On one hand, the playbook of exploiting Office's dominance to push Teams is very very reminiscent of exploiting Windows' dominance to push IE.
On the other hand, Slack's walled garden is also effectively anti-competitive; trying to create a monopoly via vendor lock-in to the Slack product & ecosystem.
It feels like a better bet would be for both of them to adopt and support open interoperability standards, so users can avoid being locked into any single vendor, and have full sovereignty over their conversation data. (Disclaimer: as project lead for Matrix I may be biased :)
> adopt and supporting open interoperability standards
Can you imagine not being able to send a UPS packet to a DHL address or not being able to call an AT&T phone from a Verizone one? And how long until I cannot send mails from my Gmail address to you Outlook one?
We live in the Wild West of the digital age.
I still remember the times that Microsoft was trying to own the WWW thru non-compatible Internet Explorer extensions. And, also, the time that Microsoft tried to own Java by adding Microsoft extensions to it. (https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-microsoft-settle-java-suit/)
Companies have many incentives to create lock-in software and proprietary protocols that go against the interest of their own users.
One of them being complexity and and how fast you can move on new features. Adding features to a spec'd standard is a horribly slow process, this is the reason the developer of Signal decided against decentralization. You end up building XMPP, and that doesn't go so well if your specs are not very explicit. You can see this in how unreliable OMEMO is with multiple resources connected.
The Web is already a mature platform and has not actually made things more interoperable. It replaced a lot of the previous internet infrastructure that was (IRC, Newsgroups, SMTP which still somewhat clings to life)
> very very reminiscent of exploiting Windows' dominance to push IE.
The idea of Windows pushing IE by bundling it seems laughably quaint to me these days where most people can't even install a different rendering engine on their device than the stock and choice is purely illusionary and very few seem to bat an eyelid or even notice.
Even if they were both open standards it wouldn't affect this. The issue here is pricing, and specifically bundling. There's no way anyone can compete fairly when Teams is bundled with a seperate monopoly product.
> very very reminiscent of exploiting Windows' dominance to push IE.
Reminiscent? They recently pushed out a mandatory windows update that caused IE to take over your entire screen upon restart, pin itself to your taskbar, and attempt to set itself as the default app for numerous functions: https://www.theverge.com/21310611/microsoft-edge-browser-for...
> attempt to set itself as the default app for numerous functions
That's false, if you install any new browser -- Chrome, Opera, Firefox -- the next time you open a URL or HTML file, Windows will ask you if you still want to use your existing default browser or change it. This is done because apps can no longer set the default browser themselves and must ask the user to do it.
actually, come to think of it, an excellent way for Microsoft to fend off this anti-competition accusation would be to go embrace Matrix for use in Teams and demonstrate they support data portability, and are serious about not locking users in.
On the Matrix side we'd be happy to help them do so (we have a few big undisclosed projects already on the go to expose existing chat systems natively into Matrix :)
Fair notice yes, but you do not need to post a dis claimer. This is an internet chatroom, there is no need to file a disclaimer as if it has any legal currency.
In this case: Thanks for your fair notice, that's interesting you're working on Matrix, I'm intrigued and I might have some interesting comments and it got me thinking further. But no no I won't sign your disclaimer. There is no legal effect or otherwise statute limiting outcomes of posting a disclaimer.
And why not?
We all have biases, and posting a disclaimer won't absolve you of still having the intentions you may have and bring to a discussion. That's the nature of human society and simply by being an actor you already accept this fact. So in conclusion, nope, no disclaimer needed.
I like the disclaimers. I don't think they always need to be there, but when someone is working for or on a competitor or for the company being discussed I think it helps keep the discussion above board. It also means that there is less risk that the person is being accused of shilling since they have been up front about their association.
You are wrong. Disclaimers are a quick and simple way for users to let others know that there might be some specific view, or conflict of interest, or bias, so that the others can take that into account.
