Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft
slackhq.com
slackhq.com
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...
AT&T's telephones still had to interoperate with (e.g.) the British Post Office's phones (and everybody else's) to remain relevant/useful. AT&T was very far from controlling all telephony equipment in the whole world.
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)
It doesn't have to be. The Web evolves relatively rapidly these days, and Matrix does too (although it could be faster, for sure). It's important to support freedom as well as privacy - as per https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom.
Only if your not one of the Big Tech companies....
If your Google you just say "We are doing this, you can either add it to the spec or not, but we are doing it"
Then it magically gets added the spec very quickly
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 ...
eta: (Sorry to sound old and curmudgeonly, but... I am old and curmudgeonly. I do not believe for one little instant that any corporate culture is capable of reversing its lifelong ingrained habits and postures.)
That being said, if MS does in good faith embrace Matrix for Teams, that would be amazing.
I use matrix and like it but I would love to see more competition in the federation space.
It's nice that the full-featured Python one can use Postgres, and succeed at operating Matrix.org, but it's not nice that you have to frequently "restart its synchrotrons" for users to be able to adjust their notification preferences. Python is a capable language for smaller systems, but at >120K lines, it worries me.
It also worries me that there is no way to split traffic to an overloaded system out to two not-overloaded systems. Is that fundamental to the architecture? That seems like the top priority to fix. Can it be done without breaking the five other server implementation projects too badly?
In terms of Synapse (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse): originally the initial prototype for Matrix, historically it had performance and architectural issues given we were frantically implementing features to prove Matrix rather focusing on perf. Since hitting 1.0 a year ago though things have improved massively. Almost all of Synapse scales horizontally; we've switched to Python 3 and have almost finished switching to asyncio (improving perf and maintenance massively); and lots of schema perf issues have been shaken out. Unsure what you're thinking about w.r.t. "restart its synchrotrons", but that just sounds like a bug that got shaken out years ago.
Dendrite (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite), meanwhile, is in very active dev by the core Matrix team - there was a long hiatus while we had to focus exclusively on Synapse, but since the beginning of this year there are folks working fulltime on it, and it's looking super promising as a very microservices-driven model, with each service scaling arbitrarily horizontally, connected via append-only logs. All the P2P Matrix work is built on it (running it clientside, as it's such small footprint). It's effectively in competition with Synapse, and worked on by different teams. It federates today and can be run as late alpha, but the CS API is missing some features that we're currently adding.
Conduit (https://conduit.rs) is the new kid on the block, written by the community in Rust, using a strictly monolithic structure for now, using Sled as a key value store for storage. It's incredibly fast, and has impressively good CS API coverage (including E2EE, whereas Dendrite's E2EE support is only landing this week), but federation work hasn't begun yet (which is a bit worrying, as you need to design/build with federation in mind from square 1). It has a great community though, and is entirely independent of the core Matrix team, and you could say it's in competition with Dendrite.
Construct (https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct) is a C++ server using rocksdb for storage. It's a community project entirely independent of the core Matrix team; it federates, and has extensive CS API coverage, but unfortunately the project's author has been incredibly antagonistic to the core Matrix team over the years, which makes it rather hard for us to comment further.
TL;DR: Matrix homeserver dev is in a good place right now :)
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.
A disclaimer is generally any statement intended to specify or delimit the scope of rights and obligations that may be exercised and enforced by parties in a legally recognized relationship.
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.
You then needed to sign in before it would give you the option not to start with windows or to only start in the background.
Obviously you could avoid this by uninstalling teams and ALSO it's auto installer. I'll add the caveat this may have only been the behaviour for those with skype for businesses installed or those in NZ(I've heard NZ is occasionally used as an early roll out/testing zone for some microsoft products) rather than more generally.
Anyway, at least you can self host Exchange. Slack is centralized.
No, we don't have to use Teams. But we were using Skype, so we were going to move to something. No one was already using Slack and paying for just chat wasn't going to be in the budget. We can certainly uninstall it. But you have to be sure to uninstall the machine-wide installer they stick on there or it comes back.
After covid, we hold most meetings in Teams now and its been fine. Wish I had more control at the beginning and it didn't just show up where we already had Skype.
