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/) 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think OPs point was that teams is effectively slack + zoom for most organisations, and that video calling was the ‘must have’ Covid feature, so while Zoom and Teams have won (because they both have great video calling) Slack lost.
The only thing I need and haven't found in others is Slack's functionality of drawing on someone else's screen. Webex has it but it's super cumbersome to use.
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.
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.
Those are really interesting points. I also thought about investor-driven approach.
Slack had to justify massive funding it took over the years. It has 1500+ employees for a chat app. In comparison, Notion has <50 employees and they seem to release more stuff than slack (though it might not be a fair direct comparison).
Having said that, 28 Billion is a great success by any metric. It's just that Slack had lots of potential to upsell and solve lots of adjacent problems around project management & collaboration which could have made it more valuable and increased its Market. But for some reason, they just didn't move fast enough and build/experiment more.
Slack is definitely way way way overpriced. I know at a bunch of companies I was out it was never considered because of the price since its "just chat".
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.
I remember, a long time ago, I went to a barcamp-style event hosted at Google in Mountain View. This was maybe a year after Google Maps was released. I forget how it came up, but at one of the sessions, an attendee got into a heated debate with a googler over whether it was ok that Google was able to release Google Maps to the world for free, essentially putting for-pay map services out of business. Apparently, Google Maps put this guy's startup out of business since there was no way to monetize anymore.
Was Google Maps anti-competitive? Perhaps in the sense that it was incredibly hard to compete with, but that benefits the customer.
And let's be real, it's not like Microsoft had never conceived of a chat client before Slack came around. Slack rode the chat trend. It didn't create it.
The only redeeming quality of Google Maps is that it is incredibly good product.
But at the same time it’s extremely anti-competitive: essentially very few companies can invest many billions of dollars it took Google to collect the data for a product which is still very poorly monetized. Instead Google chooses to offer it for free to moat Search/Ads.
I don't see how a high cost of entry is anti-competitive...at least in a way that's google's fault. Many industries have a high cost of entry, and there's entire businesses that crop up to lower it. Technology used to have a much higher cost of entry before cloud computing, for example. If you were doing anything at scale before 2005 or so, you had to own and maintain your own metal. Even Google Maps is one of those cost lowerers. A lot of companies were able to build their business on the back of google maps APIs.
Predatory pricing is the issue here, not high cost of entry. Anti-competitive activities have specific definitions rooted in the study of industrial organization. You can't go around making judgment calls based on what seems intuitively good or bad to you.
The anti-competitive question varies country to country, but in the US (where Google, the example given, is based) the question is: "does this cause consumer harm?" not "does this make it hard for another company to make money at it?".
Taking information that used to be locked up, re-discovering it from the "ground truth" (literally driving every road in some cases), and then giving it to the world for free does ruin some business models based on gate keeping, but it doesn't harm the consumer.
So should society force Google to charge for Maps? How much?
No, anticompetitive behavior is not determined with a single question. It's a whole field of study. You may as well say companies evaluate their code by the single criteria of "how fast does it run?"
With a price artifically approaching zero in a product with high margnial cost and higher long run average cost, product tying with android and google search at the least, dominant and uncontestable market power, there's a lot of bells ringing here, and more than enough to suspect significant deadweight loss to society and, yes, "harm" to consumers.
All of these terms have specific definitions, by the way. They don't just mean good or bad. And that list is far from exhaustive.
As a user, I honestly prefer Open Street Maps, because it has a much finer level of detail. For instance, it shows playgrounds, which is great if you are a parent.
It's funny how we've taken it for granted that the service of maps and routing (one I consider a technological marvel) is free just when Google starts to put ads in Maps. I guess it must have been hard to convince venture capital in 2005 to fund the innovation necessary (or, more likely, early Google engineers were incredibly good).
In 2005, the VC scene was very different. YC was doing its first year. Cloud computing wasn't really a thing yet. You had to have own your own metal if you were at any serious scale.
What I left out of my original story was that a third engineer chimed in (from Yahoo!) that asked if the real enemy to innovation here wasn't the map-data companies whose terms made it impossible to leverage for innovation. The cost was prohibitively high to get started. It's really what kept innovation back in maps and affording it was what google's real advantage was.
But that's a big reason why OpenStreetMaps exists today.
What happens if Google decides to exert its authority with its monopoly (charging a ton, charging businesses to appear, etc)?