Blocking it's removal? How? Teams was installed with Office on my current system, and it pops up in Add/Remove Programs. IT Admins can prevent it from being installed with Office (and remove it from all of their machines if it has already been installed)[0]. It's not included with Windows either (just as Office isn't). And Slack isn't blocked from being installed either.
What's the anti-competitive angle here, other than the OS is created by Microsoft, the IM system is created by Microsoft, the Office suite is created by Microsoft, and the licenses are often bundled? Apple would be guilty of a similar thing by shipping Messages.app and iWork with macOS, no?
As a person that sets direction for IT in an organization that uses Office 365, I can say that I didn't appreciate that MS forced Teams on us. And the controls that you mentioned were not available from day 1.
I don't support Slack here but MS really forced Teams on us like it or not.
Not being an office 365 user, how is it any different than other software? For instance, I believe the LibreOffice installer defaults to install all the modules. But I can change it to just install writer and calc.
I'm not familiar with Office licensing. Do you have to pay more because they bundled Teams (maybe) or do you have to use it? (that would be surprising)
Anyway, at least you can self host Exchange. Slack is centralized.
What do you mean MS forced Teams on you? IT has always been able to control what apps install with the office suite, including Teams. Teams being freely offered as a bundled service certainly incentivizes its use, but there has never been any penalty for using an alternative service other than, of course, the cost of layering on another service.
For me, Microsoft Teams installed itself one day, unprompted. In order to remove it, I uninstalled it.
The following day, it came back. It turns out you have to remove both Microsoft Teams and something I think was called "Teams Machine-Wide Installer." Only then would it stay removed.
There are so many more choices than there were 20 years ago. Microsoft makes a kick ass office suite. There's nothing monopolistic about it. They've been in this game longer than anyone and that's reflected in the feature set.
Their products and licensing provide more value now than they have in a very long time. There's also G Suite which is pretty cool. Or you could use Libre Office.
Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.
While it may not be included in the OS, it is certainly promoted in Windows. I saw a full-size pop-up ad in Windows telling me to install Teams. I did not have Office installed.
I feel that Slack dominance is hurting the productivity, because:
- It's impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki, google doc or an internal blog
- Slack is incentivized to keep you IN Slack, for engagement. They don't have their own permanent-knowledge-base-software, so they pretend it's not needed.
It's a different case with Teams, because they offer quite a roster of software to write things up permanently - like sharepoint or office365 and will likely pursue integrating tighter and tighter.
Because Slack is a standalone product, they will push for using chat in the workplaces MORE. Microsoft can offer chat as a "when needed" basis.
The logistics of trying to be productive on a company group chat led me to create a free "Win at Slack" mini-course:
https://deliber.at/chat/
This is right on. Slack's pricing is based on regular usage, so they have an incentive to keep you distracted (to put it bluntly).
Microsoft sees chat as a piece of an overall communication "puzzle". They have Sharepoint for more persistent information and Yammer for "outer-loop" communication.
My startup (https://www.friday.app/) is based around the idea that there needs to be a "home" for the most important stuff at work that complements workplace chat. It's somewhere in-between Slack and a wiki (which most people don't use regularly).
Workplace chat tools like Slack are wonderful for quick collaboration, but if you over-index here you will run into trouble. That's why Zapier, Automattic, and Stripe have all built their own internal tooling to help.
>impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki
Every Team, by default, has a Posts, Files, and Wiki tab. Designing a way to roll up those Wiki pages, like they do with Sharepoint hubs, would be a good move.
From this perspective, Notion would be the perfect acquisition for Slack. Adding a wiki / todos / workflow / document editor to Slack with deep integration.
The company wiki/internal blog depends on people reading it though. The perk of group chats is usually smaller messages that can spark interest in discussions.
Zulip honestly seems like they've solved this problem better than Slack though.
You are spot on. For effective team communication, one need a healthy mix of sync (voice/video calls, chat) and async communication (wiki, task management and documents) . That is the whole premise of our apps (https://www.airsend.io). It brings both sync and async tools in one space to minimize context switching. MS Teams is better in that respect (context switching) when compared to Slack. But Teams UI/UX is really confusing and thier forced integration of tools just adds too much complexity.