I’m guessing that’s what they mean by it being forced upon their users.
Honestly, Teams is better than Skype. But it wasn't until covid forced everyone home that we really started using Teams, that first week was painful.
Then one day in June 2019 Microsoft informed me that Skype for Business was going to be upgraded to Teams. I had the option to request a one month delay but I could not stop the roll out of Teams. At some point Click-To-Run (the installer for O365) put Teams on every computer that already had Office. In addition to the Teams app it installed the Teams-machine-wide-installer, which installs Teams to every profile that logs onto the computer, making it run at logon.
Its that part where I didn't get to choose because I already had Skype for Business that bothers me. The machine-wide installer is annoying too. Yes one can uninstall those things but that takes admin rights (some action by 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.
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.
In what areas? I see an industry with more and more consolidation. There is no longer the serious competition there once was in the field of office suites or certain kinds of creative software, which is really sad.
I entered computing at a time when there was basically nothing else available. Mac was trash and way past its glory days. Linux was a toy that no one would use seriously. The hardware support was non-existent and if you wanted to get online you often had to go buy a new modem. The other players today didn't exist yet.
It's true there is consolidation, but there are also options which didn't exist at all not too long ago.
By definition, a monopoly is a majorly dominant market position, it says nothing about how it was achieved or the quality of the product.
>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.
Things being worse in the past is not a reason to not push for further improvement. By your argument we should stop all research and progress since things used to be worse so we should be happy enough with the status quo.
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.
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.
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.
I realize this is a matter of opinion but I think that's kind of the problem, both platforms have chosen one way and forced it on users. I'm not sure that there's any same way to make this configurable either, but I don't think one option is clearly Superior to the other.
There's also plenty of precedent either way, even just looking at old forum software which tended to sort topics by activity (the Teams approach). That seems to mean that neither way is going to be obvious to all users.
I guess the conclusion is that I'm not sure there's an approach to this problem that won't piss someone off, but by that token it's not a clear win for Slack.
Also for what it's worth I think Slack's behavior is the less common option across similar products, but I've not done any kind of exhaustive survey, I just use 4-5 of these things and Slack is the one that always throws me off by behaving that way.
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..
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...
And they are right about that. Microsoft has been repeatedly convicted for this behaviour (Windows Desktop -> Internet Explorer, and Windows Desktop -> Windows Media Player). Trying to argue otherwise would, IMNSHO, be silly. The only valid question remains, does Slack's offering itself (corporate IM) fall under the office productivity umbrella or not?
[0] and no, you do not have to own 100% of the market before being considered a monopoly
I don't think there's a comparable concern here. Teams won't open incidentally in the course of making a Powerpoint; there's no way for me to end up using it without an affirmative decision that it's the right messaging tool for me.
I just can't see including a browser in an OS as some evil practice. It just seems like obvious good sense.
> adding new features to it that are in direction competition with other products is anti-competitive behaviour.
Probably any new feature you could think to add to Office exists somewhere on the internet already, in some form. Is MS just not allowed to add new things now?
Or what if MS manages to add something first, then an upstart competitor appears right after? Does it not count as anti-competitive then?
MS has had Lync and Skype for the longest time. And MSN messenger goes back to the 90s.
In fact, Microsoft has had chat apps as part of their suite since before the company that eventually released Slack even existed.
Even the selling separately argument seems absurd. How is this any different than adding another Office SKU?
> 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.
Teams looks A.Fucking.Mazing.
"We ... know you’ll be a worthy competitor."
Yeah, until we sue you...
The best outcome.
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.
I personally don't think it's anti-competitive but I at least see the argument that can be made.
There is nothing stopping businesses from using Slack.
Teams is not actually free for people who don't want the rest of Office.
That being said, I don't this should be illegal.
There is something stopping businesses from using Slack - the fact that Microsoft gives them Teams for free.
To be honest I doubt this will be a successful case. Companies get away with this all the time. I think the Windows/IE case is the only instance I've ever heard of something coming from it.
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...
