5 ms·

Slack says Microsoft is back up to old bad tricks, “browser war” style

45 points by smcleod 6y ago

alexfromapex 6y ago
Microsoft has been doing this for decades in a lot of different tech markets. They are anticompetitive and it’s super annoying for users.
- nikolay 6y ago
  Didn't Google just did the same thing by bundling Zoom, Slack, and more into Gmail?
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Except that Gmail is not the de-facto corporate e-mail client.
    - nikolay 6y ago
      I am talking about their enterprisey G Suite... which doesn't even have a sane implementation of a shared inbox... unlike Outlook!
      - ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
        Shared inboxes are a security (and thus accountability) nightmare. I support anything which helps eliminate them.
        nikolay 6y ago
        Quite the opposite. The way thing are done in G Suite (via Groups) is the worst. In Office 365, you don't get a copy of each email.
greenyoda 6y ago
Extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23916729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23916729
- smcleod 6y ago
  Oh thank you, sorry I didn't realise a similar story had been posted previously.
kennywinker 6y ago
> Slack alleges that the way Microsoft bundles Teams into its distribution of Office—widely used enterprise software such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—gives Microsoft an unfair advantage against the competition. I'm _all_ for antitrust, but this seems like a dumb complaint to me. Shipping IE with Windows gave them a dominance in the browser world of something like 80-90% maybe more? It was a lot. And they were using it to slowly bring a non-proprietary technology (the web) in-house by breaking compatibility with non-IE browsers. This situation seems more like saying if you make a printer and a fax machine you can't combine the two into a single product because it provides an anticompetitive advantage against companies that only sell a fax machine. Maybe that is an anti-trust issue, that's up to your viewpoint, but it's not like slack isn't doing the same thing with shipping video and audio chat built into slack. Zoom might very well argue that it's anti-competitive of slack to do that.
- Shared404 6y ago
  This is exactly what I thought. I'm all for m$ getting hit with whatever legislation is related, but this isn't it.
- toper-centage 6y ago
  It's definitely not as serious as Windows+IE back in the day, but MS Office is the defacto office suite. MS managed to make a proprietary standard The Standard and constantly break compatibility with other suites. And now they are extending that dominance to the conference software world with Teams. It's a fair parallel to draw, IMO.
- kedean 6y ago
  My interpretation was that the issue is the use of Microsoft Office's dominant position to (allegedly) push Slack out of the market. They aren't providing one product that does two things (fax/phone), but rather they are providing multiple disparate products in a package together to take advantage of the fact that everyone wants one of them already. I think a better comparison is if Verizon were to decide they want to make a smart watch, so they start bundling them with every cell phone they sell. Sure, users can go out and buy a Fitbit if they want to, but Verizon would be taking advantage of their position as cell phone gatekeeper to get them into everyone's hands before they even have the chance to make a market decision. Users could come into a contract with a phone they got independently (analogous to windows users who don't use MSOffice), but the vast majority are just buying a phone from the Verizon store. Admittedly, the analogy would work better if Verizon was more dominant in the market, but as it stands the big three US cell providers seem to be on pretty equal footing.
0xy 6y ago
Slack is floundering and profoundly embarrassed after mocking Microsoft publicly with a full NYT ad [1]. Slack has barely changed for 4 years meanwhile Teams has unprecedented deep integrations with business tools. Competing is not taking two years to release a single feature (shared channels), Slack. The company is stagnating, and this is senior leadership responding by trying to wield the power of the government against a competitor. Slack went from (literally) "we'll be right there ready [for your competition]" to salty lawsuits and sour grapes. This is pathetic. Compete or die. [1] https://www.geekwire.com/2016/full-text-slack-offers-friendly-advice-microsoft-full-page-new-york-times-ad/ https://www.geekwire.com/2016/full-text-slack-offers-friendl...
- rckoepke 6y ago
  I largely agree with Slack failing to innovate on the user experience side and continue to deliver new value to customers. I give them the benefit of the doubt that they've been doing lots of innovation on the backend that I can't see. In my heart I feel that as long as Teams remains at least a half-decent product it will be very difficult for anyone else to compete in this space as long as MS bundles Teams with Office. Office absolutely is a monopoly -- pretty much any new software that's bundled with it is going to eat everyone's lunch. Doesn't matter if that's Teams or a Spotify clone ("Music for Office") or an HR suite. This rule feels valid to me for any general purpose software that's used in nearly any business. I don't think it holds up for specific domain software: VSCode doesn't eat IntelliJ's lunch, and a half-decent Photoshop clone included with Office365 wouldn't kill Photoshop. It also doesn't hold for other free software (Edge can't eat Chrome because Chrome is also $0 so they only compete on utility, not price). If it ends up there's no future competition for Teams, that's not going to be a good thing for consumers / citizens at large. It's definitely in the interests of the public to ensure that there's a healthy market for competition. Part of making sure things are good for consumers / citizens is also making sure there can be tight integration. If Slack can make a client that integrates Teams and Slack channels into one frontend, and integrates with Outlook/Exchange/Calendar as well as Teams does, and allows users to hop on Zoom calls, that would be amazing. I'm currently a strong proponent for opening up API's in software so that new companies can add value on top of existing services, rather than having to build all of Rome from scratch just to develop the Colosseum.
nikolay 6y ago
What?! Didn't Microsoft had Yammer way before Slack was born?
- smcleod 6y ago
  They purchased Yammer and progressively made it a slower, added bugs, continued to degrade the UI/UX and messed up the authentication system, it became a dumpster fire.
  - nikolay 6y ago
    True, my point is that Slack robbed Yammer and now they complain that Microsoft robbed them back.
    - smcleod 6y ago
      Slack is a chat application, Yammer was a Facebook clone for businesses.
      - nikolay 6y ago
        A chat application? :) No, Slack is an email replacement, just like Yammer was/is.
        smcleod 6y ago
        Interesting you see it that way, across the companies and consultancies I've worked with it would only be a replacement for maybe 20% of emails, it's just replaced whatever chat systems were previously in place (IRC/Jabber/Skype etc...)
        nikolay 6y ago
        That's even how Slack advertises their own service.

