4 ms·

Sounds like a typical corporate move by Microsoft. I side with slack on this one in that Microsoft is using its position with Office as a dominant productivity

Sounds like a typical corporate move by Microsoft. I side with slack on this one in that Microsoft is using its position with Office as a dominant productivity tool and wedging their Teams product in there. Vox had an article about it a year ago: https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government-antitrust-investigation-apple-amazon-google-facebook https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government... It's the long game they can play because they have the resources for it. If they bankrupt slack by offering an alternative that's free and almost at feature parity, then it's an easy win for them to absorb the short term running costs of their own chat product Teams.

k__ 6y ago
Is this as big of a problem as with IE6 back in the days? I haven't been using MSO for years now and most companies I work with use Google Docs.
- lou1306 6y ago
  I don't think so. IE6 was bundled with Windows, a software that came bundled with nearly every retail PC and that was basically essential for said PC to be used (in the eyes of the layman, at least). Teams is bundled with Office, which is neither bundled by so many hardware vendors, nor essential for operating a PC, nor free of competitors.
minhazm 6y ago
What about Microsoft bundling OneDrive? Or One Note? Should they be forced to remove those too? I don't understand how Microsoft is in the wrong here. This isn't like them bundling it into Windows. O365 is a paid product and users are specifically paying for a productivity bundle, where Teams makes perfect sense as a product. They previously bundled Skype here IIRC, which was also a chatting app, they just replaced it with Teams. If you want to argue that Teams ripped off of Slack, I won't disagree with you there. But Slack was just an evolution of IRC + plugins also. So it isn't a novel idea that they came up with, it was just well executed. I don't even like Teams, I much prefer using Slack. But Microsoft having a productivity suite where they're offering a productivity app seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Google is doing the same thing with Google Meet/Chat, it's going to get bundled in Google Apps for Business.
- tedk-42 6y ago
  I don't mind products competing against each other and copying features from each other. But to make a clone of a product, and slip it into your existing offering which is very popular amongst the general populous is an anti-competitive practice. Microsoft consistently walk a fine line with this sort of crap. Whenever I update my PC, I DO NOT want to know about the new features of Edge and then be prompted to replace my default browser with it. Firefox, Chrome and other browsers don't charge for their product but Slack does. It's this sort of thing that in which Microsoft need an occasional slap in the face for.

k__ 6y ago

Is this as big of a problem as with IE6 back in the days? I haven't been using MSO for years now and most companies I work with use Google Docs.

lou1306 6y ago
I don't think so. IE6 was bundled with Windows, a software that came bundled with nearly every retail PC and that was basically essential for said PC to be used (in the eyes of the layman, at least). Teams is bundled with Office, which is neither bundled by so many hardware vendors, nor essential for operating a PC, nor free of competitors.

minhazm 6y ago

What about Microsoft bundling OneDrive? Or One Note? Should they be forced to remove those too? I don't understand how Microsoft is in the wrong here. This isn't like them bundling it into Windows. O365 is a paid product and users are specifically paying for a productivity bundle, where Teams makes perfect sense as a product. They previously bundled Skype here IIRC, which was also a chatting app, they just replaced it with Teams. If you want to argue that Teams ripped off of Slack, I won't disagree with you there. But Slack was just an evolution of IRC + plugins also. So it isn't a novel idea that they came up with, it was just well executed. I don't even like Teams, I much prefer using Slack. But Microsoft having a productivity suite where they're offering a productivity app seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Google is doing the same thing with Google Meet/Chat, it's going to get bundled in Google Apps for Business.

tedk-42 6y ago
I don't mind products competing against each other and copying features from each other. But to make a clone of a product, and slip it into your existing offering which is very popular amongst the general populous is an anti-competitive practice. Microsoft consistently walk a fine line with this sort of crap. Whenever I update my PC, I DO NOT want to know about the new features of Edge and then be prompted to replace my default browser with it. Firefox, Chrome and other browsers don't charge for their product but Slack does. It's this sort of thing that in which Microsoft need an occasional slap in the face for.