Microsoft Crushed Slack

Then isn't this antitrust behavior? Office, the file format, the desktop suit, and arguably the subscription definitely has an monopoly in the documents business. Microsoft is bundling teams , a separate product, with a dominanting product and including it for free. This is what is destroying slack. It seems like the common sentiment is that people use Teams because it's bundle with office 365, which they need for word, excel and powerpoint. But slack as a product is better than Teams. And people would pick slack if Teams and Slack has the same pricing. Honestly, I don't get why microsoft gets away from the recent anti trust scrutiny. The whole office 365 bundling. The bundling of dynamics with office 365. And bundling of azure, dynamics and office 365 with EA agreements is just so anti-competitive to me. More so than what apple is doing with the app store. Seems like microsoft just has the feel good, benovlent, "make everybody achieve more" PR branding. And it's just not in the general public's spotlight helped. But microsoft's bundling strategy is legit hurting smaller business software makers.

I feel like anti-monoploy law should be used to prevent this kind of bundle selling. And this is something that is actually easy to implement. And microsoft will still do well. The smaller competitors get equal footing. Microsoft's valuation and competitive moat will not change too much. Not to the point where it's not survivable.

And when microsoft bundles everything. It forces things like Slack bought out by salesforce happening. ISVs like slack can't compete on it's own, it also needs another ecosystem or bundling to survive. So it forces ISVs to be merged into other ecosystems and bundles and it create big companies each with their own bundles. For the consumers, it reduces choice, create more lock-in, and less freedom to be mobile between products. From economic standpoint, it creates a few big businesses that controls a lot of things and makes so much money they don't even know what to do with that money.

It’s always back to the problem of enterprise software catering to procurement managers. Slack made headway because it infiltrated from the bottom-up. Employees used it, probably sometimes surreptitiously, and once it had a lot of users it started reaching out to management teams. That’s the one thing that concerns me about the acquisition by Salesforce. Slack might not really cater to end-users anymore, although Heroku is one example where Salesforce seems to be doing an acquisition right.

I have spent so long making fun of Google for doing that that I never even noticed Microsoft was doing it... I wonder why these large companies are so bad at realizing the network effects of unified chat with stable addressing?