a standalone product anymore but is part of the Office365 suite.
- mxfh 10y agoApparently the whole yammer team was working on this, since it's still not possible to edit and update post on yammer. Which is a pain to write longer posts with.
- overcast 10y agoWHAT was Slack thinking writing this?! http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-teams-new-york-times-ad http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-t... Is this the worst ad in the history of advertising? HUGE publicity for Microsoft, with a schoolboy level of condescending, passive aggressive nonsense. Not sure what they were thinking with this one, especially with an opening line doing nothing but praising their competitor. The confidence(arrogance) is astounding.
- algorithmsRcool 10y agoThat was actually how I found out about Teams to post this. Slack didn't do themselves any favors with that post.
- Touche 10y agoYep, I had never heard of Teams but now am going to consider it for my startup.
- EduardoBautista 10y agoAll Office 365 customers who are on Slack must be seriously considering moving over to Microsoft Teams right now. They are basically letting them know they have an alternative.
- 3pt14159 10y agoThey are copying Apple [1]. It's supposed to demonstrate strength, since most competitors try to pretend that the competition doesn't exist. To me it always came off as really dumb and self-important in the most cringing of ways. [1] http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/jobs-apple-welcome-ibm-seriously-ad.php http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/jobs-apple-welco...
- overcast 10y agoYeh, we know how that turned out for Apple in the 80s/90s :)
- pwthornton 10y ago
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoYammer with a new skin?
- zephyrvinay1985 10y agoNo better slack
- ju-st 10y agoGoogle Wave?
- ohitsdom 10y agoTo the other replies suggesting similar products from different vendors, you're missing the point. Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012 so could have very well used a lot of the same tech under the hood of Teams.
- devy 10y agoI really like the fact that Microsoft stresses the security of this product: Broad compliance standards support Data encryption at all times, at-rest and in-transit Multi-factor authentication for enhanced identity protection The only other thing I think they didn't mention in the feature set that Slack is much better is 3rd party API integrations.
- artursapek 10y agoI've found Slack's API integrations to be mostly used as distractions from work, but that may just speak to the team more so than Slack
- krisdol 10y agoIf you don't find its API integrations useful, then why use slack over just about any other communication software? For us, the API integrations are huge. Slack is our one-stop hub for finding out what's happening throughout the company with integrations for PM tools, Monitoring, Alerting, Deployments, Build Systems, Support Emails, AnswerHub, GitHub, etc. And of course, giphys.
- mahyarm 10y agoIt's general chatroom infrastructure where you don't have to be invited to join a chat room. @heres , good mobile clients and so on are part of the package.
- monkmartinez 10y agoI am guessing here, but outside of "developer teams" how many businesses and people give a crap about 3rd party API integrations? They wouldn't really have a use for them unless someone happened to be a hobby programmer on the side or something. I guess MSFT could create a marketplace for said bots/integrations....
- WorldMaker 10y agoMicrosoft is definitely building a marketplace for bots and integrations.
- dmode 10y agoI won't trust Microsoft to make the Mac version of this product as good as the Window's version. There is a long history of Office development that supports this conclusion. If you use Mac in your workplace, probably best to stay away from MS stack
- vvanders 10y agoI could have thought I saw that it web-based so it should work fine on any platform?
- Analemma_ 10y agoThis isn't a given. Some of Microsoft's newer programs, like Visual Studio Code, run just as well on Macs (and Linux!) as on Windows. Especially when they said it was "web-based", which I assume means the desktop app is (like VSC) using Electron and cross-platform compatibility shouldn't be hard.
- blahi 10y agoHistorical data is not a guarantee for future performance.
- lucozade 10y agoNo but it's often quite a good indicator.
- ccurrens 10y agoFrom what I can tell, it's written in Electron. I assume they did this so that they could share the code base between desktop (win/mac), ios/android/winphone, and web -- keeping the features sets the same on all platforms. VS Code is the same way and that works beautifully on Mac. I expect that same for this. Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft (Azure) but have no relation to Office or Microsoft Teams.
