It was transformative _because_ it was a downgrade.

I'll speak of the things I like about teams

Granted, I've not professionally used slack so I can't say if it's much better.

- Teams integration with outlook is the best. Makes meetings with remote team members really slick.

- Teams video chat (at least for a smaller group of people) is way better than solutions like zoom. It's just super convenient to be able to do a video or voice call with someone to work something out.

- The ability to create small group chats with people on the fly is awesome. When we need a 1 off async convo with the right people it's easy enough to just add them to a chat, name it something useful, and be off.

- Because video chat has a chat, it's pretty easy to do a message where you can write something without interrupting the current conversation. That also doesn't go away as soon as the meeting ends (ala zoom).

The things that's been transformative for me is that 95% of the external organisations I interact with have and use Teams. I cannot understate the power of broad uptake.

It's not a feature, or a piece of technical excellence, it's just that it is pervasive.

And that’s mainly a pricing issue. Teams is included in 365, webex charges insane rates nowadays.

That last point, persistent meeting chats, is really nice

Yup, particularly if you have a series of meetings (for example, standup) then the chat for yesterday's standup ends up being the same chat for today's standup.

Adds a lot of continuity to repeated meetings and can serve as an adhoc meeting notes location.

Being able to call someone on audio or video, at any moment, without organizing a meeting, is a killer feature. I wish Google Meet allowed that.

In Google Chat, you can attach a Meet invite to a message for an impromptu meeting.

Personally I am glad that people can't just call me up. I would rather be asked over chat first.

Probably coming from email, not Slack.