Slack says Microsoft is back up to old bad tricks, “browser war” style

This is exactly what I thought.

I'm all for m$ getting hit with whatever legislation is related, but this isn't it.

It's definitely not as serious as Windows+IE back in the day, but MS Office is the defacto office suite. MS managed to make a proprietary standard The Standard and constantly break compatibility with other suites. And now they are extending that dominance to the conference software world with Teams. It's a fair parallel to draw, IMO.

My interpretation was that the issue is the use of Microsoft Office's dominant position to (allegedly) push Slack out of the market. They aren't providing one product that does two things (fax/phone), but rather they are providing multiple disparate products in a package together to take advantage of the fact that everyone wants one of them already.

I think a better comparison is if Verizon were to decide they want to make a smart watch, so they start bundling them with every cell phone they sell. Sure, users can go out and buy a Fitbit if they want to, but Verizon would be taking advantage of their position as cell phone gatekeeper to get them into everyone's hands before they even have the chance to make a market decision. Users could come into a contract with a phone they got independently (analogous to windows users who don't use MSOffice), but the vast majority are just buying a phone from the Verizon store. Admittedly, the analogy would work better if Verizon was more dominant in the market, but as it stands the big three US cell providers seem to be on pretty equal footing.

I largely agree with Slack failing to innovate on the user experience side and continue to deliver new value to customers. I give them the benefit of the doubt that they've been doing lots of innovation on the backend that I can't see.

In my heart I feel that as long as Teams remains at least a half-decent product it will be very difficult for anyone else to compete in this space as long as MS bundles Teams with Office. Office absolutely is a monopoly -- pretty much any new software that's bundled with it is going to eat everyone's lunch. Doesn't matter if that's Teams or a Spotify clone ("Music for Office") or an HR suite.

This rule feels valid to me for any general purpose software that's used in nearly any business. I don't think it holds up for specific domain software: VSCode doesn't eat IntelliJ's lunch, and a half-decent Photoshop clone included with Office365 wouldn't kill Photoshop. It also doesn't hold for other free software (Edge can't eat Chrome because Chrome is also $0 so they only compete on utility, not price).

If it ends up there's no future competition for Teams, that's not going to be a good thing for consumers / citizens at large. It's definitely in the interests of the public to ensure that there's a healthy market for competition.

Part of making sure things are good for consumers / citizens is also making sure there can be tight integration. If Slack can make a client that integrates Teams and Slack channels into one frontend, and integrates with Outlook/Exchange/Calendar as well as Teams does, and allows users to hop on Zoom calls, that would be amazing.

I'm currently a strong proponent for opening up API's in software so that new companies can add value on top of existing services, rather than having to build all of Rome from scratch just to develop the Colosseum.

Oh thank you, sorry I didn't realise a similar story had been posted previously.

Didn't Google just did the same thing by bundling Zoom, Slack, and more into Gmail?

They purchased Yammer and progressively made it a slower, added bugs, continued to degrade the UI/UX and messed up the authentication system, it became a dumpster fire.