This is what I meant. It’s very clear that Microsoft sees the future as cloud-first, and their traditional installers are still there only for defensive purposes. I bet they’d love to drop them, if they could be 100% sure that this wouldn’t mean losing customers (the ones with old browsers, unwilling to retrain, unwilling to use Sharepoint rather than network folders, etc) and that it wouldn’t weaken their entrenchment (those billions of offline .docx and .xslx are a massive moat that is very hard to abandon for good).
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.
As with most Microsoft licensing & naming things it is surprisingly complex!
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.
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.
Microsoft isn't being anti-competitive here. Out of all the FAAMG, they're the one that least resembles a monopoly.
You're struggling because you are selling chat 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.
You had a chance to build a moat and make acquisitions to fortify your position, but you didn't do it. You invited competition from Microsoft and instead of doing something, you rewrote your Electron layout six times and made a WYSIWYG that everyone hated.
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.
You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.
Yeaaahhh I used to think that. Until I expanded to Asia.
Chats as platforms and general portals to the internet is pretty amazing, despite the drawbacks to the centralized control that some of the chat app implementations.
For the last several years when I open a new business bank account for an online-only service and the banker asks for my website, I correctly tell them I don't have one, as everything happens over chat apps, and "websites" are an antiquated, useless, unnecessary form of validation for North American and European markets for a pyramid of ad/web design/tracking services and are simply not a barrier in selling a product online.
Bots for slack/discord/telegram and platforms in asian markets all leverage pretty robust environments. Whereas in the past (and many people still do this) it was necessary to build a whole website and your own platform with the hope of reaching users like with mobile apps that have so much friction to reaching you. Can they complement each other? sure. But you should just keep selling those shovels to other companies stuck in the last decade, while building something with much lower barriers and efficiencies for yourself.
I think Slack is on the right track. They can monetize their api and bot marketplace.
I've been excited about what the general 'chat UI' can accommodate and love API's like that of Telegram that allow a ton of custom UI and functionality that augment chatbots.
And it's been frustrating to learn how in Asia this unified interface offers portals to tons of stuff that in the west I need to visit (shitty) websites for (putting aside the issue of the web technically being more open than something like WeChat).
My impression is that Slack hasn't really done much to try and bring the 'chat UI' to the masses, even though they have a lot of power to try and do so. Telegram seems to have done more, including of course native desktop apps that I feel comfortable having open all the time.
While it's true that other chat-offering companies haven't done much either (WhatsApp doesn't even have bots?), or perhaps it's just really hard to change a culture, it still feels like Slack could've put a ton more effort in trying to bring what's clearly working in Asia to Europe/US/etc.
I might be wrong though; I've mostly been reading up on this on occasion and never really dove into any of it beyond building Telegram bots to scratch my own itch. But I picked Telegram because it has much better apps for all my devices, so there's that at least.
By all means correct me though. I really, really want chat-based solutions to so many things. It's nice, for example, to be able finally order most of my takeout online with so much less friction than in the past. But it feels silly to have to make an account with at least two providers, open their 'bespoke' apps or website, learn their UI, and so on, when I'd much prefer having an ongoing 'conversation' with the restaurants of my choice where, say, I can re-order an earlier order or pre-populate an order by scrolling up the chat history and picking an order I liked. or to be able to chat with the courier/restaurant about delivery rather than having to deal with whatever shitty home-built interface the restaurant or delivery service offers.
How does a chat based solution lead to a better experience compared to an established website?
> I'd much prefer having an ongoing 'conversation' with the restaurants of my choice
That sounds a lot like ordering over the phone.
If paying for seats goes out of vogue, they have the other things and its an okay niche.
If the Developed world can't afford Slack what chance has the Developing world really got?
Slack wants €200 for a 15 member team or somthing. Per month. While Google will sell us all the same stuff and more (GDrive, Corporate Email, GCalendar, Hangouts Chat etc) for a lower price (GSuite), all of which we need anyway.
Coding the custom solution around Mattermost cost less than one year of Slack and in year three we're still happy with it
Any recommendation for experiencing it?
Can we get some of them on Western app stores , and still get a representative experience with integrations?
