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In other words, does a16z ask for startups to attack MS on their home turf? There can be a niche for the product creation stage. But how does a company scale i
by randomsilence 5y ago
In other words, does a16z ask for startups to attack MS on their home turf?
There can be a niche for the product creation stage. But how does a company scale in MS's market? Sooner or later, it's a Slack vs MS Teams situation.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoTo be fair, slack kinda messed up themselves. I am still astonished that they never built video calling. Like MS did use their existing sales channels to stop slack growing, but if slack at least had feature parity with Teams then it would have been a harder sell.
- nightpool 5y agoSlack launched video calling in 2016. You can say whatever you want about their UX or ease of use, but you can't say they never built it.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoHuh? That kinda proves my point though, as I've never seen or hear anyone using it. It just boggles the mind, but fair enough seems like a marketing failure rather than a technology one.
- WorldMaker 5y agoMicrosoft also tried to M&A Slack before building Teams. As far as exits go, Slack may go down in history as a particularly not-smart one: they were allegedly quite rude in refusing the M&A offer for what might have been a "golden" exit, encouraging Microsoft to build a competitor in a hustle, and then their later exit to Salesforce was a lot less "golden" and at a lesser valuation due in part to the competitor they helped create through their alleged rudeness. (ETA: Of course, easy to spin things the other direction and read Microsoft's offer as a bully move "join us or we'll build a better you without you". The reality is somewhere in the middle of the two extreme perspectives.)