45 points by smcleod 6y ago

Microsoft has been doing this for decades in a lot of different tech markets. They are anticompetitive and it’s super annoying for users.

nikolay 6y ago
Didn't Google just did the same thing by bundling Zoom, Slack, and more into Gmail?
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Except that Gmail is not the de-facto corporate e-mail client.
  - nikolay 6y ago
    I am talking about their enterprisey G Suite... which doesn't even have a sane implementation of a shared inbox... unlike Outlook!
    - ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
      Shared inboxes are a security (and thus accountability) nightmare. I support anything which helps eliminate them.
      - nikolay 6y ago
        Quite the opposite. The way thing are done in G Suite (via Groups) is the worst. In Office 365, you don't get a copy of each email.

greenyoda 6y ago

Extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23916729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23916729

smcleod 6y ago
Oh thank you, sorry I didn't realise a similar story had been posted previously.

kennywinker 6y ago

> Slack alleges that the way Microsoft bundles Teams into its distribution of Office—widely used enterprise software such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—gives Microsoft an unfair advantage against the competition. I'm _all_ for antitrust, but this seems like a dumb complaint to me. Shipping IE with Windows gave them a dominance in the browser world of something like 80-90% maybe more? It was a lot. And they were using it to slowly bring a non-proprietary technology (the web) in-house by breaking compatibility with non-IE browsers. This situation seems more like saying if you make a printer and a fax machine you can't combine the two into a single product because it provides an anticompetitive advantage against companies that only sell a fax machine. Maybe that is an anti-trust issue, that's up to your viewpoint, but it's not like slack isn't doing the same thing with shipping video and audio chat built into slack. Zoom might very well argue that it's anti-competitive of slack to do that.