Now there is no service for customers to switch to. Anti competitive behavior benefits the customer as long as the company wants it that way. The moment it decides otherwise, customers hurt a lot more than they would have by paying for the service since its inception (where there would be alternatives to the service)
Well, there's Bing Maps and Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap. Also, paper maps are still a thing, believe it or not. There's always been map competitors, so your argument is already a little shaky. However, let's go with the spirit of your argument and say Google is now the only game in town when it comes to maps. What happens is that antitrust law kicks in. The FTC web site has great material explaining how it works. Attempted monopolization with the intent of controlling market price is arguably a black and white violation of the Sherman Act. This would not necessarily require there to be competitors, but would require Google to operate in good faith with the public, similar to public utility companies and even cable providers.
The problem with the trend is the next step, where significant monetisation only starts once a monopoly has been created (first kill the competition through subsidisation from a big company and a price tag of £free, then create a poorer product with loads of ads to profit once the original company is dead).
Ive heard a bit about these barcamp style events (I'm not in SF) and I'm interested in replicating this culture or event format. might you have a link or search terms where I can find more info about how these are like?
Is this really true? For installed software this is true. But at least with everyone I work with, it’s all Google docs now. I was honestly floored the other day when I got a presentation in an email rather than a link to one online that could be collaborated with. Maybe I’m in a bubble, but I can’t imagine going back to Word or Excel.
Having worked in a number of large commercial enterprise (non-IT product) and government environments, next to no one uses Google Docs. The ones that do, are looked at sideways and are a pain to work with due to interoperability issues with Word/Excel and Docs/Sheets (yes, they do exist).
Microsoft has also taken some pretty big steps forward over the last couple of years when it comes to document collaboration/sharing. Most Office applications now allow for live sharing/collaboration via the desktop apps.
There’s also the O365 web-based capability similar to Docs/Sheets. Plus, these are integrated with other O365 products like OneDrive and SharePoint (laugh, but SharePoint is unlikely to go away anytime soon with enterprise customers).
I have yet to find a product differentiator that GSuite (or whatever they call it now) has over M365/O365, except maybe sometimes price. On the other hand, Microsoft has a number of differentiators over Google’s products. Even with the price differences, Enterprise customers get significant volume licensing discounts and see cost savings through not having to retrain everyone from IT administrators to day-to-day users.
At least if you're on a Linux desktop, the GSuite experience is vastly better than the online Office 365 one, as there's no desktop clients. That's a pretty small market segment though.
Yeah, that is a good point! Like you mentioned though, it’s a very small market segment and I could see Microsoft spending more resources on Linux interoperability in the future. They have already been doing it with some products and I would be surprised if it’s not on their mid-long term roadmap.
Inertia is a thing. A guy I work with has used Office for decades. He's never even tried Google Docs. Refuses to look at stuff if you send him a Google drive link. Asks for a Word document. He doesn't do anything sophisticated. Google Docs would be more than adequate. Just set in his ways.
Yep and by my completely speculative estimate, that is likely the case for 90% of people born before the mid-90s. Office has been pretty pervasive in professional work and even academic environments for quite some time. My first exposure to Word/Excel was in high school and its use was continued through college.
I forgot to mention previously all the integration with existing system administration capabilities widely in use at companies (e.g., Active Directory, identity management/permissions/sharing permissions, etc.). It is only becoming more ingrained with Azure AD, M365 Enterprise licensing, etc.
I’m sure I am missing something, but I do not understand why a business - other than very small ones - would choose to use GSuite.
I’m sure I am missing something, but I do not understand why a business - other than very small ones - would choose to use GSuite.
But almost all businesses are SMEs, and almost all of those are small businesses.
If you're operating at enterprise scale, and you've got dedicated contacts at Microsoft and negotiating leverage in your commercial terms for using their products and access to the top editions of those products, you're moving in a different world to most smaller businesses. That's true whether we're talking about Office, Windows or almost anything else Microsoft offers these days. For a small organisation, the pricing structure and artificially broken products and lock-in effects and so on are significant downsides to going with Microsoft.
On the other hand, if you are part of a large organisation, being able to create and collaborate on a single document or spreadsheet in isolation is still the foundation of everything, but being able to manage large numbers of those documents and spreadsheets and access to them by large numbers of people for large numbers of reasons is also an important requirement. I have yet to encounter an online competitor that really has powerful tools for things like formal revision management, organising the full set of information for large projects, and constructing large, complicated documents with many contributors who have different responsibilities. There's a whole ecosystem around MS Office that deals with these kinds of issues, but a smaller organisation would probably have little need of it.