I will be the weirdo and say I would rather have an amazing search feature in chat than have to go through moving knowledge into a more “permanent” location.
Permanent, searchable chat in Slack has been way more powerful for me than all of the other options for knowledge capture (SharePoint, Confluence, etc). I can almost always find what I need and if there is more up to date information, Slack seems to surface that first.
It seems like the difference between real-world usage and theoretical solutions in this case is wide.
My oh my how the tables have turned. There is something to be said about Microsoft and their ability to execute in the office space. Even my Dad, an architect at 70yrs old, is using MS Teams, while he never heard about Slack or any other collaboration tools.
And looking at their product portfolio around MS Teams, if there is a company I'd be willing to bet that they win the workplace transformation race is Microsoft. It's easy to forget when you're working comfortably in the Silicon Valley tech scene, that there is a real business world out there and MS is the ruler.
My company recently moved from Slack to Teams, for financial reasons.
I'm sorry but Teams absolutely sucks compared to Slack. There are tens of thousands of people voting for feature requests on the Teams community site, to bring Teams to parity with Slack. The killer one is that when you start a thread in Teams, it will be pushed to the most recent spot every time someone comments on the thread. In Slack, the original post that started the thread is stable, and threads are in a side panel, so the order of original posts is maintained chronologically.
There are other examples as well, but just in general I find myself spending way more time just navigating around in Teams and losing productivity trying to work within it.
Not sure why this is downvoted. I work for people who have both and while I'm definitely not a Slack fan, find Teams to be pretty much unusable outside of video chat. I have trouble even considering the two as covering the same space when I think about it...
Playing devil's advocate, Slack is just asking to compete on a level field. When Apple Music launched, it was preloaded on iOS. It's now the second largest streaming player. Amazon's offering comes in third. First-mover advantage seems to be best, but bundling in your platform five years late looks like a solid path to #2.
Slack needed to learn 4 years ago that it takes more than a decent chat app to make a company fully remote. It's a critical piece of it, but your wiki, knowledge base, and business planning software are all part of it too. Microsoft bundles all of these into one package, I fail to see how they are anti-competitive when they aren't even selling the same products.
Slack failed to see how fragile their product was and now needs to be acquired or make their own productivity suite.
You can tell they didn't truly consider the full working remote scenario because their video/voice call and screen sharing functionality is below average.
Slack on its own isn't usable for remote work, it has to be Slack + Google Meet or Slack + Zoom. Slack's tech in that area just isn't up to industry standards.
This is the premier way of detecting a company shaking in their boots towards new competition, especially Microsoft: Writing letters to their competitors. Who does that?
Facebook Inc. fought off the old giants: Google, Apple and Microsoft (which even has a stake in FB) when they revealed their 'social networks' and they all failed. Facebook owned that category. No stupid letters or any overreactions.
The same Slack that said "What we’ve seen over the past couple of months is that Teams is not a competitor to Slack" [0]. The IBM deal is essentially keeping Slack alive. Maybe IBM could be thinking with Microsoft "Just like old times?"
From [0].
> “I think there’s this perpetual question, which at this point is a little puzzling for us, that at some point Microsoft is going to kill us,”
Right, predicting Slack's own death, even worse when he knows who will kill Slack.
Sure, but their distinction seems kinda silly. They're arguing that because the Microsoft Office suite has been so successful, adding any new product to it is anti-competitive.
> We know that playing nice with others isn’t exactly your MO, but if you can’t offer people an open platform that brings everything together into one place and makes their lives dramatically simpler, it’s just not going to work.
Some people love teams, and it’s enough people to stifle the company from spending even more money; and, crucially, from having sensitive data spread across multiple companies instead of just one.
I don't know if you can call competition when the other guy is teleported directly at the finish line. This issue affects open communication applications too not only Slack. What would be ironic is if EU forces all of them to use open standards so I could integrate my open source app into Office too
Whether or not they actually welcomed competition, this lawsuit is perfectly consistent with that letter. The allegation is that MS is engaging in anti-competitive behaviour.