Shared404 6y ago
This is exactly what I thought. I'm all for m$ getting hit with whatever legislation is related, but this isn't it.
toper-centage 6y ago
It's definitely not as serious as Windows+IE back in the day, but MS Office is the defacto office suite. MS managed to make a proprietary standard The Standard and constantly break compatibility with other suites. And now they are extending that dominance to the conference software world with Teams. It's a fair parallel to draw, IMO.
kedean 6y ago
My interpretation was that the issue is the use of Microsoft Office's dominant position to (allegedly) push Slack out of the market. They aren't providing one product that does two things (fax/phone), but rather they are providing multiple disparate products in a package together to take advantage of the fact that everyone wants one of them already. I think a better comparison is if Verizon were to decide they want to make a smart watch, so they start bundling them with every cell phone they sell. Sure, users can go out and buy a Fitbit if they want to, but Verizon would be taking advantage of their position as cell phone gatekeeper to get them into everyone's hands before they even have the chance to make a market decision. Users could come into a contract with a phone they got independently (analogous to windows users who don't use MSOffice), but the vast majority are just buying a phone from the Verizon store. Admittedly, the analogy would work better if Verizon was more dominant in the market, but as it stands the big three US cell providers seem to be on pretty equal footing.

0xy 6y ago

Slack is floundering and profoundly embarrassed after mocking Microsoft publicly with a full NYT ad [1]. Slack has barely changed for 4 years meanwhile Teams has unprecedented deep integrations with business tools. Competing is not taking two years to release a single feature (shared channels), Slack. The company is stagnating, and this is senior leadership responding by trying to wield the power of the government against a competitor. Slack went from (literally) "we'll be right there ready [for your competition]" to salty lawsuits and sour grapes. This is pathetic. Compete or die. [1] https://www.geekwire.com/2016/full-text-slack-offers-friendly-advice-microsoft-full-page-new-york-times-ad/ https://www.geekwire.com/2016/full-text-slack-offers-friendl...

rckoepke 6y ago
I largely agree with Slack failing to innovate on the user experience side and continue to deliver new value to customers. I give them the benefit of the doubt that they've been doing lots of innovation on the backend that I can't see. In my heart I feel that as long as Teams remains at least a half-decent product it will be very difficult for anyone else to compete in this space as long as MS bundles Teams with Office. Office absolutely is a monopoly -- pretty much any new software that's bundled with it is going to eat everyone's lunch. Doesn't matter if that's Teams or a Spotify clone ("Music for Office") or an HR suite. This rule feels valid to me for any general purpose software that's used in nearly any business. I don't think it holds up for specific domain software: VSCode doesn't eat IntelliJ's lunch, and a half-decent Photoshop clone included with Office365 wouldn't kill Photoshop. It also doesn't hold for other free software (Edge can't eat Chrome because Chrome is also $0 so they only compete on utility, not price). If it ends up there's no future competition for Teams, that's not going to be a good thing for consumers / citizens at large. It's definitely in the interests of the public to ensure that there's a healthy market for competition. Part of making sure things are good for consumers / citizens is also making sure there can be tight integration. If Slack can make a client that integrates Teams and Slack channels into one frontend, and integrates with Outlook/Exchange/Calendar as well as Teams does, and allows users to hop on Zoom calls, that would be amazing. I'm currently a strong proponent for opening up API's in software so that new companies can add value on top of existing services, rather than having to build all of Rome from scratch just to develop the Colosseum.

nikolay 6y ago

What?! Didn't Microsoft had Yammer way before Slack was born?

smcleod 6y ago
They purchased Yammer and progressively made it a slower, added bugs, continued to degrade the UI/UX and messed up the authentication system, it became a dumpster fire.
- nikolay 6y ago
  True, my point is that Slack robbed Yammer and now they complain that Microsoft robbed them back.
  - smcleod 6y ago
    Slack is a chat application, Yammer was a Facebook clone for businesses.
    - nikolay 6y ago
      A chat application? :) No, Slack is an email replacement, just like Yammer was/is.
      - smcleod 6y ago
        Interesting you see it that way, across the companies and consultancies I've worked with it would only be a replacement for maybe 20% of emails, it's just replaced whatever chat systems were previously in place (IRC/Jabber/Skype etc...)
        nikolay 6y ago
        That's even how Slack advertises their own service.