I was able to get this in San Francisco with relative ease, and when I accidentally gave the CCP my address book, pretty much all my asian contacts were already on it.
Maybe also easy to get verified with the student body of major universities.
For an example, most recently, I was trying to verify a client exists and couldn't find anything on Google, but when I had the mental spark to check WeChat they had a whole business page, lots of updates, easily accessible representatives, followers, accolades, etc.
What it needs now is someone who can add (for want of a better term) "knowledge management". The search sucks; it is just garbage. But beyond fixing search, it needs... something. I started sketching an idea involving users tagging comments as a baseline something to try to make it more than a realtime stream of undifferentiated business info.
Your Slack history contains a ton of info your company needs. Too bad you can't find it if someone said it last week.
Amen. It's deeply ironic that email threads actually work better at this use case than Slack does, despite it being Slack's alleged raison d'etre.
I try to think from the 'regular user' perspective and often assumed that they just don't care. I figured they'd have Slack open on their desktop all the time at work, or just not care about load times or battery drain. I figured that was just one of those '(web) developer things'.
But I've been surprised at how much friction there is to using Slack with various non-nerdy clients I have. They'll constantly send me messages via WhatsApp or even Telegram. The ones that I've convinced to use Trello often start using it for their own stuff.
But Slack is a slog to them. Mostly the desktop clients, but I've heard a number of them complain about mobile (which I don't use much, but I thought was native?).
Whatever Slack is doing right, whatever its other problems, surely the fact that 'regular folks' feel friction using a chat app that one is supposed to regularly use is a cause for concern!
It can be a product, but I guess it will have the same fate as Web Browsers. Who buys a browser product nowadays? Web-browsing is a feature.
> team communication package
A.k.a chat program.
If Slack charges too much, there's a host of free alternatives that can be used, meaning they have limited ability to increase prices.
Compare that to office suites. There's not that many options here and it's pretty difficult to build something that would have the functionality that enterprises think they want/need and compete with incumbants like MS.
The main free alternative (libreoffice) has had recent struggles with funding, due to the level of work needed to maintain and improve their offering
Products like Atlassian's HipChat predated Slack by many years.
It is easy to dismiss something as "just a chat product" but then again, it is incredibly hard to make a product that is so easy to use that everyone can use. Reminds me of that comment about Dropbox from years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Personally, I think what happened was that GChat became popular, and killed all the alternatives, and then basically stagnated and confused the shit out of its users through hangouts etc.
Slack was one of the first products that realized that since GChat had gone, there was a huge gap in the market.
I’m hard pressed to think of any area where they were beyond predecessors in either ease of use or features (I can’t remember if persistent chat rooms were available in all the other messengers) beyond those little custom emoji things.
and all the teenagers in all the high-schools who otherwise had no affinity with computers whatsoever.
/slap
But that was 20 years ago, of course. You can't compare the technical prowess of a random kid back then with a current well-paid software professional with access to portable hardware 100s of times more powerful.
There's a reason Mozilla moved away from IRC, and it wasn't that "their engineers couldn't figure out IRC".
* Many businesses have purchasing rules that discourage buying 2 duplicate products -- so by bundling a bad team chat product with Office 365, they significantly reduce Slack's ability to get paying customers simply because of their monopoly position (not because of their product's quality).
* Microsoft is in a market position where they can effectively bribe potential customers with discounts on other services they sell (E.g. we'll add another $250K in Azure credits if you agree to go all Microsoft).
> You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.
This I agree with -- but the reason is that we're in a world of essentially unconstrained monopolistic tech giants, and it's basically impossible to stop a tech giant 100 times your size from taking your market if they really focus on doing so. And Microsoft is clearly very focused on the team chat market.
There are very few markets where it's possible to create a moat that can resist a monopolist copying your product (however badly) and then making the price of their copy zero (or negative!). I don't think we should accept a world where the only long-term outcomes for a fast-growing technology company are to be acquired or destroyed by a tech monopoly.
> Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets
This is a common misconception. While you can make "chat" as a demo with any web framework, nobody would willingly use that tool. Creating a team chat user experience that isn't terrible requires a huge amount of work because there are hundreds of features that significantly improve important workflows for large classes of people (if you don't believe me that it's hundreds, read https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/changelog.ht... and https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen...).