Those are all certainly fair points and I definitely appreciate you taking the time to provide your perspective!
I agree with you that some of the functionality in O365 (or M365 for that matter) is unnecessary for many small businesses. However, for the features that are most likely to be necessary, the costs and terms are not all that unreasonable and Microsoft does do their Business level plans without an annual contract.
Further, the costs between GSuite and O365 are comparable, while features are disproportionately in Microsoft's favor. Whether those features are needed or not, is a legitimate question to ask though.
Can you be a little more specific about the artificially broken products and lock-in effects are you referring to? I have not experienced those types of issues with any of the O365 tenants I set-up and currently manage.
Can you be a little more specific about the artificially broken products and lock-in effects are you referring to?
For artificially broken, I was more thinking of products like Windows 10, where anything below Enterprise/Education is IMNSHO unsuitable for professional use for well-documented reasons around forced updates and reboots, mandatory phoning home, etc. However, to get the best of Office, you typically also need to be on Windows, as other platforms are either unsupported or very much second tier.
For lock-in effects, I'm partly talking about the commercial terms for accessing the serious products particularly for smaller businesses, partly about tactics like the various poorly documented and sometimes changing file formats Microsoft has relied on over the years to try to force upgrades, and partly about the push to use ever more of Microsoft's online services. Microsoft relies heavily on trying to get you onto its platforms, and particularly these days the establishing subscription-y enterprise-y relationships even if you're a small business that never needed that kind of relationship with MS before, and then using various technical barriers to make it hard to get off the ride.
We use a few things at work (including google docs by not office). Quip is by far the universal favorite.
Its main advantage is that it presents an extremely good history of who said what when, and what parts of the document were updated. It also has a cross-document “inbox” of relevant updates.
The main disadvantage is that we can’t use it with collaborators outside the company. I’m not sure if that’s specific to our company or a product limitation.
In over 10 years I’ve rarely received a google drive doc / sheet or presso. Can’t imagine relying on those school child level tools to be honest.
I’ve worked at SAP, Oracle, and a few large consultancies. Most of my customers are in the enterprise size range. Office is used heavily by the larger companies of the world and therefore is used by their software and service vendors.
The only company I’ve ever worked with that was totally google drive was an American startup.
Office is still very much the dominant suite of software across most companies although there are plenty of smaller American companies trying to work without it.
I personally can’t tolerate the the lack of basic formatting that docs offers are how limited sheets and slides are. Just adding section numbers in docs needs an add on and if your collaborators don’t have the same add on they just add new sections without numbering. I can’t imagine large documents without numbering...
Pretty sure you’re just not the intended user. Many in finance are pretty much forced to use Excel, and specifically on Windows because there’s functionality that isn’t available on OSX
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?
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.
I think Microsoft bundling IE is a very valid comparison.
I guess it's hard to see what's a transparent attempt to crush Slack and what's just the regular enhancement of business. After all, you can hardly buy Word alone and no one complains.
The problem I run into here is that somehow relying on antitrust prosecutorial discretion does kind of make it hard to innovate, since you might be unsure about the line between outcompeting and being anticompetitive. Slack drove HipChat out of business because it was frankly terrible. But I do think the lawyers can mostly figure this out.
The fact you can't hardly buy a copy of word without having a copy of teams thrown in is what's the issue. You can't get excel with powerBI without also having to buy teams. It's more how Microsoft sells Teams than the fact that Teams exists at all that raises my eyebrow. Teams doesn't sell Teams, Word and Excel sell Teams.
Really saying that Microsoft won't let you buy their most popular products alone is just another way to phrase this situation.
This is like complaining about the coupons you get included from an online order. You're technically correct, but the version you get for "free" is pretty much just a freemium version of the actual product. It's usually limited in such a way that maybe small teams would get some benefits, but any sizeable organizations would have to pay to upgrade. As an example, being able to use an API requires an upgraded license
They kind of charge for Teams already, at least for some customers/users. In order to have a teleconference dial-in number, the user that created the conference has to have a license (I believe it’s somewhere around $10 p/mo). In my company, this is more or less a fundamental requirement if you interact in a customer facing role.