- dmode 10y agoIt is not about the technology platform. You still have to dedicate resources to ensure feature parity across both OS systems. When MS starts selling Teams to huge enterprise customers (e.g., Walmart, Ford, GM etc.) that are on 99% Windows platform and the feature request and pressure starts building, where do you think the resources would go ? It is not MS fault, it is the nature of their business. Windows based enterprises are their bread and butter and that's what they will prioritize. I work for an enterprise Cloud company, and we prioritize IE because of this reason.
- elcct 10y agoGreat, but would I trust Microsoft with my data? I don't think so.
- zephyrvinay1985 10y agobut you would trust slack with your data ? Also Microsoft has on prem version so you don't have to trust anyone
- elcct 10y agoI thought they don't have on prem version. Cool!
- jeffjose 10y agoyour c
- urda 10y agoThen you shouldn't trust Slack either. You're kidding yourself otherwise.
- red_admiral 10y agoI would happily trust microsoft's corporate cloud - and the certification and insurance that presumably comes with it. Even the public-facing OneDrive I'd consider better than many of the alternatives (such as Dropbox) - MS has some pretty good security engineers.
- vthallam 10y agoHaven't tested Teams yet, but very shrewd move by Microsoft. They lead in the productivity suite with Office/Skype/Sharepoint etc in enterprises and a slack competitor which tightly integrates all their services is a wonderful addition. As someone mentioned on this thread, they could have picked a better name "Let me microsoft team it to you" sounds weird.
- slackoverflower 10y ago"Post it on Teams" I don't think people say "I'll slack it to you" either.
- adamsoad 10y agoI sometimes hear: "I'll send it on Slack" which sounds alright to me.
- Corrado 10y agoThe phrasing reminds me of the Zune product: "Let me squirt you a song". That is not a good thing. :/
- ijafri 10y agoMicrosoft is charging $6/month/user for online office/teams/1tb storage/50gb email storage/skypebiz/conference calling Slack $7/month/user just for teams :/// anyhow i hate office so i am gonna stick to gsuite..
- thesimpsons1022 10y agonot trying to insult you or anything but microsoft probably doesn't really care. make most of their money from contracts with companies with thousands of people.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- monkmartinez 10y agoYep, not to mention entire cities and state governments. Also, the entire Military and Military Industrial Complex...
- udkl 10y agoSlack is going to be a crazy $30/person/month when the enterprise version launches next year ! Currently it costs $12.50 per enterprise user per month. https://paypal.slack.com/pricing/slack-for-teams https://paypal.slack.com/pricing/slack-for-teams
- commandar 10y agoAs somebody working in the healthcare industry, this is the killer feature for me: >Q. What level of security and compliance does Microsoft Teams support? >A. Microsoft Teams is expected to be Office 365 Tier C compliant at launch. This broad set of global compliance and data protection requirements includes ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EUMC, SOC 1 Type I & II, SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA and FERPA. Microsoft Teams also enforces two-factor authentication, single sign on through Active Directory and encryption of data in transit and at rest. The last time I'd looked into it, Slack was explicitly not HIPAA-compliant and therefore a non-starter for my team. We've basically had to stick to a combination of Hangouts for general chat and internal email for any HIPAA-covered data, so this would be a big win for us.
- ianai 10y agoAdhering to industry compliance specs definitely opens the possibility of a captive audience.
- brudgers 10y agoOr serving unserved organizations, or both, depending on how one looks at it.
- commandar 10y agoI mean, like I said above, my team would love to be using Slack, but it's legally impossible for us to use in a way that would improve our current workflow. And honestly, that's not just limited to Slack; it's not at all unusual for me to run into slick new technologies and products that I'd love for us to be able to use, but things like "not breaking Federal laws" get in the way. Sometimes it does take an 800lbs gorilla like Microsoft stepping in to get those techs our way because Microsoft's customer base has to worry about that sort of thing.