Dropbox, Box, Asana, Airtable, Zoho, Amazon, Adobe. There's other ways they could grow to become Microsoft that don't start with document editing. Adobe in particular would be an attractive mix. Google and Facebook sound like mediocre homes, because they already offer such overlapping suites, but maybe its just about user acquisition. Oracle would probably be interested in monetizing chat.
At the end of the day though, they will need a competitive spreadsheet offering. Everyone needs spreadsheets.
And at least anecdotally, Dropbox has completely disappeared in the world around me. I used to get links to stuff in someone's public folder, or be added to a company/person's dropbox to collaborate, and all of that's gone now. It's usually Google Drive, sending stuff around on Slack (which I'm not a fan of), or back to email attachments.
Maybe that's just very particular to my situation, but considering the variety of people I interact with as a freelancer/consultant, it doesn't bode well for Dropbox in NL at least.
Not that I need 1TB of cloud storage at all, which is why I haven't committed to either yet.
At the same time, I think Slack has an exit problem. As you've said, they're selling chat. They have to hope to be acquired - but by whom? Google already has 12 platforms. Facebook has 2, and famously doesn't compete on this part of the business side. Similarly, many of my friends companies have left Slack for things like RocketChat, Chanty, or Mattermost.
I think Amazon may well feel a need to go up against its cloud infrastructure competitors Microsoft and Google with its own set of office/collaboration offerings. And they have a pretty deep cooperation with Slack already.
(Disclosure: I am a Slack shareholder)
This is clearly a case of confounding an app being easy to use, with it being easy to build [1]
[1] - https://graymatters.substack.com/p/-why-easy-to-use-apps-are...
My freelancer friends write bots for Slack that integrate various other products to work within slack. They would say Slack is a "platform" for communication.
Ouch, what happened to Netflix?
Seriously?
Slack could be accused of creating a "weak, copycat product" in their file hosting, document editing, video calling and workflow automation features.
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.
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?
Nov 2016 - Slack declares how thoughtful, craftmanship-y, open, loving, long term-y and un-Microsoft-y they are [1]
Jan 2018 - Teams launches app store
Aug 2018 - Teams offers free tier to compete with Slack [3]
Mar 2020 - Slack starts integrating Teams calls [4]
Apr 2020 - Slack launches Outlook and One Drive apps [5]
[1] https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft [2] https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793870058955104257 [3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563710/microsoft-teams-... [4] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197091/slack-microsoft-... [5] https://slackhq.com/increase-everyday-productivity-with-offi...
I think that's exactly the complaint: that Microsoft is hiding the true cost of Teams, using anti-competitive "bundling" to make Slack seem more expensive by comparison.
Not saying I agree, but that does seem to be exactly the complaint.
The goal of bundling is usually to introduce people who like one of your products to your other presumably-equally-good products, especially if they integrate well. Right? Sounds good!
If you're incredibly successful at that, and the most popular of your products is market-dominating, then that may be leveraging your market position to squeeze out competitors.
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.
I can't see Slack getting out of this in one piece. I see Amazon being the obvious choice here.
Looks like he said it in May 2020. So i wonder what happened since then.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewar...
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.
Is teams auto installed with the Office suite and can it not be uninstalled?
0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...
If they’ve added Teams to that installer, I’m not surprised.
but from the link you gave:
>BUT, if you are willing to invest a little effort, there is a business specific tool you can use. It is called the "Office Deployment Tool". You will have to edit a simple text only "XML" file that tells the tool what you want it to do.
My guess is they may be referring to enterprise setups or perhaps an enterprise office 365 installer. I'm using 365 but not an enterprise 365 account so I can't speak for how it would behave there. Bundling Teams in with the other stuff that gets installed might be an option individual companies can opt into.
"btw, teams is installed, try here" "login failed, maybe you are not allowed by your admins, nag them about it"
repeat every 2 weeks
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?
Maybe the actual problem is that big companies have a lot of money that they can spend on this products and offer them for free then make it impossible to create a fair competition. Would MS get the same Windows installs if the computers would come with the choice of different OSs )from what I read in most shops in the world options with alternatives are not present)
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.