Sounds like a pretty desperate move to me. Teams is not preinstalled with Windows; it's part of a suite of products. Office products these days don't even need to be installed (in fact, I bet MS would rather prefer that you did not).
>Teams is not preinstalled with Windows; it's part of a suite of products.
Most businesses are buying that suite for Word/Excel. Teams comes along with it for free from their perspective. That can definitely be anti-competitive.
I agree that Slack's case is pretty weak here. It's hard to see the harm to the consumer when Microsoft's bundle is cheaper than Slack's lowest paid plan.
Skype for Business (or whatever the legacy chat product is or has been called) dates back to 2007 and was typically present in your EA seat license bundle. Slack might be better than Skype, but it’s weird to suggest that getting into a market with an established history suddenly becomes anti-competitive only as soon as your competitor actually produces something that’s not a raging dumpster fire.
Office 365 is more of a monopoly than Windows now. This kind of bundling and cross-subsidy is classic monopoly abuse, and is almost identical to the IE case.
I'm curious in what way microsoft would not be interested in having users not install office. I thought that office was microsofts primary revenue source (maybe this is info from before cloud stuff though).
I think GP meant MS might prefer people not install Office and use the online version instead. I don't know if there's a difference in pricing and if it's possible to only get the online or the offline version.
Using the online versions allows them to have everybody at the same level all the time, which might mean easier support.
I for one prefer the online versions. They work fairly well in Firefox on Linux. Outlook online is way nicer to use than the installed one. Much, much snappier...
Office365 is cloud based. The more you use it, the more you use Microsoft's resources, the higher the cost for them and maybe the higher the strain on resources available to others.
So for an Office365 bundle with x products, you pay the same price whether you use all x products or fewer. The fewer you use, the better for Microsoft and they don't take a hit on revenue.
The thing is, Teams integrates with the rest of Office 365 much more than IE did with Windows. It's very easy to argue that it's a core part of the product.
In general, Microsoft has really nailed how if things work well together, they become more than the sum of their parts. That's why each individual part doesn't need to be the best in class in order to win. Which is bad news for Slack, but it's hard to argue that it's bad for consumers.
Well, I use Ubuntu. No problem with my two customers using Slack (one is Mac basede, the other one is more or less BYOD). All of us install the desktop app and it's done. If they switch to a more integrated system like Team maybe (and only maybe) it could be difficult for me to keep using Ubuntu when working with them. So too much can be bad for some consumer.
Pretty much all of Office 365 is available through a single unified API. Whether they use that API for their internal integrations, I couldn't say. But I would guess any integration they're doing could also be done by a third-party who was that way inclined, yes.
Readit News
On the other hand, Slack's walled garden is also effectively anti-competitive; trying to create a monopoly via vendor lock-in to the Slack product & ecosystem.
It feels like a better bet would be for both of them to adopt and support open interoperability standards, so users can avoid being locked into any single vendor, and have full sovereignty over their conversation data. (Disclaimer: as project lead for Matrix I may be biased :)
Can you imagine not being able to send a UPS packet to a DHL address or not being able to call an AT&T phone from a Verizone one? And how long until I cannot send mails from my Gmail address to you Outlook one?
We live in the Wild West of the digital age.
I still remember the times that Microsoft was trying to own the WWW thru non-compatible Internet Explorer extensions. And, also, the time that Microsoft tried to own Java by adding Microsoft extensions to it. (https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-microsoft-settle-java-suit/)
Companies have many incentives to create lock-in software and proprietary protocols that go against the interest of their own users.
For much of the 20th century there was exactly one phone company in the US, and it insisted on total control of all equipment connected to it. Even non-electrically connected mouthpieces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...
FWIW, a few of my friends at an Elite engineering undergrad program didn't think that was possible. I was baffled.
