Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded.

They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.

The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options.

Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.

Teams shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s pretty great, and comes with a lot of great tools that no unicorn has found a way to replace.

It is currently abhorrent. They do appear to be updating regularly, but so much of the UX should have been fixed at the beginning.

- Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobody uses teams but chats, which are only recently pinnable (!?!?) - the pages, plugins and sharepoint files is great, but too restrictive.

Compared to Slack or Zulip, it is still very behind. However, once our 70k organisation moved to office 365 and started using teams, we sheepled and didn't want the team to use a fragmented tool and bit the bullet. So yeah. Watch out for teams.

Yeah, we use teams and have had none of those issues. In fact, I'd say it is better than Slack now, which is what we used before switching to Teams last fall. Plus Teams is in the whole Microsoft enterprise bundle already. Slack's biggest challenge will be Teams. Or their enterprise market share will boil down to, enterprises not using Microsoft, .. so Google...

You're describing 12 months ago Teams. It's come a long way.

Some of my co-workers switched to Teams. They show up as offline on Skype for Business.

I haven't moved to it yet because I require a chat application that works and allows people to contact me.

People showing up as offline doesn't affect the ability to send them messages, though.

Teams has it's own issues, but messages getting delivered isn't one of them.

One little detail: the MS offering should work adequately.

If Lync (Skype for Business) is any indication, building well-working enterprise messaging is hard. Unless cost-cutting is your central concern, you want your internal communication to use the best, least-friction tools. Here Slack has quite an advantage.

What advantages does Slack have over Zoom? Microsoft Teams seems to compete more with the latter than the former.

Zoom and Slack are very different products.

99% of value of Slack for our team is in the text-related features.

Yes, I know, but it seems most of the value Microsoft Teams provide is in its video conferencing capabilities. Why is Slack said to be competing with one and not the other?

You think enterprise companies switch a product they’re already using with all the integrations to another (possibly inferior) product just because of price? That’s not usually been my experience

No, the switch to a product that is fully integrated with another more important product that they already use.

And with Flow adding integrations all the time Microsoft are real close to a killer Business product.

Seriously, Flow is good stuff.

That’s the definition of Enterprise Software - the buyer is not the user. They are already paying for Office. Why pay extra for Slack? You really don’t want to go head to head with Microsoft’s Enterprise sells.

> The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough”

Also, Google Chat. AFAIK it's free if your company is already using the work version of Gmail, though don't quote me on that. It's out now, and does the job well enough.

My current employer went with Google Chat, I think mainly due to the cost difference with 10k+ employees.

Would you really trust any messaging platform from Google? They have a new one every year.

Anecdotally I changed to 365 just for the storage capacity, I don't even use Ms Office apps.

> What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough”

Or Salesforce Chatter. Enough companies handing Salesforce good money that adding this on makes sense.

I've never worked anywhere where Salesforce was available outside of select teams. In fact, last time I had access to it I kept finding my access had been 'lent' to another user because the per seat license was so expensive.

My very-large project switched chat apps in one weekend (backed by a few weeks of prep by IT team). We had JIRA integration on day one, and one or two missing things within a week. It wasn't that big a deal.

I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.

Chat history seems like the issue to me. My company has tons of institutional knowledge locked away in slack channels.

You could always just export all your company's slack data to preserve it and make it queryable https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...

Huh, good to know that exists.

> My company has tons of institutional knowledge locked away

I think your company should start working on that problem ASAP.

That might not be an issue at many big companies, which likely have data retention policies that disallow storing chat history longer than N days.

They really need to make the search better.

Their moat is sticky?

They were simply the first company to do hosted chat well enough that it didn't constantly piss people off. I wouldn't call that a sticky moat.

They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark.

There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.

> They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark.

well put - and - even more so: hosted business chat. all they have to do is keep on keeping on.

ICQ was quite impressive in 1997.

ICQ offered offline delivery, which was missing from many chat apps for a long time, too.

Wouldn't the Slack bot integration provide a better moat. If they can get orgs using a lot of bots for CI reporting, etc switching gets more difficult at least. Not sure how many teams get that tightly integrated with bots though.

Notifications are easy, do many companies really use more advanced bots?

I don't really know I've been at the same company for a while and we've only used Skype for Business and before that Sametime for our chat infrastructure. I've seen a couple articles written about making them but not sure how many people actually use similar bots with the ability to kick things off or change things.

Notifications are easy if the integrations exist.

Building the integrations is easy, if all the integration is is a notification. I've got half a dozen custom slack integrations that i've written for my team, it's no more than a day of work sunk in so far, including the infrastructure in our product to figure out who, what and when to notify.

If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.

Building an integration is having someone:

- deal with the target platform's API

- deal with APIs of the many platforms that are being integrated

- maintenance and SLAs

I honestly doubt you can create half a dozen good integrations that require more than just notifications in a channel (for example, PagerDuty notifications and the like).

I'm not sure they'll be able to compete against a worse but integrated solution like MS teams long term. No doubt it's worse but the bundle is cheaper with when you're already paying for Windows and Office. Same story with G Suite.

MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.

My company just switched from Slack to Teams.

I think it is hard for cost conscious organizations with o365 to justify slack.

I use Teams in a very large org. Sometimes, the lack of integration and capability is a benefit. People don’t message me unless they actually need something.

