19 ms·

How Microsoft crushed Slack

135 points by atarian 6y ago

cratermoon 6y ago
Ah, the sleeping monopoly wakes. Github, Slack, Azure. What next?
- acwan93 6y 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 6y 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.
    - cratermoon 6y ago
      > something that beats Confluence and Jira Which is a pretty low bar, if you ask me. The fact that Sharepoint doesn't clear that bar says a lot about how bad it is.
      - wj 6y ago
        So on point. Sharepoint is awful. Confluence is the worst except for all other knowledge base software. I guess this space is so boring that we aren't seeing any exciting startups tackling it and giving the incumbants reason to innovate.
    - munchbunny 6y ago
      They already have both Azure Devops and GitHub converging on Confluence and Jira (and BitBucket) from different directions. Azure Devops also has Teams integrations.
  - Closey 6y ago
    Well Microsoft’s Trello is just Planner / Tasks, so they are already playing on the field.
  - cratermoon 6y ago
    Nope, I'm completely serious. What about Microsoft Planner? Supposedly it integrates with Teams and Azure.
- tiew9Vii 6y 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 6y ago
    I love how you wrote this list and didn’t even include LinkedIn. They are very well positioned indeed :)
  - waynesonfire 6y ago
    ding ding... did you too buy some MSFT stock?
  - ohthehugemanate 6y 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 6y 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).
  - judge2020 6y ago
    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/10/28/microsoft-teams-reaches-115-million-dau-plus-a-new-daily-collaboration-minutes-metric-for-microsoft-365/ 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.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  Microsoft didn’t buy Slack. Salesforce did.
mewpmewp2 6y 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 6y ago
  Alternatively all the companies i know of use Teams. These are huge corporations that already have tons of MS.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- augustocallejas 6y 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 6y ago
    Teams got autoinstalled onto my 8 year old Windows 8 desktop.
  - Jakobeha 6y 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
georgeplusplus 6y 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_ 6y 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 6y 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-protection https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/business/data-...
the_arun 6y ago
All we need is a similar tool from Google :)
- mbakke 6y ago
  We had one, but it was discontinued back in... 2010! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
  - htrp 6y ago
    just wait for Google to revive And re-launch Wave
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  They’ve got an alternative. Its called Chat. It’s not the same though. More focused on threaded conversations.
  - deathanatos 6y ago
    > It's not the same though. It's not even remotely in the same league as Slack.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hawski 6y ago
  Google would gain 100 mln users and then they would shut it down or replace with something half baked.
908B64B197 6y 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 https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft#.os9n0emzt
singhrac 6y 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_ 6y 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?
  - TheOperator 6y 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.
stevefan1999 6y 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.
- DedlySnek 6y 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 6y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/03/02/why-did-microsoft-create-c/?sh=45ec38d70f30 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/03/02/why-did-micros...
    - DedlySnek 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing that.
romanoderoma 6y 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.
- judge2020 6y 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 6y ago
  Curious, what was lacking with your experience of Slack on Linux? I haven't experienced any issues at all.
  - romanoderoma 6y 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.
AzzieElbab 6y 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
- TheOperator 6y 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.
- gumby 6y 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.
  - AzzieElbab 6y ago
    But I have seen no evidence of such promises by ms. Everything seem to be build on assumptions
    - gumby 6y ago
      That was my point in saying, “[buyer at big enterprises must] either find a solution or get air cover for your decision by offloading it on your long term, trusted vendor.” In other words: “We need offline storage in case something goes wrong. But nobody offers it. Well I’ll stick with ms because at least if someone complains I can point to the company we’ve always chosen” This is why Oracle still does so well. Don’t get me wrong: they have some high end features few others offer. But many people could do fine with something simpler, but why take a chance? When the trade off is “get something better for the company” versus “risk losing my job” which are you going to choose?
mantap 6y 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.
AtlasBarfed 6y 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 6y 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"....
  - userbinator 6y 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.
    - sofixa 6y ago
      > 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 another one for macOS, and another one for Linux distros. Teams would have never become as popular if it was Windows-only, and doing frontend code 3 times for some slight advantages in speed and resource utilisation is textbook waste of money.
      - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
        The recurring tragedy of UI toolkits... The fact we have a near-universal UI language (HTML/CSS) and a basic scripting language (JS) that we can't use as an intermediate language for compilation to native UI is a tragedy. And I'm not talking about every nook and corner of JS and HTML and CSS. It's even more ridiculous that MS didn't use their HTML5 + JS framework they made for Windows 8/10. But the Office team is almost completely independent from Windows politically since they make so much money.
lovetocode 6y 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 6y 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.
  - lovetocode 6y ago
    I know you are being sarcastic but the entire US Iraq and Afghanistan wars were being operated out of mIRC chat.
- pkaye 6y 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 6y 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.
scarface74 6y 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/welcome%20ibm_51944.png https://www.incimages.com/uploaded_files/inlineimage/630x0/w... https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-the-release-of-windows-95-twenty-years-ago-today/ https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-the-...
ykevinator 6y ago
Teams and slack are both bad for Ubuntu users. Chat peaked with hipchat
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
it's easy when you have a monopoly
nemothekid 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
pkamb 6y 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/suggestions/16941685-use-built-in-notifications-for-macos https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
- guidedlight 6y 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.
  - Nextgrid 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
    - tatersolid 6y ago
      Multi-party video conferencing is way more complicated than anything VS Code does.
- oneeyedpigeon 6y 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.
  - 6y ago
mike503 6y 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.
- Lutger 6y 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 6y 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.
aejnsn 6y 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.
- foepys 6y 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 6y 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.
    - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
      As someone who's used both this year - Teams with one company, Slack with two - I feel like Teams is the 'meeting' product and Slack the 'chat' one. I think both products have flaws, but Slack is far easier to understand and use.
  - Lutger 6y 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.
peteretep 6y 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 6y 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.
- Nextgrid 6y 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 6y 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/ 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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-time-collaboration-for-teams/ http://blog.flowdock.com/2009/07/05/announcing-flowdock-real...
66fm472tjy7 6y ago
The main reason we switched to Teams (besides the bundling) is that Slack calls are limited to 15 participants.
fossuser 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
- Nextgrid 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
tannhaeuser 6y 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 6y 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.
  - tannhaeuser 6y 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 6y 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.
golemiprague 6y ago
I like Teams because it is crap comparing to Slack so people use it less so there is less noise so I can do my job.
scitechx35 6y 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.
- oblio 6y 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 6y ago
    I read some people expand slack as "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge"
- thu2111 6y 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.
globular-toast 6y 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 6y ago
It's almost 2021 and Slack still can't syntax highlight code blocks.
- Nextgrid 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
How MS crushed Slack. The same way they crushed Netscape. By exploiting their dominant position to eliminate their competitors.
- sylvainr65 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
Lol would we say crushed?
aldanor 6y 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.

