On one hand, the playbook of exploiting Office's dominance to push Teams is very very reminiscent of exploiting Windows' dominance to push IE.<p>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.<p>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 <i>any</i> single vendor, and have full sovereignty over their conversation data. (Disclaimer: as project lead for Matrix I may be biased :)
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.<p>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?<p>0: <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#how-to-exclude-microsoft-teams-from-new-installations-of-microsoft-365-apps" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...</a>
There was previous discussion around written asynchronous communication being a superpower.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577228" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577228</a><p>I feel that Slack dominance is hurting the productivity, because:<p>- 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<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The logistics of trying to be productive on a company group chat led me to create a free "Win at Slack" mini-course:
<a href="https://deliber.at/chat/" rel="nofollow">https://deliber.at/chat/</a>
It is quite amusing to see Slack filing competition complaint after being so brash in bashing MS at the launch of MS Teams.<p>Remember the full page ad they ran in NYT? <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-teams-new-york-times-ad" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-...</a><p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Slack failed to see how fragile their product was and now needs to be acquired or make their own productivity suite.
Slack's "Dear Microsoft" [0] letter in 2016 looks even sillier now.<p>> Dear Microsoft,<p>> Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition.<p>Uh yeah, I don't think you are..<p>[0] <a href="https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft#" rel="nofollow">https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft#</a>
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).<p>Imho it's a very, very weak complaint.
The thing is, Teams integrates with the rest of Office 365 <i>much</i> more than IE did with Windows. It's very easy to argue that it's a core part of the product.<p>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.
It's about time. I don't know exactly what Prince means by "gateways vs gatekeepers" in this context as Slack is itself a pretty closed system, isn't it? It's not using open protocols or interpretable with competing chat systems as far as I know. However I do find their allegations that Microsoft forces a subpar uninstallable copycat product to be accurate and credible. Teams is a bottom tier application and they are so aggressive about forcing it on users, it's a little silly.
Can’t really shed tears for a company which wanted to kill email and wall off content into their own proprietary product. They have ridiculed email so many times that itself is ridiculous. They are still trying to figure out interoperability of one org’s chat spaces with other orgs when it was a solved problem 40 years back.
Dear Slack,<p>You're selling something that isn't a product. Standalone chat is a feature, and you won't win against a full product offering unless you drastically reduce your prices. You need to get acquired (by Google or Facebook), because I don't think you can innovate an office productivity suite fast enough to compete. And that's clearly the enterprise puzzle piece where chat fits into nicely.<p>Microsoft isn't being anti-competitive here. Out of all the FAAMG, they're the one that least resembles a monopoly.<p>You're struggling because you are selling <i>chat</i> as a service. Something that has been free since IRC and AOL Instant Messenger. Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets. You built a pretty (through opinions vary) version with access controls.<p>You had a chance to build a moat and make acquisitions to fortify your position, <i>but you didn't do it</i>. You invited competition from Microsoft and instead of doing something, you rewrote your Electron layout six times and made a WYSIWYG that everyone hated.<p>You had four or five years to do something. You had a chance most startup companies dream of. But here we are. You squandered that chance while you reveled in hubris.<p>You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but this press release is a bit embarassing. For most business use cases Slack is more expensive, and less featured than Microsoft 365, and it's having to work very hard to justify its existence.<p>Slack could be accused of creating a "weak, copycat product" in their file hosting, document editing, video calling and workflow automation features.<p>I think this is a long continuation of the awkward brand strategy Slack has had for some time. "...an open platform is essential" [1] just doesn't ring true from a closed source SaaS, but it's a good marketing message - so vague that you can't really disagree. And weirdly it's gone from being a poorly conceived guerilla marketing strategy (almost complete with bespoke emoji [2]) to a legal case.<p>It maybe explains how Slack has been racing to embrace Microsoft recently - in a bid to show how "open" they are, and therefore how much they have been damaged by "closed" Microsoft? But wouldn't that swing both ways - if they integrate so easily, then where is the monopoly?<p>Nov 2016 - Slack declares how thoughtful, craftmanship-y, open, loving, long term-y and un-Microsoft-y they are [1]<p>Jan 2018 - Teams launches app store<p>Aug 2018 - Teams offers free tier to compete with Slack [3]<p>Mar 2020 - Slack starts integrating Teams calls [4]<p>Apr 2020 - Slack launches Outlook and One Drive apps [5]<p>[1] <a href="https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft" rel="nofollow">https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft</a>
[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793870058955104257" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793870058955104257</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563710/microsoft-teams-free-version-slack-competitor" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563710/microsoft-teams-...</a>
[4] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197091/slack-microsoft-teams-integration-calling-features" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197091/slack-microsoft-...</a>
[5] <a href="https://slackhq.com/increase-everyday-productivity-with-office-365-apps-for-slack" rel="nofollow">https://slackhq.com/increase-everyday-productivity-with-offi...</a>
The additional problem I see with Slack is that their calls/video chat option is really inadequate and almost everyone is opting for Zoom. Zoom + Slack is a very steep price point for a lot of companies, especially in an era of cost saving and insecurity about the future.<p>My company opted to move to MS Teams because the experience is better as it integrates calls + chats and we were already using office365 for emails and documents anyway, so it was "free". As someone said already, it's hard to compete with free.<p>I can't see Slack getting out of this in one piece. I see Amazon being the obvious choice here.