Agree - there was a lot of talk about Slack in our org, until everyone realised we had Teams already as part of O365 and it delivers on most of the use cases you set up from Day One.

It's actually pretty good for managing discreet work streams, and even for organising personal work (kind of against the "Team" ethos, but having a channel for myself keeps my work visible and tabs keep important things to hand easily).

I have _never_ used teams. I have seen it creep up in enterprise focused orgs but I have still never used it.

As a remote worker Slack is my office, essentially, and I think it's done an amazing job at being an office for remote first companies. I can't speak for Teams.

>Their moat is sticky enough and they know it.

I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.

Why do you make it sound like some shady back-door deal? Our grey-beard entirely Linux using ops staff would drop Slack for MS teams at the drop of a hat to get that money back in the budget. You can only waste so much money when the entire office demands Office.

Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will always come out cheaper than Office + $other_thing.

Can confirm. Desktop Linux-using ops staff here, we're moving from dropbox to onedrive in the next ~month, and I'd switch from Slack to Teams if it didn't suffer from the same problem all MS IM products (UWP/Chromium Skype- & Lync-based alike) seem to face: intermittent failures to push notifications.

We route alerts through IM primarily, and are remote-first. I get that some folks here complain about their inability to ignore chat notifications, but there's a decent chunk of us that need to find our uninterrupted time where we can, not when we want.

> Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive.

A few weeks ago the startup I work for started using NextCloud as a stop-gap till we get O365 and OneDrive. It is ridiculously simple for us at-least to just copy over our entire Dropbox folder to the NextCloud one.

I hear that. I wish I could deploy Nextcloud at my company. We have plenty of resources and storage. Not paying per user per month would be so so so nice.

My company is already paying for Teams as part of our O365 Installation. We won't use it, simply because of the network effect the Shared Channels have created.

We have shared channels with Integration Partners, Suppliers, Enterprise Customers... These are extremely valuable ways of communication once setup, especially with simple file-transfer thrown in, etc. Leaving Slack would mean slamming the door in the face of these entities, something we're simply not ready to do for the cost-savings that ditching Slack would mean.

I don’t know a single enterprise client that enables external Slack users. People are far too careless with what they share in IM (like private SSH keys and IP addresses), and Slack history is a juicy target for hackers diving for secrets.

Enterprise users usually just use it for internal messaging.

I'm in a chat or two as a "single channel" user only, and I'm external to that company. It's not uncommon and depends on the scale I think.

If that's what's best for your company, great. For others, competing against MS Teams means that they will face an uphill battle on the sales side - to put it mildly. In terms of the cost savings aspect once MS reaches feature parity-ish, there will be significant pressure on the CIO to consider a migration away from Slack. Both of these pressures raise valid questions about the valuation and future of Slack.

Microsoft isn’t Oracle. They put Teams in the bundle and slowly break whatever they are replacing. In this case Skype.

If you’re big enough for Microsoft to care about you, you already have embedded SEs compensated based on OneDrive and Teams adoption. Your IT middle management pushes teams.

Your CIO is getting the cyber pitch based in the insecurity of your O365 implementation. The fix is to buy Azure AD or the next bundle (EMS), or maybe the E5 O365/Windows subscription.

Well they might as well acquire Flickr.

Flickr were acquired by SmugMug around a year ago, now.

While messaging apps have tended to be cyclical, I'd argue Slack has become much more than a simple messaging app at many large companies with their integrations and bots, and they are intrinsic to many teams' workflows (e.g. "ChatOps" is a real thing).

I see Slack as more akin to something like Excel, where people who really depend on it (in a way much more than person-to-person chat) go beserk if it's taken away.

Companies switched to slack because hipchat didn't work very well. Slack works pretty well. It would be much harder for there to be internal political motivation to change unless someone does something significantly better which I cannot imagine.

Messaging apps are cyclical. I remember icq! Slack should become part of Google.. that would help Google widen its user base and perhaps a robust video conferencing system can piggy back on top of it.

Google might already have a messaging app and might still have video chat.

You missed the part about “expanding their user base”

What backlash?

The product is compelling enough that Microsoft is trying to position their clone as the lynchpin of everything in O365 that isn’t mail.

It’s a platform that is attractive to all sorts of players. Apple has a huge enterprise business that they completely ignore. Google, Cisco, other enterprise plays are easily imaginable.

Basically M$ is pushing hard to switch off Skype For Business (SFB) in favor of Teams, especially when still on-premise. The new features are being developed only for Microsoft Teams and the user base is a click away from a decent Slackish app. Another killer feature of Teams (inherited from Lync and SFB) is the trunking possibility with a legacy SIP PBX (so called Microsoft Team Direct Routing, or some form of similar creative name from Redmond market intelligence). So, I think that the future of Slack is probably the same as the future of Spotify, both like the article says incidentally direct-listed at the NYSE (and not via a formal IPO). Both will have a trusted user base, a better interface, but motivated tech giants competing into the same market.

I haven't seen any backlash outside this tiny circle. HN is not a good yardstick.

They are stickier than you think. Especially with shared channels.

Slacks biggest paying customers are enterprises using it for internal chat. Not very sticky overall since enterprise customers are used to vendors constantly raising prices.