135 points by atarian 6y ago

cratermoon 6y ago

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

acwan93 6y 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 6y 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.
  - cratermoon 6y ago
    > something that beats Confluence and Jira Which is a pretty low bar, if you ask me. The fact that Sharepoint doesn't clear that bar says a lot about how bad it is.
    - wj 6y ago
      So on point. Sharepoint is awful. Confluence is the worst except for all other knowledge base software. I guess this space is so boring that we aren't seeing any exciting startups tackling it and giving the incumbants reason to innovate.
  - munchbunny 6y ago
    They already have both Azure Devops and GitHub converging on Confluence and Jira (and BitBucket) from different directions. Azure Devops also has Teams integrations.
- Closey 6y ago
  Well Microsoft’s Trello is just Planner / Tasks, so they are already playing on the field.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  Nope, I'm completely serious. What about Microsoft Planner? Supposedly it integrates with Teams and Azure.
tiew9Vii 6y 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 6y ago
  I love how you wrote this list and didn’t even include LinkedIn. They are very well positioned indeed :)
- waynesonfire 6y ago
  ding ding... did you too buy some MSFT stock?
- ohthehugemanate 6y 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 6y 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).
- judge2020 6y ago
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/10/28/microsoft-teams-reaches-115-million-dau-plus-a-new-daily-collaboration-minutes-metric-for-microsoft-365/ 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.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
Microsoft didn’t buy Slack. Salesforce did.

mewpmewp2 6y 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 6y ago
Alternatively all the companies i know of use Teams. These are huge corporations that already have tons of MS.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
augustocallejas 6y 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 6y ago
  Teams got autoinstalled onto my 8 year old Windows 8 desktop.
- Jakobeha 6y 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

georgeplusplus 6y 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_ 6y 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 6y 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-protection https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/business/data-...

the_arun 6y ago

All we need is a similar tool from Google :)

mbakke 6y ago
We had one, but it was discontinued back in... 2010! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
- htrp 6y ago
  just wait for Google to revive And re-launch Wave
ViViDboarder 6y ago
They’ve got an alternative. Its called Chat. It’s not the same though. More focused on threaded conversations.
- deathanatos 6y ago
  > It's not the same though. It's not even remotely in the same league as Slack.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hawski 6y ago
Google would gain 100 mln users and then they would shut it down or replace with something half baked.