Didn’t their CEO say that Teams is not a competitor.<p>Looks like he said it in May 2020. So i wonder what happened since then.<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewart-butterfield-microsoft-teams-competition" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewar...</a>
Find it odd that so many people hate Teams so much. For me, it works considerably better than using Slack did in my previous position; the only downside for me personally was the lack of a Linux client initially, which is now present.<p>It's also considerably better than Slack for mixing other communications in, which is widely used in corporates: video calling, screen sharing, and the fact that you can hook it in with phone systems. Given it's effectively replaced Skype, that's not really surprising. Prior to teams being introduced at my current company, we were using a mix of Jabber, Cisco WebEx, and other ad-hoc tools in various teams. Now we can use Teams to do all of that.
"Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers"<p>Is teams auto installed with the Office suite and can it not be uninstalled?
>Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.<p>So what's the core issue here? That Microsoft bundles Teams with Office 365, or that it gets auto-installed and can't be removed? If that's considered anti-competitive, is it possible for eg. Evernote to go after them as well, because OneNote is also bundled? What about Dropbox, because Onedrive is bundled?
I've been using Slack for a while and quite much like the basic functionality (chat) when you working in single organization context.<p>However recently I've been playing around with Teams quite a bit and I'm feeling this integrated experience with all the tools is the future. Even when running just in browser it is already pretty good. You have chat, calls, mail, can collaborate on documents etc. Having everything in one package feels convenient. Not saying it's perfect. There are bugs and for example different file storage backends (Sharepoint vs Onedrive) are a bit confusing.<p>It will be challenging to for these "best of breed" apps (Dropbox, Slack, Zoom) to compete with the integrated offering from Microsoft. It's just so easy to get everything from single vendor. One user/group management, one invoice etc.
I really think we need some laws which require companies to open their protocols to allow seamless integration with other companies or open source implementations. There is no real reason why this should not be possible. E.g. take chat protocols. WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Hangout, and all the others. It would be easy to have some way that they could communicate with each other. But companies don't want that, because they want the vendor lock-in. This is bad for everyone in the end. The only real way to solve this is if this is enforced by some law. I'm not really seeing that some law like this would be possible in the US, though. But maybe in EU...
Same guys that on November 2nd, 2016, run a full page ad on the NYT [0], titled "Welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution", and signed "your friends at Slack".<p>How ironic.<p>[0]: <a href="https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft" rel="nofollow">https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft</a>
Teams from what I understand is pretty much free with office. Slack is going to have a hard team competing with free. It also doesn't have the same video desktop sharing capabilities as teams from when I last used it.
I've been thinking about antitrust a lot recently. Years ago, Microsoft were losing in court over the right to ship their browser with their operating system.<p>Now, you get reminded how great Edge is when you try to change your default browser, you get the new one in a forced Windows update that launches the browser itself on startup, places shortcuts back in your task bar, etc.
I personally see this as a weak move. Surely a bundle of software can include whatever they desire to include.<p>What next a law suit for bundling Access? Don't get any ideas Oracle...