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.
It has always been. Windows has had Dropbox-like features all the way back to 1998; but they sucked (and there wasn't enough bandwidth...), so people didn't use them. We've had corporate IM offerings since forever, and Skype existed waaay before Zoom. The likes of Dropbox have thrived by focusing on building better products, more powerful and easier to use. There is space for everyone in the market, if they have the best product and/or the best timing.
Consider open source alternative such as zulip or matrix. Zulip is used by rust team :) and has a pretty good threading model.
edit: hmm, I guess this depends on what it means for the protocol to be open vs the platform itself...
Because that's all you are describing is: basic antimonopoly regulation.
How ironic.
But in the end it worked perfectly well for Microsoft. The settlement was essentially a slap on the wrist.
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.
What next a law suit for bundling Access? Don't get any ideas Oracle...
That's part of what makes the anti-competition claim hold true to me. If Teams were pushed as a first-class component of Office to paying users (maybe the way Groove was at one point) but not forced upon every user regardless, it might be different.
Not when the bundle is a monopoly. This was established with the rulings on MS bundling IE with Windows.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps that would be fair, being such a massive company. I just don't know.
The only thing we're really missing from Slack is threads.
This is MS’s version of sherlocking. Every big Tech company does this.
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.
If only the wars was about efficient applications then we would all win.
I recall using MSN Messenger on a machine with 64 MB of RAM I think and it did approximately the same - instant messaging.
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).
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.
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.
From what I noticed Skype for Business is used often within enterprise companies.
That said,it sucks less than teams.
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.
I think this even will have a bigger effect than breaking up these companies, and it will be easier to push through politically.
Edit: Typo
While this individual action may appear on the surface a net gain for everybody (though you surely meant everybody but Microsoft), the net negatives of continued unnecessary government interference in tech are harder to recognize since each just increases legislative momentum. Then we get surprised we weren't stauncher and more principled when the heavier hand is shown.
> Slack previously revealed it has 12 million daily active users back in October, but the company has not publicly updated this number since. Microsoft Teams usage has soared over the past year, reaching 44 million daily active users during a big increase in demand earlier this month. Slack has instead been trying to steer the conversation to how many actions are taken in Slack compared to its competitors, and how much people love to use its app.
0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195092/slack-new-user-r...
Vox had an article about it a year ago: https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government...
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.
If you want to argue that Teams ripped off of Slack, I won't disagree with you there. But Slack was just an evolution of IRC + plugins also. So it isn't a novel idea that they came up with, it was just well executed.
I don't even like Teams, I much prefer using Slack. But Microsoft having a productivity suite where they're offering a productivity app seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Google is doing the same thing with Google Meet/Chat, it's going to get bundled in Google Apps for Business.
But to make a clone of a product, and slip it into your existing offering which is very popular amongst the general populous is an anti-competitive practice.
Microsoft consistently walk a fine line with this sort of crap. Whenever I update my PC, I DO NOT want to know about the new features of Edge and then be prompted to replace my default browser with it.
Firefox, Chrome and other browsers don't charge for their product but Slack does. It's this sort of thing that in which Microsoft need an occasional slap in the face for.
I haven't been using MSO for years now and most companies I work with use Google Docs.
Teams is bundled with Office, which is neither bundled by so many hardware vendors, nor essential for operating a PC, nor free of competitors.
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
"Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft - Several People Are Typing" [1]
Due to the og:title tag being different.
---
[1] Emphasis mine.
If you want to refer to what you posted elsewhere, a link is fine.
* life consists of Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Confluence and Sharepoint....
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 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.
If this point is considered to contribute to a successful claim, I think it says something sad about the EC.
No, you're not forced to install both X and Y. But it's pretty clearly taking advantage of a dominant market position.
I don't like Microsoft's software, nor do I use it, but if this is illegal and the Apple App Store isn't, the EC is none but a lawfare weapon for many-billionaire companies.
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.
Curious to see what regulators end up doing to force compliance since these fines don’t seem to do so.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/business/dealbook/eu-anti...