Word and Excel integration is one thing. In my opinion, the integration with Outlook is the bigger selling point. I want to schedule a teams meeting with a customer? Create a calendar invitation and click a button to make it a Teams meeting. Dial-in information is then automatically placed in the invitation. That same meeting (and the rest of mg Outlook calendar) is also now synced with my calendar in Teams, so now I receive alerts in Teams when someone starts the meeting, the meeting start time, etc.
Other services have integration with Outlook, but nothing like what Teams has, and to go against the grain a bit, that aspect of Teams’ UX is fantastic.
I think one thing many are missing is a lot of new Teams users aren’t using it for the Slack-like features (e.g., channels). Most of the people I’ve worked with on teams over the last 6 months use it solely for direct messaging, file sharing, direct phone calls to coworkers, internal meetings, teleconferencing, etc. for those purposes, Teams’ UX is more than adequate and I actually prefer it over Slack.
That is not to say it’s perfect though (dear Microsoft: please make changing input/output device settings more intuitive and well-behaved...).
Fair point, but I have used Zoom and GoToMeeting’s integrations with Outlook and there may be some similar (or identical) features, but the experience with Teams is a far more integrated experience in Outlook.
Further, why leave the Microsoft O365 ecosystem if you’re already using it? Teams offers other capabilities and integrations that Zoom doesn’t have and the Teams integration does not require additional user action to add to Outlook (it’s there by default). Other value adds for enterprises include centralized identity/license/user management via the existing O365 admin portal/Azure AD, singular invoicing, consistent SLA with single vendor, etc. I haven’t looked into Zoom’s SSO integrations with things like AD or Azure AD, but again, that’s another example of resistance for enterprise customers/system administrators.
Fair point, but I have used Zoom and GoToMeeting’s integrations with Outlook and there may be some similar (or identical) features, but the experience with Teams is a far more integrated experience in Outlook.
As far as I understand, it is Microsoft who are putting third parties at an unfair disadvantage by not offering them the same level of integration.
I don’t disagree with you and other companies do the same thing to Microsoft. Just saying it’s reality at this point in time and at least for now, offers an advantage for Teams.
Word/Excel is the defacto default across industry. It’s a monopoly. Microsoft is using their monopoly on office suite to get a competitive advantage on chat/video collaboration software.
It’s like when Google uses their monopoly on search to highlight their own price comparisons in the top part of the result section, thus being anti competitive towards other price comparison companies (e.g. Pricerunner)
I have barely touched office over the past decade; been using Google Workspace. My past four employers have used Google. I have been using it personally, at work, for longer. My weightlifting club using Google sheets. My mortgage sheets were Google sheets.
I’ve worked at SAP, Oracle, and a few large consultancies. Most of my customers are in the enterprise size range. Office is used heavily by the larger companies of the world and therefore is used by their software and service vendors.
The only company I’ve ever worked with that was totally google drive was an American startup.
Office is still very much the dominant suite of software across most companies although there are plenty of smaller American companies trying to work without it.
I personally can’t tolerate the the lack of basic formatting that docs offers are how limited sheets and slides are. Just adding section numbers in docs needs an add on and if your collaborators don’t have the same add on they just add new sections without numbering. I can’t imagine large documents without numbering...
I suppose the distance between being the sole provider, or having exclusive control over, office suite software and the 5 million businesses paying for GSuite as of last year? Or the 2 billion active GSuite users?
Lets make the unit of measure a paying business subscription. We will call them business units, or BUs. Microsoft Office is 5MBUs(mega business units) away from being a monopoly.
where do you get this info? the statistics say otherwise [0]:
> The office suite market in the United States is split between Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365, with G Suite being the market leader holding a share of 59.41 percent and Office 365 occupying 40.39 percent, as of October 2020
I mean, maybe old-style orgs still use MS office, but it looks like all the non-IT ones are moving to Google.
Schools in our town use Google calendar and Google classroom. My gym uses google docs and google forms. Many of the random event "sign-up" pages are on google forms.
"Free" is a great price, and many businesses (especially smaller ones) do not want to pay extra for ms office.
I guess I implied that I think they're a monopoly in the area of productivity software, which isn't entirely fair since Google Suite exists. But in my shallow opinion Google Sheets is not really a competitor to Excel.
Five years ago I would say you are right. But Google Sheets is now good enough for all but the most serious Excel power users, and I'm sure they're still improving it.