I have used slack at 3 different jobs and they seem to have lost touch with what the user wants and struggles with in their environment. Before launching some anticompetitive tirade they should focus on becoming a better product. There is no way I’m going to side with them while they auto hide contacts that I talk to throughout the day just because I have a list of several hundred. Also what’s up with not allowing multiple tabs open to view multiple conversations at the same time? Even Facebook has that feature. If anyone at slack is listening.. get off your antitrust high horse and get back to coding, you’ve let your product become inferior and this just sounds pathetic asking for the government to step in and help you do what your design/dev team cannot do for you.
I think Slack's case against MS has legs. I work for a company that makes a competitive product (<a href="https://www.airsend.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.airsend.io</a>) to Teams/Slack. It gives a bit of insight on what is happening here.<p>Teams comes free with office 365 (now microsoft 365). For just 5$ per user/per month one can get email/one drive/office web apps and teams. There is no way slack can compete with the pricing. Slack's pricing starts at 6.67$. For businesses, office apps are a must have. When Teams is bundled with office apps, there is really not a reason for businesses to go and pay for Slack. So one can argue MS is using its dominant position in office suite to undercut the competition. The fair thing to do is charge some money for Teams. Personally I feel we need to have more diversity and choices in the IT systems we use. Increasingly the tools we use are controlled by 2/3 dominant platforms (4 companies account for 49% value of Nasdaq 100). It is not good for customers in the long term. Once you obliterate the competition by bundling it free, one can always come back and raise the price.<p>There is some serious blood between MS and Slack (It all goes back to the time when MS tried to acquire Slack). FWIW, Slack's posture during that time was also not really good (Cocky). I am guessing - It hurt somebody's ego very badly in MS. So the leadership team in MS made it as a personal mission to obliterate Slack. The whole game is playing out now.
There are laws and companies will use those laws to their advantage as much as possible. Not doing so is stupid.<p>Just as Slack is trying to get Microsoft in trouble over antitrust, Microsoft is currently trying to get the US to investigate Apple over their App Store. Everyone is looking for an edge. It is better to use that edge while you're competitive than when its too late. Except in Microsoft's complaint about the App Store, the train left the station a long time ago.
The thing this has me thinking about is, assuming Slack wins this lawsuit, can MS no longer add any more fully featured products to Office? Not saying that is good vs bad, it just becomes interesting if their position suddenly means they must create new bundles for new offerings and cannot ever leverage existing offerings to get into a market.<p>Perhaps that would be fair, being such a massive company. I just don't know.
I'm surprised Discord isn't showing up in the comments. We moved from Slack to Discord (even though we get Teams "for free" it doesn't get as much usage and setting it up to work with outside-the-org collaborators is painful), and I know of a lot of other companies / open-source projects moving to Discord too.<p>The only thing we're really missing from Slack is threads.
It’s definitely monopolistic to include Teams into Office(Excel,Word,PPT) only after slack shows value. As a user though, Teams is working out well for us.<p>This is MS’s version of sherlocking. Every big Tech company does this.<p>I think one work around would be to have an independent council that recognizes these events, and forces the big players to pay out $100M per incident. This might satisfy most parties involved.
Idea: find some feature that's part of a software suite, like the ability to zoom on Windows. Build a business around just that feature, like sell a zoom tool for Windows. If the business flounders start an anti-trust lawsuit because Microsoft includes that feature for free in Windows.
Hey i am wondering if someone within knowledge of EU competition law can give their analysis on this.<p>The thing that stands out to me is that this is a private competition law action - it is not a government agency/commission taking action. This indicates that the government agencies in the jurisdiction don't currently see this as a priority. Many of the prominent anti trust actions in tech have been taken by regulators (eg EU commission vs Google).<p>From my brief understanding of competition law barriers to entry and consumer detriment are issues the court considers. As others have stated, Microsoft is far less dominant with cloud office products than they were with windows pcs in the 90s. They are also not the incumbent in the chat market trying to block competition out.
Something I didn't see someone mentioning: Microsoft is moving everyone from Skype for Business over to Teams. Any enterprise customer will have to migrate. Skype for Business is quite different from Skype itself, basically a marketing thing.<p>Moving enterprise customers over from a chat&screen sharing app to teams is quite a change. There's loads more functionality, options, etc. I don't think if you had Skype for Business before you'd ever consider anything such as Slack or similar.<p>From what I noticed Skype for Business is used often within enterprise companies.