The Web is already a mature platform and has not actually made things more interoperable. It replaced a lot of the previous internet infrastructure that was (IRC, Newsgroups, SMTP which still somewhat clings to life)
The idea of Windows pushing IE by bundling it seems laughably quaint to me these days where most people can't even install a different rendering engine on their device than the stock and choice is purely illusionary and very few seem to bat an eyelid or even notice.
b) Slack could just build their own Office suite. Google did.
Reminiscent? They recently pushed out a mandatory windows update that caused IE to take over your entire screen upon restart, pin itself to your taskbar, and attempt to set itself as the default app for numerous functions: https://www.theverge.com/21310611/microsoft-edge-browser-for...
That's false, if you install any new browser -- Chrome, Opera, Firefox -- the next time you open a URL or HTML file, Windows will ask you if you still want to use your existing default browser or change it. This is done because apps can no longer set the default browser themselves and must ask the user to do it.
Regardless, your existing default browser is still the top choice, clearly spaced from the rest: https://techdows.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/popup-dialog... (in this example, Firefox Nightly was recently installed, causing the prompt)
Pinning itself to your taskbar is debatable because it effectively replaced Edge, which comes pinned to taskbar out of the box.
This may not have come off as you intended ...
I use matrix and like it but I would love to see more competition in the federation space.
I actually chuckled.
Fair notice yes, but you do not need to post a dis claimer. This is an internet chatroom, there is no need to file a disclaimer as if it has any legal currency.
In this case: Thanks for your fair notice, that's interesting you're working on Matrix, I'm intrigued and I might have some interesting comments and it got me thinking further. But no no I won't sign your disclaimer. There is no legal effect or otherwise statute limiting outcomes of posting a disclaimer.
And why not? We all have biases, and posting a disclaimer won't absolve you of still having the intentions you may have and bring to a discussion. That's the nature of human society and simply by being an actor you already accept this fact. So in conclusion, nope, no disclaimer needed.
What's the anti-competitive angle here, other than the OS is created by Microsoft, the IM system is created by Microsoft, the Office suite is created by Microsoft, and the licenses are often bundled? Apple would be guilty of a similar thing by shipping Messages.app and iWork with macOS, no?
0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...
I don't support Slack here but MS really forced Teams on us like it or not.
Anyway, at least you can self host Exchange. Slack is centralized.
The following day, it came back. It turns out you have to remove both Microsoft Teams and something I think was called "Teams Machine-Wide Installer." Only then would it stay removed.
Isn't that because your org chose to deploy Teams, though?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/msi-deployme....
Their products and licensing provide more value now than they have in a very long time. There's also G Suite which is pretty cool. Or you could use Libre Office.
Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more google docs/sheets created on certain days of the year than there are Word/Excel documents.
Deleted Comment
While it may not be included in the OS, it is certainly promoted in Windows. I saw a full-size pop-up ad in Windows telling me to install Teams. I did not have Office installed.
I feel that Slack dominance is hurting the productivity, because:
- It's impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki, google doc or an internal blog
- Slack is incentivized to keep you IN Slack, for engagement. They don't have their own permanent-knowledge-base-software, so they pretend it's not needed.
It's a different case with Teams, because they offer quite a roster of software to write things up permanently - like sharepoint or office365 and will likely pursue integrating tighter and tighter.
Because Slack is a standalone product, they will push for using chat in the workplaces MORE. Microsoft can offer chat as a "when needed" basis.
The logistics of trying to be productive on a company group chat led me to create a free "Win at Slack" mini-course: https://deliber.at/chat/
Microsoft sees chat as a piece of an overall communication "puzzle". They have Sharepoint for more persistent information and Yammer for "outer-loop" communication.
My startup (https://www.friday.app/) is based around the idea that there needs to be a "home" for the most important stuff at work that complements workplace chat. It's somewhere in-between Slack and a wiki (which most people don't use regularly).
Workplace chat tools like Slack are wonderful for quick collaboration, but if you over-index here you will run into trouble. That's why Zapier, Automattic, and Stripe have all built their own internal tooling to help.
Every Team, by default, has a Posts, Files, and Wiki tab. Designing a way to roll up those Wiki pages, like they do with Sharepoint hubs, would be a good move.
https://www.notion.so/
Zulip honestly seems like they've solved this problem better than Slack though.