- brudgers 10y agoFor many organizations, running something like RocketChat inhouse might be an alternative...I mean, how many of Slack's features add most of the value?
- probe 10y agoTwo really unique things I think this product does 1) The use of GIFs/memes. While this seems silly, it is actually a big deal because it lowers the formalization of communication. Having used this product, you just have much better free flowing conversation and many times these "fun" items help you get the message across significantly better (ex. asking for updates or bumping things can now be done in a funny way). 2) Creation of a horizontal matrix. Having tabs is awesome because it makes information more compartmentalized and helps keep the priority the same on each screen. This essentially adds an extra layer of depth into the product without overcomplicating things (and imagine one day having ability to live edit documents on a tab, while chatting and seeing metrics). Keeping a multi-dimensional communication design model is very scalable to mixed reality too. Essentially I see MSFT Teams as "Slack meets Google Hangouts meets Email", and see it doing very well from a product sense. However, their business strategy of bundling with O365 will not help them hit SMB, which is a conscious decision I think they made. I would have actually used Teams as a trojan horse to capture stickiness and then upsell users to O365, but overall still excited to see where this goes.
- robbyking 10y agoFWIW, Slack offers Giphy integration.
- mjrbrennan 10y agoI've used the Giphy integration, and unless I was using it wrong it is horrendous. You can just write /giphy <word> and it will pick a random gif for you, and most of the time they are completely irrelevant.
- boundlessdreamz 10y agoDoes it offer search of past messages?
- ccurrens 10y agoIt seems to, yes. [0] It also looks like you can filter on date, team and channel, attachments, who it's from, messages where you're mentioned. [0] http://imgur.com/DSmXg41 http://imgur.com/DSmXg41
- restapi 10y agoLooks quite good, maybe worth to try it...
- agumonkey 10y agoSomehow reminds me of Google Wave.
- red_admiral 10y agoThis actually looks really good, and considering the security/compliance features I'm seriously thinking of moving from Trello to "plans". It comes close to trello for UI and considering it's available through my organisation it means I can put non-public data in my weekly task lists too.
- softwarefounder 10y ago1) Is this a cloud/online product, or does it require desktop installation? 2) I see it mentioning the a Preview is available, but I can seem to find it on my Office 365 apps panel (I'm a Business Premium account/user).
- Periodic 10y ago1) It's both cloud based and has a desktop app. I believe the demo screenshots I saw were all in the browser though. 2) There was a mention that it wasn't available immediately but should start showing up somewhere in the dashboard around 1:30 EST. You might have to find it somewhere deep in the settings if I remember what someone else showed me. I.e. it's not in the main app grid by default and has to be enabled.
- TorKlingberg 10y agoHow does this relate to Skype for Business (previously Lync)? Is it a update and rebrand of group chat, or something separate?
- basch 10y agoif you start a private chat with a user, and they have never logged into Teams, it sends them a Skype for Business message. So I can be using Teams and they can still be using S4B the team chats are threaded with embedded documents, likes, emojis etc
- Yabood 10y agoWe're a team of five people all remote and in different time zones. We use Slack, and its been great, but we also use Office 365. Teams with its wide integration with all the different MS products is really cool. What I see missing here is mobile apps, and 3rd party integration. Once those are available we'll have no reason to pay the extra $300 a year for Slack.
- mingyeow 10y agowhy office 365 vs google docs?
- Yabood 10y agoThere are many reasons really, but the most important one is that we're a .NET shop, and run our stack on top of Azure. Office 365 integrates well with Azure and everything MS. AD and Exchange management, SSO, MSDN, etc.. It all just works.
- devopsproject 10y agonot op but office365 includes desktop versions of word, excel, outlook, etc and they are faster and have more features.
- enraged_camel 10y agoNot all license types include the desktop apps. Lower-tier licenses are web-only.
- shmed 10y agoPretty sure Web only became totally free a couple years ago. All paid version include desktop version too.
- hisyam 10y agoExcel is still superior to Google Sheets.