I'm not sure, but why would they want to? It's a very mature product, with many established competing manufacturers, and not much room for any real improvement or profit margin.
If there were already half a dozen Slacks in use and they were all interchangable and customers were indifferent to which one was on their computer, would Microsoft be jumping in with their own product?
Microsoft is allowed to make more than one product. Microsoft is not allowed to use abuse their market dominance in one product to help them capture another market, with harm to the consumer.
For example, this is why Microsoft was sued for antitrust in 2001. Microsoft was alleged to have used its market power in OEM operating systems (Windows) to sell its browser (Internet Explorer) through bundling. Microsoft settled with the DOJ.
You could allege that in this case, Microsoft is doing the same thing — using market power in office software to sell unrelated chat software. This practice is harming competitors to such a degree that they seek to be acquired by other companies. It's also telling that HN regards Slack as a better product than Teams. The resulting decrease of competition is detrimental to the consumer.
Maybe you want to argue that Teams is being provided for free, so this is better for the consumer. While that nominally might be true, Microsoft must pay for development on Teams somehow. Consumers are likely paying higher prices than if Teams was not being developed. And even if they aren't, we still should consider how bundling can lead to consolidation.
If Slack is marketing their product for businesses and as an office product ("we're trying to kill email"), then it's hardly unrelated. If companies are looking for a solution that streamlines the functionality of SharePoint, Teleconferencing, and collaboration, it seems directly within Microsoft's wheelhouse to include Teams as a part of M365.
Sure you can, but treat them as a standalone product. Currently companies (like Amazon with AWS) are using massively profitable products to dump prices in totally unrelated industries and kill off the competition.
Not to mention companies like Uber using massive amounts of VC money to break laws and social contracts in whole countries despite no goal of actually being profitable. Medium did the same when providing free access and then turning on the paywall after that. There are many more examples.
Is it just me or does anyone else find Microsoft Teams horribly unusable? Every time I try to log in (for a client's project) it wants a goddamn SMS authentication and Slack never had me do that BS. I don't even use SMS and so I have to dig through Twilio API just to log in.
It has its problems but so does Slack. It seems to be getting better quickly though. I applaud MS for having a Linux client that actually works. The biggest annoyance is that it doesn't remember my phone number when using phone audio for meetings. The UI is a bit confusing at times but I'm getting used to it.
Does it actually work? It seems to crash and freeze my machine for 15 seconds at every startup. It also loves going full screen on my 4K monitor. Spews out 404 errors half the time when I try to log in. Freaking 404 errors! That shouldn't even be a thing.
Works great. I run it on Ubuntu 20.04 in a virtualbox VM running on Ubuntu 20.04 as I keep my work stuff in a VM. Audio and video work fine, although I generally use phone audio because my bluetooth doesn't seem to work in the VM. It works fine on the host OS though. Also, I can use phone audio with the USB webcam on the PC providing the video and it works great.
Well at least Slack doesn't even offer such stupid policies, so I prefer Slack. I began the deprecation process of SMS around 1999 with the first Blackberry which supported this awesome new thing called e-mail. E-mail is this FANTASTIC new thing that offers more than 140 characters, allows larger attachments. It works just like SMS, except you can receive them even if you change your SIM card while travelling! Your inbox moves with you from provider to provider! How COOL is that!
Seriously, nobody should ever require SMS in 2020. Kill that nonsense.
Well at least Slack doesn't even offer such stupid policies
It does (indirectly) if you use SAML single sign on (which many large corporations do). That is what is happening with Teams. You're not being asked to sign in to Teams itself. You're being asked to identify yourself via Microsoft single sign on and the people that set up that companies Microsoft single sign on have set SMS as the default 2FA.
Whether or not you should use SMS for 2FA is of course a separate discussion.
I have multiple office365 accounts and within those accounts, and in a large number of different teams. The UX of switching between these is absolutely terrible.
That's the problem, I don't even use SMS, I deprecated it starting in 1999 and ended deprecation in 2007. It's 2020 already. Use e-mail. It's better than SMS in every way.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, and from a bean counter but also "someone who likes to do work while at work" Point of view having a chat tool that feels like work at work rather than a typical social media time sink is a GOOD THING. Slack has been an absolute productivity killer everywhere I've used it because it contains all the usual Skinner box tricks to keep users engaged with it rather than doing actual work. Workplaces shouldn't be about "the joy if connecting with each other". shudder
I'm actually curious, how is Slack a time sink? I muted most of my channels and just check for DMs, thread replies and @channels from important channels. It's at most 30 minutes a day, roughly the same as email.
