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1) Bundling

2) Network effects

and 3) Who else is doing something different? No one cares about the quality of the product they make anymore. The only thing that's important is pushing new features. Fixing old features is useless because by the time someone finds out the feature they chose you for doesn't work, they've already paid you for a year long contract. And most of the time, by the time the year rolls around, they're used to dealing with the problem and don't want to take the disruption of moving to something else again.

Nah, Google's mistakes with Chat are myriad but the biggest one is that they didn't make Slack. They added like one feature on top of Hangouts (threaded group chats), completely redesigned the entire interface (and the Gmail and Meet interfaces while they were at it), changed a bunch of words to make it seem like they copied Slack, and then said "enjoy using this new turd we pushed out".

(Okay, they also added a tiny bit of Markdown-based text formatting. Because why not use the least intuitive, most complicated possible solution, and then not document half of it.)

It's also a lot tougher to do a root cause analysis when there's no source, fifty layers of framework, and anemic documentation.

Which applies to nearly 100% of modern software. (Including Linux distros and a lot of their required software, other than the source bit...)

It's actually not free as part of all Office 365 plans, sadly. We discovered recently that we'd either have to downgrade(!!!) to the version with only web apps, or upgrade to the version with Exchange, to get teams. (Or, better yet, pay for a Teams-specific license since it's $0.25 cheaper than getting Exchange...)

Of course, the whole reason that we were looking at it is that one vendor who says they prefer Teams for some reason, even though we already pay for both Google Meet and Zoom.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with two non-interoperable message apps named Messenger? There was MSN Messenger/.NET Messenger/Windows Messenger/Windows Live Messenger, but those were interoperable (they were the same thing, just updates). They also managed to wrangle compatibility with Yahoo Messenger (although by then no one I knew still used Yahoo), and apparently Facebook Messenger, and then did a crappy merger/migration to Skype.

I'd go back to those days in a heartbeat, and I was there.