Permanent, searchable chat in Slack has been way more powerful for me than all of the other options for knowledge capture (SharePoint, Confluence, etc). I can almost always find what I need and if there is more up to date information, Slack seems to surface that first.
It seems like the difference between real-world usage and theoretical solutions in this case is wide.
Remember the full page ad they ran in NYT? https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-...
My oh my how the tables have turned. There is something to be said about Microsoft and their ability to execute in the office space. Even my Dad, an architect at 70yrs old, is using MS Teams, while he never heard about Slack or any other collaboration tools.
And looking at their product portfolio around MS Teams, if there is a company I'd be willing to bet that they win the workplace transformation race is Microsoft. It's easy to forget when you're working comfortably in the Silicon Valley tech scene, that there is a real business world out there and MS is the ruler.
I'm sorry but Teams absolutely sucks compared to Slack. There are tens of thousands of people voting for feature requests on the Teams community site, to bring Teams to parity with Slack. The killer one is that when you start a thread in Teams, it will be pushed to the most recent spot every time someone comments on the thread. In Slack, the original post that started the thread is stable, and threads are in a side panel, so the order of original posts is maintained chronologically.
There are other examples as well, but just in general I find myself spending way more time just navigating around in Teams and losing productivity trying to work within it.
Like do they want to be an optional add on into O365?
[1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370
Slack failed to see how fragile their product was and now needs to be acquired or make their own productivity suite.
Slack on its own isn't usable for remote work, it has to be Slack + Google Meet or Slack + Zoom. Slack's tech in that area just isn't up to industry standards.
> Dear Microsoft,
> Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition.
Uh yeah, I don't think you are..
[0] https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft#
Deleted Comment
Facebook Inc. fought off the old giants: Google, Apple and Microsoft (which even has a stake in FB) when they revealed their 'social networks' and they all failed. Facebook owned that category. No stupid letters or any overreactions.
The same Slack that said "What we’ve seen over the past couple of months is that Teams is not a competitor to Slack" [0]. The IBM deal is essentially keeping Slack alive. Maybe IBM could be thinking with Microsoft "Just like old times?"
From [0].
> “I think there’s this perpetual question, which at this point is a little puzzling for us, that at some point Microsoft is going to kill us,”
Right, predicting Slack's own death, even worse when he knows who will kill Slack.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/1/21244158/slack-microsoft-t...
0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/04/amazon-licenses-slack-for-wo...
> We know that playing nice with others isn’t exactly your MO, but if you can’t offer people an open platform that brings everything together into one place and makes their lives dramatically simpler, it’s just not going to work.
> it’s just not going to work.
Some people love teams, and it’s enough people to stifle the company from spending even more money; and, crucially, from having sensitive data spread across multiple companies instead of just one.
"We ... know you’ll be a worthy competitor."
Yeah, until we sue you...
Imho it's a very, very weak complaint.
Most businesses are buying that suite for Word/Excel. Teams comes along with it for free from their perspective. That can definitely be anti-competitive.
I agree that Slack's case is pretty weak here. It's hard to see the harm to the consumer when Microsoft's bundle is cheaper than Slack's lowest paid plan.
There is nothing stopping businesses from using Slack.
Dead Comment
Using the online versions allows them to have everybody at the same level all the time, which might mean easier support.
I for one prefer the online versions. They work fairly well in Firefox on Linux. Outlook online is way nicer to use than the installed one. Much, much snappier...
So for an Office365 bundle with x products, you pay the same price whether you use all x products or fewer. The fewer you use, the better for Microsoft and they don't take a hit on revenue.
In general, Microsoft has really nailed how if things work well together, they become more than the sum of their parts. That's why each individual part doesn't need to be the best in class in order to win. Which is bad news for Slack, but it's hard to argue that it's bad for consumers.
Btw, people consume t-shirts, but office suits?
The only thing ive missed there is the ability to take control of someone else's pc.