True, but in every chat app ever that I've used, nothing is muted by default.
And the reasoning is quite simple, for the average user who doesn't change any default value, a by-default-muted chat app is useless. There would be no messaging as far as a regular user would be concerned. What good is a chat app where you can't chat? :-)
You know, I’ve been thinking on this. You’re right. My office chair is way too comfortable—I need the backache to keep me motivated to leave work at work. /s
> There is just one little problem. They are often not the people who get to decide on where the company spends its money.
Super common in businesses. They prioritize what managers want, not what the employees need.
Example:
We switched to NextCloud's Mail app for our webmail. It's terrible and barely has any of the features you'd consider it for any size company much less ours (~$1 billion & 3500 employees).
We brought it up to our VP of IT before we rolled it out and "we like that its integrated into NextCloud and we can pay them or develop features ourselves!".
Rollout went as predicted. Our users hate it because it has tons of problems and barely works. So we brought up that we can switch to something like RoundCube and same thing: "We like that its integrated". Even after we brought up that its a terrible experience for users. VP: "I don't care about that". There was a nice awkward silence after that.
I don't meant to be a complete bean counter but if all Slack can point to as a benefit is a "certain sense of community" even among a group that cares a lot about tools then it isn't it a great spot.
Is your revenue down since switching to Teams? Sales volume? Number of bugs fixed per release? Onboarding new hires slower? Time to fix critical incidents up?
Those are the kind of things I would have expected you to mention if there were actually a massive difference between Teams and Slack.
If the team is less engaged then that will show up in all of those metrics over time, and losing a sense of community seems like it would trigger that for some team members.
How much better does it need to be to justify its $6/user/month? If it makes employees even 0.1% more productive, then it's net positive. It takes you 5 seconds instead of 7 seconds to look something up and you do 5 times a day? Congratulations, you've made up your $6.
Teams has high numbers, but I wonder how much of that is actually eating into the Slack use case. Most of it seems to be awkward KPI gaming by forcing people to click into it to read docs and make calls.
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.
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.
For me MS Teams has been the most reliable experience after plain-old IRC but with the added video/audio/screen sharing features. The only bad experiences have come from somebody using a terrible wireless link, nasty Bluetooth devices, or just using the laptop audio devices in a noisy environment. This is our corporate ms teams so maybe we get allocated our own compute and bandwidth resources though.
Edit: now that I think of it, the key-press to light latency is horrible on macOS. Even worse than in IDEA. With sometimes just stalls after which the whole paragraph I typed pops up.
The latter issue for me is always caused by having one too many browser + CEF/Electron app open at the same time. Killing one of those usually fixes it.
Have not experienced that at all, and subject talking had been using slack (and loved it) for a couple of years before corporate forced us to use Skype for business. Made me reconsider career choices.
When I joined my cureent employer and they told me they were all into teams, the trauma from skype was still lingering.
But to my biggest surprise, it's actually fine; I'd even go the lengths to say it's good. Has most, if not all, features I think a developer would expect in 2020, plus they just work (at least so far).
Hard to believe msft could pull off something like that having seen skype for biz before.
I don't understand the need to separate "teams chat" and group chat, but seriously? The calls and screen sharing works pretty damn fine. I don't think I've used better.
Notifications default settings is a little bit unintuitive though.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
This used to be a problem for us too but I believe the UX changed a couple of months ago. Teams now shows a largish purple button that says “New Conversation” at the bottom of the chat window, and they added a little more space between that and the bottom of the previous conversation. It made a big difference.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The Calendar button in Teams shows everything on your Exchange calendar, including non-Teams entries.
If that button isn’t there, I suspect your corporate IT have messed with the Teams settings for your org for some reason. Probably some other poorly conceived Outlook calendar plug-in like Salesforce that wants to “capture” activity on the calendar but would be blind to modifications made in Teams UI, so they turn it off.
Or maybe you are still on-premise for Exchange? The Teams-Exchange integration is server-side, and won’t work with on-prem Exchange unless your admins have set up hybrid mode correctly.
