From the outside, Teams (and Zooms) growth was accelerated because video conferencing became way more important. People didn’t need video conferencing pre-COVID because that would have just been a meeting. When they suddenly did, Slack wasn’t that good. My pet peeve continues to be that on Slack I cannot see someone’s screen on iOS - that one annoyance had us move to Zoom then teams.

An argument could be made that Slack was ultimately unable to compete in video by virtue of not having an army of high paid engineers to throw at the problem like MS does, but the features that Slack chose to focus on (like the WYSIWG editor) doesn’t say that to me

The most meaningful thing they've had recently is the cross-org shared channel thing, which is awesome when it works but still onerous to manage. That was two years ago. And it doesn't open up that many new users, it just keeps people in slack longer (good for stickiness, bad for growth).

This is the important point: because of tech monopolies it is no longer possible to compete on software quality. This is why Congress needs to break them up.

I wonder if Microsoft's Teams numbers were pumped up by it being freely included in O365 subs. "Oh you're a paying O365 customer; we'll just go ahead and count your included Teams sub as a Teams sub."

As it stands it seems to be the other way around, at least for the features we care the most about (meetings, screen sharing, voice calls).

So I think it's possible to compete on quality, but it's definitely harder as a lot of people will get by with a lower-quality offering.

Not sure what the example of IE would entail. IE was insanely popular during its prime of 2006-2008. Even today, Chrome has not captured as much of the market as IE6 did at that time.

It was only years of neglect (i.e nearly the entire IE6 team was reassigned to other projects), and governmental intervention that allowed other browsers to even have a significant plurality.

So yes, you can win merely by being bundled for free with another popular product.

If Slack for instance just came preinstalled on iOS/OSX, then people would have standardized on it so long as it was also available on Windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Yes there were other browsers, and yes there existed people who used them, but it was very small

Android is the most popular mobile OS on earth and I remember when Google+ was bundled as part of the base OS image. Even that and the huge marketing Google did wasn't enough to popularize the service and Google ended up killing it.

Another thing is -- the public stack overflow is really nice for reference, but in my experience I don't like the culture around it. It isn't inclusive. The thing that turned me off was when they would shut down a question because it would lead to extended discussion.

Now slack allows extended discussion - properly off in a thread - and through that fosters a corporate culture in a good way.

That said, I’m not sure they could have competed with Teams in MS corporate deployments under any circumstances. If a company is already using Outlook, Exchange, AD, O365, Teams plugs in very nicely. But, seems like that still leaves a pretty big market.

I don't understand this. Chat has always been an integral part of work in all my jobs. Before Slack it was Skype. I can't imagine working through email only. It would be hard enough when we were sitting in the same office but impossible now when we're remote.

SharePoint has always been too complicated for most people to use, but part of Teams is an easier to use UI over SharePoint.

Huge problem solved, right there.