Why Microsoft Teams Flopped and What It Means for Slack

Microsoft Teams was only announced in November, literally two months ago! I think coming in saying it has flopped is a little pre-mature. This article is a lot of words but doesn't really say much.

Team is still very much a beta. And almost kept a secret if you want to use it :

- we could only use it with office 365 premium accounts

- you have to explicitly grant users access in the portal

- If yiu ever used Skype for business you have to be sure you are signed out.

- integrations really only started working reliably at the holiday break

- Skype calls to individuals does not work. Team calls and screen sharing does

- document uploading sharing won key because of it being built on SharePoint

- mobile isnt fully fleshed out compared to the desktop client

Things it has going for it:

- the ability to attach and edit documents with team is amazing

- screen sharing works out of the box

- the task tab is useful like trello on the cheap

- price at the moment - we pay 7 per user for slack and 15 for all office. If we lopped off the costs for slack savings are pretty significant

For as much as Microsoft Teams sucks it has the killer feature of Skype Integration. Since Skype won't open up for Slack integration and I can't convince anyone to pay for Slack while Teams is "free" (as in already paid for as part of our corporate office account) we are moving from Slack to Teams. I think almost all enteprise level corporations who are using Microsoft Office 360 will follow suite. It sucks but it is how Enteprise level software works.

Written by a Slack and Microsoft competitor. Teams is still in preview, and the developer platform w/ 3rd party integrations hasn't even launched.

https://blogs.office.com/2016/11/02/introducing-microsoft-te...

Q. When will Microsoft Teams roll out broadly to all eligible Office 365 customers?

A. Microsoft Teams is available in preview to eligible Office 365 commercial customers beginning November 2, 2016. We expect the service to become generally available in the first quarter of calendar year 2017.

I'd encourage people to read the article rather than focusing on the headline. The author makes a lot of way more interesting points than the title would indicate.

I tend to agree with the article -- Slack is going to get squeezed by Microsoft or Google because companies are already paying them for business services

Skype is pervasive in my industry. We use it constantly for work. And all of our clients use Skype as well. Because of that we cannot remove Skype from our workflow. So we are not focusing on adopting anything else.

"According to the latest stats, Slack has 1.25 million paying seats"

Sounds way way to high. Slack gives you $50 for every user that signs up. Does this mean ALL their users are paying customers?

"adoption is very low"

Based on what numbers?