- mbesto 10y agoThis is exactly why Slack is not a defensible product. 1) The UI/interaction/UX can (and obviously will) be replicated, which has been slack's biggest value proposition. 2) There's no "stickiness" for companies. None of the data in chat is really a "system of record" and the switching costs are minimal. 3rd party bots/integrations are the only thing that really make it sticky for companies. 3) The IP isn't really all that interesting. Chat based systems have been around since day 1 of the TCP/IP protocol and it's design patterns are pretty well known. In other words, the tech can be replicated. 4) It's not solving a core technology problem for most business without introducing additional problematic externalities. http://www.businessinsider.com/i-used-to-be-obsessed-with-slack-but-now-im-dropping-it-completely-heres-why-2016-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/i-used-to-be-obsessed-with-sl...
- unethical_ban 10y agoWhat do you mean, not defensible? As in, it shouldn't exist, or there's no way it can be profitable long-term? I think it's a great product experience, but as you say, without adding more value, it can be replicated by Zulip/Rocket.Chat/Mattermost/Cisco Spark/Microsoft Team/ you name it.
- vehementi 10y agoThey meant not profitable long term implicitly as it is easily replicatable
- tedunangst 10y agoAs in it doesn't have a moat.
- rhubarbquid 10y ago> None of the data in chat is really a "system of record" and the switching costs are minimal. That's not true where I work. Slack's history is full of valuable information that we use all the time.
- dsp1234 10y ago
- denfromufa 10y agoCan I setup MS Teams without IT Admin?
- sabarn01 10y agodepends on how your tenant is setup
- ebel 10y agohttps://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5055/5405231875_927598741d_z.jpg https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5055/5405231875_927598741d_z.j...
- Tuft88 10y agoand as always in cases like this you see crazy amount of Microsoft vote/comment-shilling. Good job guys!
- nikolay 10y agoThe requirement to have an Office 365 account will not allow it to grow. I understand Microsoft wants people to pay for Office 365 and then for more and more services, but they need to have a free tier so that influencers can try out their solutions, and then the money will come on its own! So, the "new" Microsoft is not really "new" in its marketing strategy. I was unpleasantly surprised that as a developer I cannot use Hyper-V on Windows 10 Home either as the Hypervisor is free with macOS.
- blahi 10y agoGees, I guess they will be constrained to their 60M paying customers and their 1,2B employees. Tough life.
- nikolay 10y agoWell, you oversimplify things, and that's a very typical fallacy. Just like they have a market today, without something to keep people loyal, it can dissolve pretty quickly. Look at Apple! With their arrogance and laziness, they are going down the drain fast. Android runs on 9 out of 10 phones, people are swapping Macs for Surface, and things didn't look like this not so long ago! Arrogance and laziness killed MySpace, too! You always need to flirt with your customers and mostly - with the influencers! Microsoft used this strategy to flirt with developers!
- forgotAgain 10y agoIf they offered it a la carte I would be a lot more interested. Our company is just getting over Microsoft hegemony. I'll never be part of getting back into that by buying Microsoft services that are intertwined.
- sumitgt 10y agoBuying the cheapest SKU of O365 that has Microsoft Teams is actually cheaper than per-person cost for Slack.
- forgotAgain 10y agoFor now it is. If service income is to replace on premise licenses the price will have to go up.
- krisroadruck 10y agoDisagree. People had fairly long upgrade cycles on desktop office before office365. A subscription provides more reliable income.
- forgotAgain 10y agoMost of Microsoft's income comes from businesses. They already use a subscription service called Software Assurance. That's the income they will need to replace.
- slackoverflower 10y agoWhether or not Slack has the better product or not, Microsoft will blow past them in terms of paying customers. Slack has 1.25 million paying customers as of now. Microsoft announced it signed a 400,000-employee comppany on launch day. They can easily sign Coca Cola, Macy's, McDonalds and Unilever in a matter of months, which could bring them at most 10 million paying customers. Microsoft has the power of existing customers to connect to. This is very much the Snapchat vs. Instagram Stories situation but for team communication.