908B64B197 6y 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 https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft#.os9n0emzt

singhrac 6y 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_ 6y 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?
- TheOperator 6y 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.

stevefan1999 6y 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.

DedlySnek 6y 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 6y ago
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/03/02/why-did-microsoft-create-c/?sh=45ec38d70f30 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/03/02/why-did-micros...
  - DedlySnek 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing that.

romanoderoma 6y 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.

judge2020 6y 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 6y ago
Curious, what was lacking with your experience of Slack on Linux? I haven't experienced any issues at all.
- romanoderoma 6y 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.

AzzieElbab 6y 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

TheOperator 6y 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.
gumby 6y 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.
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  But I have seen no evidence of such promises by ms. Everything seem to be build on assumptions
  - gumby 6y ago
    That was my point in saying, “[buyer at big enterprises must] either find a solution or get air cover for your decision by offloading it on your long term, trusted vendor.” In other words: “We need offline storage in case something goes wrong. But nobody offers it. Well I’ll stick with ms because at least if someone complains I can point to the company we’ve always chosen” This is why Oracle still does so well. Don’t get me wrong: they have some high end features few others offer. But many people could do fine with something simpler, but why take a chance? When the trade off is “get something better for the company” versus “risk losing my job” which are you going to choose?

mantap 6y 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.

AtlasBarfed 6y 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 6y 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"....
- userbinator 6y 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.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    > 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 another one for macOS, and another one for Linux distros. Teams would have never become as popular if it was Windows-only, and doing frontend code 3 times for some slight advantages in speed and resource utilisation is textbook waste of money.
    - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
      The recurring tragedy of UI toolkits... The fact we have a near-universal UI language (HTML/CSS) and a basic scripting language (JS) that we can't use as an intermediate language for compilation to native UI is a tragedy. And I'm not talking about every nook and corner of JS and HTML and CSS. It's even more ridiculous that MS didn't use their HTML5 + JS framework they made for Windows 8/10. But the Office team is almost completely independent from Windows politically since they make so much money.

lovetocode 6y 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 6y 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.
- lovetocode 6y ago
  I know you are being sarcastic but the entire US Iraq and Afghanistan wars were being operated out of mIRC chat.
pkaye 6y 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 6y 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.

scarface74 6y 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/welcome%20ibm_51944.png https://www.incimages.com/uploaded_files/inlineimage/630x0/w... https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-the-release-of-windows-95-twenty-years-ago-today/ https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-the-...

ykevinator 6y ago

Teams and slack are both bad for Ubuntu users. Chat peaked with hipchat

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

it's easy when you have a monopoly

nemothekid 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

pkamb 6y 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/suggestions/16941685-use-built-in-notifications-for-macos https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

guidedlight 6y 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.
- Nextgrid 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
  - tatersolid 6y ago
    Multi-party video conferencing is way more complicated than anything VS Code does.
oneeyedpigeon 6y 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.
- 6y ago

mike503 6y 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.

Lutger 6y 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 6y 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.

aejnsn 6y 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.

foepys 6y 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 6y 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.
  - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
    As someone who's used both this year - Teams with one company, Slack with two - I feel like Teams is the 'meeting' product and Slack the 'chat' one. I think both products have flaws, but Slack is far easier to understand and use.
- Lutger 6y 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.

peteretep 6y 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 6y 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.

Nextgrid 6y 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 6y 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/ 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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-time-collaboration-for-teams/ http://blog.flowdock.com/2009/07/05/announcing-flowdock-real...

66fm472tjy7 6y ago

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

fossuser 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

Nextgrid 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

tannhaeuser 6y 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 6y 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.
- tannhaeuser 6y 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 6y 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.

golemiprague 6y ago

I like Teams because it is crap comparing to Slack so people use it less so there is less noise so I can do my job.

scitechx35 6y 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.

oblio 6y 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 6y ago
  I read some people expand slack as "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge"
thu2111 6y 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.

globular-toast 6y 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 6y ago

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

Nextgrid 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago

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

sylvainr65 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago

Lol would we say crushed?

aldanor 6y 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.