
Slack says Microsoft is back up to old bad tricks, “browser war” style - smcleod
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/microsoft-is-back-up-to-antitrust-mischief-after-20-years-slack-claims/
======
kennywinker
> Slack alleges that the way Microsoft bundles Teams into its distribution of
> Office—widely used enterprise software such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint,
> and Excel—gives Microsoft an unfair advantage against the competition.

I'm _all_ for antitrust, but this seems like a dumb complaint to me. Shipping
IE with Windows gave them a dominance in the browser world of something like
80-90% maybe more? It was a lot. And they were using it to slowly bring a non-
proprietary technology (the web) in-house by breaking compatibility with non-
IE browsers.

This situation seems more like saying if you make a printer and a fax machine
you can't combine the two into a single product because it provides an
anticompetitive advantage against companies that only sell a fax machine.

Maybe that _is_ an anti-trust issue, that's up to your viewpoint, but it's not
like slack isn't doing the same thing with shipping video and audio chat built
into slack. Zoom might very well argue that it's anti-competitive of slack to
do that.

~~~
toper-centage
It's definitely not as serious as Windows+IE back in the day, but MS Office is
the defacto office suite. MS managed to make a proprietary standard The
Standard and constantly break compatibility with other suites. And now they
are extending that dominance to the conference software world with Teams. It's
a fair parallel to draw, IMO.

------
0xy
Slack is floundering and profoundly embarrassed after mocking Microsoft
publicly with a full NYT ad [1].

Slack has barely changed for 4 years meanwhile Teams has unprecedented deep
integrations with business tools.

Competing is not taking __two years __to release a single feature (shared
channels), Slack.

The company is stagnating, and this is senior leadership responding by trying
to wield the power of the government against a competitor.

Slack went from (literally) "we'll be right there ready [for your
competition]" to salty lawsuits and sour grapes.

This is pathetic. Compete or die.

[1] [https://www.geekwire.com/2016/full-text-slack-offers-
friendl...](https://www.geekwire.com/2016/full-text-slack-offers-friendly-
advice-microsoft-full-page-new-york-times-ad/)

~~~
rckoepke
I largely agree with Slack failing to innovate on the user experience side and
continue to deliver new value to customers. I give them the benefit of the
doubt that they've been doing lots of innovation on the backend that I can't
see.

In my heart I feel that as long as Teams remains at least a half-decent
product it will be very difficult for anyone else to compete in this space as
long as MS bundles Teams with Office. Office absolutely is a monopoly --
pretty much any new software that's bundled with it is going to eat everyone's
lunch. Doesn't matter if that's Teams or a Spotify clone ("Music for Office")
or an HR suite.

This rule feels valid to me for any general purpose software that's used in
nearly any business. I don't think it holds up for specific domain software:
VSCode doesn't eat IntelliJ's lunch, and a half-decent Photoshop clone
included with Office365 wouldn't kill Photoshop. It also doesn't hold for
other free software (Edge can't eat Chrome because Chrome is also $0 so they
only compete on utility, not price).

If it ends up there's no future competition for Teams, that's not going to be
a good thing for consumers / citizens at large. It's definitely in the
interests of the public to ensure that there's a healthy market for
competition.

Part of making sure things are good for consumers / citizens is also making
sure there can be tight integration. If Slack can make a client that
integrates Teams and Slack channels into one frontend, and integrates with
Outlook/Exchange/Calendar as well as Teams does, and allows users to hop on
Zoom calls, that would be amazing.

I'm currently a strong proponent for opening up API's in software so that new
companies can add value on top of existing services, rather than having to
build all of Rome from scratch just to develop the Colosseum.

~~~
Rapzid
Haven't needed to use Office professionally in over half a decade; it's been
Google's office suite. Hardly a monopoly.

~~~
rckoepke
Usually better to attach numbers to anecdotes, although reasonable people can
still disagree on the interpretation or reliability of those numbers.

"Microsoft had 87.5% of the email and authoring market (formerly named the
office suite market) share in 2018, according to Gartner's 2019 market
research. Google held 10.4% of the market."
[https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Microsoft-Office-
collabo...](https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Microsoft-Office-
collaboration/571740/)

------
greenyoda
Extensive discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23916729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23916729)

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

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

~~~
nikolay
Didn't Google just did the same thing by bundling Zoom, Slack, and more into
Gmail?

~~~
rbanffy
Except that Gmail is not the de-facto corporate e-mail client.

~~~
nikolay
I am talking about their enterprisey G Suite... which doesn't even have a sane
implementation of a shared inbox... unlike Outlook!

~~~
ThePowerOfFuet
Shared inboxes are a security (and thus accountability) nightmare. I support
anything which helps eliminate them.

~~~
nikolay
Quite the opposite. The way thing are done in G Suite (via Groups) is the
worst. In Office 365, you don't get a copy of each email.

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

~~~
smcleod
They purchased Yammer and progressively made it a slower, added bugs,
continued to degrade the UI/UX and messed up the authentication system, it
became a dumpster fire.

~~~
nikolay
True, my point is that Slack robbed Yammer and now they complain that
Microsoft robbed them back.

~~~
smcleod
Slack is a chat application, Yammer was a Facebook clone for businesses.

~~~
nikolay
A chat application? :) No, Slack is an email replacement, just like Yammer
was/is.

~~~
smcleod
Interesting you see it that way, across the companies and consultancies I've
worked with it would only be a replacement for maybe 20% of emails, it's just
replaced whatever chat systems were previously in place (IRC/Jabber/Skype
etc...)

~~~
nikolay
That's even how Slack advertises their own service.