I like to think of Teams as Skype for Business on steroids. If you look at it from that angle it's a much better product. I dislike Skype for Business with a passion.
Skype for business was great. That's because it was Skype, which they acquired. But unfortunately they then proceeded to completely destroy the non-enterprise Skype with the most braindead UI change I've ever seen, and completely neglect Skype for business for years.
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.
Previously when I’ve been at them they where on Slack, more recently they use Teams.
People complain about using Teams compared to Slack but Teams seems good enough for the people paying for Slack to decide to stop using it.
Teams being bundled with Office 365 is a huge value proposition. It’s not a case of who’s best, Slack seems more useful but can never compete with free which Teams is if you already have Office 365 which most large orgs do.
Teams video chat is way better than Slack also which may of helped this past year with working from home.
Agree. At my employer the largest engineering BU has been a zealous user of Slack for many years. Problem is, Slack seat licenses aren't free (and are thus rationed) and TPBT are balking at adding any more Slack seats now that corp IT is aggressively pushing Teams which is apparently free (since the overall corp has grown a dependence on some mishmash of O365). The Slack zealots thus appear to be fighting a (losing) rearguard battle against being forced onto Teams.
Teams tends to be used by bigcorps with tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of staff. Why buy and audit another tool when you already have a Office 365 subscription for the Org.
Slack just isn't good enough. It's better than Teams, somewhat, but that's about it.
(Despite having both Teams and Slack the people at my workplace keep spontaneously switching to Telegram because it's cross-platform and very fast, despite being the worse chat app on every feature metric. Yes, it turns out performance and portability is a huge value proposition for endusers if you actually give them the choice.)
Because it’s not measurable and it’s hard to argue with your CIO that using Slack will save you $xxx000 in productivity costs.
It also doesn’t register a “hair on fire” problem. Slack still has the preconceived notion of being a chat app. And those are not worth the huge investment, compared to problems that truly keep you awake at night ie. Cybersecurity
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.
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
As a counter-anecdata, I’ve gone three jobs using only Teams - in one case they had explicitly rejected Slack on the basis of price. My daughter also uses Teams for school.
Same anecdata here (EU) - Kids use Teams for distance learning, pretty much every larger company uses teams (and to some extend zoom) due to the Covid situation.
Hardly anyone even knows slack exists. Everyone knows and uses teams.
The only anecdote I have is that we started out with Slack and moved on to Teams, which we prefer. It was just an easier integration with our existing systems.
Teams has only "won" in large enterprise environments who are already full-Microsoft and who used Skype for Business/Lync before. I'd argue this is not really Slack's competition as Slack would've been a non-starter for many of these companies to begin with.
Teams however definitely didn't win the small business/startup game where tools are actually chosen based on functionality (and where end-users have a say in which tools to use) and Microsoft's market-penetration is lower or non-existent (so the bundling of Teams with Office 365 has no effect). In these cases, Slack wins by a large margin on functionality and performance alone considering how bad Teams is.
I work at largish company (13k employees worldwide), and a couple of years ago there was a fair amount of Slack (admittedly mainly free tier) being used ad hoc around the company. Then word came down from up high that the company was standardizing on a single chat platform and that platform was Teams. Now there is basically no Slack being used (and certainly no paid Slack) any more.
The main argument was that Slack for 13k employees was incredibly expensive, while Teams was 'free' and already integrated into most of their infrastructure.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
They already have both Azure Devops and GitHub converging on Confluence and Jira (and BitBucket) from different directions. Azure Devops also has Teams integrations.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me, the near-perfect solution has been available for a long time now, only costs the data overhead, and you have total control over the data. Granted, some companies prefer that another company manage that data security, so there's less on their IT hands.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"....
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.
> 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.
slight advantages in speed and resource utilisation
I would not call the two orders of magnitude difference that you can get between true native and this new webcrapp stuff "slight". There are reports of Teams taking dozens of gigabytes of RAM --- that's just not something you would see with a native application with the equivalent functionality, unless it was written extremely horribly. Dozens of MB is a comfortable amount of memory for such an application to use, and the old MSN Messenger (native! with many third-party clients too!) was in that ballpark. Remember that Skype used to have a native Linux client too. Microsoft is a huge company. They can certainly afford it.
is textbook waste of money.
So it all comes back to corporate greed. Inflicting a dismal user experience on everyone, for what would be an essentially tiny savings on their end.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/) 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.