What's more amazing to me is Google had Chat and Docs/Sheets all ready to go and integrate and take on Office and instead they closed down chat and brought out Hangouts which I've still never understood.

I’m also astounded at how badly Google has squandered the opportunity in business productivity.

Even companies that were all-in on Google for email, calendar, and documents went with (for example) Slack for chat and Zoom for meetings. Google has had multiple products in both categories for years! And yet somehow could not put together a compelling package the way Microsoft did with O365 + Teams seemingly overnight.

It does seem like a big missed opportunity. My only thought is the failure of Wave loomed large and people didn’t want to repeat it. Consumer messengers with huge user bases all had simplified UIs and that seemed like a better market to try (repeatedly) to break into.

Supporting something for business for years is just not something Google has in its DNA.

Microsoft still hasn’t shut down Lynx yet.

Was Skype bundled as a part of Office? I'm not sure if it was included or if it was a license add on.

The companies I worked at that had slack licenses still had teams using what they considered to be the best product. Slack, Hipchat (remember them?), and Zoom.

There's also more to it than 'bundling.' Trusting your chat communications to the same company doing your email is a more compelling story than sending it to Slack, Discord, or Zoom. There are a lot of companies that still don't trust 'the cloud' and then you've got governments all over the world and all of their regulations that may block the use of something else.

Skype for Business is licensed separately, from what I recall. Back when I was L1 I'd have to install Skype for Business from portal.office.com, because it wasn't installed as part of the standard Office2016/O365 package.

"Bundling" isn't any indication of any wrong doing. The OS "bundles" a word processor, a music player, a photo editor, etc, etc. I don't think I'd choose to install an OS without an internet browser. But a decade or two ago, people thought differently that an OS shouldn't ship with a bundled browser.

I don’t think that really counts for much — they literally just expanded their product suite, and integrated as such. If you’re not supposed to do that, then I’m not sure what a company is supposed to do other than have a single standalone product per domain.

Their monopoly lawsuit behavior was different — the bundling of windows with forced IE was problematic (largely because windows was everything, and also IE being largely unrelated to the rest of the OS) but much more problematic was their OEM strategies, to enforce and maintain windows as the dominant OS.

I would have agreed had Microsoft not owned several chat platforms over the years (MSN Messenger, Skype, Lync and Skype for Business).