- brazzledazzle 10y agoThe point might be moot but there is a difference between enterprise licenses and active users. In some big multinational business a subscription with a service like Office 365 signed and paid for at the parent corp level often means dick. Services like this are sometimes a negotiable value add so it may not even be on the radar in terms of implementation for the parent corp. Even when it is many child companies/divisions have a lot of latitude to choose how they collaborate because the bureaucratic corp IT groups are often unaligned with the child companies and focus on cost cutting. Ultimately they are inherently focused on providing a least common denominator solution which often ends up sucking equally for everyone. To put it another way, look at something like SharePoint. Microsoft will happily tell you it has a ton of users. They might tell you that it's quite profitable. But SharePoint is a just a terrible piece of shit that everyone hates but IT departments drag everyone to it kicking and screaming. So subscriptions will get purchased, contracts signed. Microsoft will make money. But will they take mindshare? Maybe Slack won't be able to differentiate enough. Time will tell but today employees actually want Slack.
- kyaghmour 10y agoI saw a few comparisons to Slack and Google Wave. But, seriously, this is likely more like Microsoft Groove (originally from Groove Networks) brought to the web. This idea has been around for a very long time.
- dfar1 10y ago+1 for adding another great option. The more options the better... -1 for no shame when coping the design.
- orware 10y agoSince this was harder than you expect it to find on the main announcement page...the page you want to go to in order to actually access teams is here: https://teams.microsoft.com/ https://teams.microsoft.com/ And the app downloads page is here: https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads I'm getting an error on my end though after following their activation steps so I need to figure out why it's doing that. (Shows me "errorCode=AdminUserLicenseNotPresent" so maybe there's an extra step I have to complete that wasn't mentioned)
- sumitgt 10y agoMaybe you have to get your enterprise admin to enable it?
- orware 10y agoI am the Enterprise Admin...that's what I'm confused about, since I already went through their simple 3 steps to get started video which was essentially just flipping a switch in the Office 365 Admin area. I expected it to work right away, but then couldn't see where the actual main page for Teams was, so I kept on looking and eventually found it, but even so, it didn't seem to allow me to login yet...right now I'm chalking it up to them not being fully ready for everyone to use it.
- Kratisto 10y agoEver figure this out? I did the same thing today! I enabled it, and both the app/browser version say I need to enable it. Already did, but maybe it just takes a little while.
- orware 10y agoHi Kratisto...yup I did. It appears that Teams isn't actually for our type of organization yet (since we're an EDU organization using Office 365...seems like it won't be available to us until early next year so we'll have to wait until then from the responses I received back from our Microsoft sales people over at Computer Land).
- asidiali 10y agoHIPAA compliance...nice, just killed all the "secure email/chat for healthcare" startups out there, since this is coming from the makers of Outlook/Office/every enterprise machines' OS. Wonder how long until Slack upgrades their compliance.
- hhsnopek 10y agoCreative name for a slack clone...
- frik 10y agoWill it come to on-premise SharePoint 2016 (or later) too? Or is this just a cloud-only service?
- fuzzy2 10y agoSo I just tried the desktop app and it’s terrible. Fuzzy fonts almost everywhere, feels sluggish. It keeps nagging about the mobile apps. And then it popped up randomly over an hour after closing it, happily informing me that I got the latest updates. Thank you, but no. The web app refuses to work with anything but the very latest browsers. Why? Probably no reason at all. It also doesn’t work in IE, which is kind of sad. It also consumes humongous amounts of memory, as does the desktop app. The avatars, blurry too, of course, are embedded as Base64 Data URIs. Why? All in all this is yet another collaboration tool from Microsoft. It feels very rushed.
- muad 10y agoSlack Killer. I have been saying for a while that Slack is not a defensible product and that their customer base is notoriously fickle. As microsoft, google, and apple begin integrating chat more directly into the OS Slack will see its market share vanish.