Slack has a quality problem that they really need to get on solving. Their desktop client has way too many weird quirks, and I just plain refuse to run their android client anymore.<p>That said,it sucks less than teams.
Messaging is big and Slack is too small to compete in this space. The only viable way out for Slack is to join Google. Because we all know Google can't build messaging apps!
I think there needs to be a law that forces companies that benefit from network effects to open their standards once they reach a certain market power (similar to antitrust and monopoly laws).<p>For example, Twitter would be forced to open their standard and then anyone can build clients (and host servers), just like IMAP and POP3 works for email.<p>I think this even will have a bigger effect than breaking up these companies, and it will be easier to push through politically.<p>Edit: Typo
Can I be against MS bundling Teams <i>and</i> against Slack using the government to unbundle it? I know that public companies attack for growth at all angles, including litigious ones, but this turns me off of Slack's general business strategy (if I wasn't already). I yearn for the company that accepts modest growth, applies its principles to itself only, and remains technically focused no matter how large.
As a layman, it seems link companies looking to cut costs in current environment are finding Teams (free) more sensible option than paying millions to Slack. So while the WFH push is doing wonders for other communication platforms like Zoom, Slack is not seeing that benefit. Otherwise, it looks a bad time for a company to be distracted by political games.
The battle of the glorified IRCs is on!
Sure, Microsoft is shady as usual (not all of it, but a good part), but once Teams get stable and everything actually works, it should smoke Slack.
At least Teams offers more than chat, and it has a justified need for running in a browser.
The best move now would be for Slack, Zoom to merge, buy Airtable and Webflow, quickly try to build a moat. No one will get this opportunity again. But they might just build the next Google/Facebook/Apple this way.
Sounds like a typical corporate move by Microsoft. I side with slack on this one in that Microsoft is using its position with Office as a dominant productivity tool and wedging their Teams product in there.<p>Vox had an article about it a year ago: <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government-antitrust-investigation-apple-amazon-google-facebook" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government...</a><p>It's the long game they can play because they have the resources for it. If they bankrupt slack by offering an alternative that's free and almost at feature parity, then it's an easy win for them to absorb the short term running costs of their own chat product Teams.
> its market-dominant Office productivity suite<p>is it really that dominant nowadays? I think it was around late 2000s when I last saw a 'use MS Word format' in any personal/corporate document exchange
Slightly off topic, but when you share this article via social media, the page title becomes:<p>"Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft - <i>Several People Are Typing</i>" [1]<p>Due to the og:title tag being different.<p>---<p>[1] Emphasis mine.
Not exactly related but how is Microsoft's approach to Teams any different than Google's approach to Google Chat (or Hangouts Chat) that also is component of G-suite?
If someone could make a JIRA/Confluence/Slack for devs it would make my current life* very easy.<p>* life consists of Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Confluence and Sharepoint....
one of those times, where I will say the big co isn't in the wrong. slack, has suffered the hand of the market. that the deck, the market dealt wasn't in your favor. is slack a product, could be ? but what are the advantages ? strategy 101. real business don't ride on fashion, but utility. teams is good enough.
> We want to be the 2% of your software budget that makes the other 98% more valuable; they want 100% of your budget every time.<p>Please. You are a company in a capitalistic system, it's your goal to make money. If you'd have the chance, you'd also take 100% of your customers money every time.
> <i>Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.</i><p>I feel like it's bad for a society to place no weight on agreements. “Force installing” is a pretty bold claim, given that Office is a piece of self-updating software that adds new components on a regular basis, and which says as much when you install it. Teams is a component of the Office suite in the same way that Microsoft's SSO system is.<p>If this point is considered to contribute to a successful claim, I think it says something sad about the EC.
Good for Slack. Filing a major lawsuit against one of the biggest tech companies is an incredible decision to make.<p>Microsoft has been doing this for years with basically all of its products and hasn’t really changed its behavior [1]. They continue to get fined for not abiding by earlier EU judgements and rulings.<p>Curious to see what regulators end up doing to force compliance since these fines don’t seem to do so.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/business/dealbook/eu-antitrust-tech-stocks.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/business/dealbook/eu-anti...</a>