Ah, the sleeping monopoly wakes. Github, Slack, Azure. What next?
Atlassian are working incredibly hard to control the dev stack. Tight integration between Jira, Confluence, BitBucket. Bringing documentation, development, estimation, backlog together in a unified view.
Microsoft now have all the pieces. Office 365 managing users and the business side, SharePoint, GitHub, Azure, Teams.
When they start working to unify/integrate these pieces together in to a seamless experience so you can communicate, plan, build, track and deploy all on the Microsoft stack it’ll be very compelling product for businesses and very difficult for any competitor to compete. Not only would Atlassian need Jira/Confluence for example, they’d need their own Cloud for you to deploy to.
So your contacts app knows just which contacts to highlight/suggest based on your org chart (active directory), communication history (outlook, teams), and subject matter (documents/SharePoint/teams message history/etc etc). And it's all subject to centralized authentication, access, and audit controls.
The integration goes into the azure products, too. Your kubernetes RBAC can be based on AAD, so your running containers have an identity that could access Teams and email of you want. Your serverless functions, ML toolkits, etc etc run with their own AAD identities, too. Oh and of course monitoring integrates with their world leading business intelligence tools, including Excel.
This is all there already. Azure DevOps does exactly what you describe:
> you can communicate, plan, build, track and deploy all on the Microsoft stack it’ll be very compelling product for businesses and very difficult for any competitor to compete.
And those features are coming to GitHub Enterprise, so you can do it with the developer product you already know and like. And of course, with tight integration to do it from your IDE if you like.
This is so funny, because Outlook does exactly the opposite and it's so annoying. Seems like such an obvious thing but hey, it's only 2020...
And they didn't crush Slask by being one.
Actually, they didn't crush Slack, period. Slack was just sold for tens of billions. Many multinational giants would only wish they were "crushed" like that.
As for the "Teams has 115M users over Slack's 12M" - isn't that because it bogusly counts non-users with access to Team (which is everybody having Office 365, which was already in that range).
DAUs - so unless it auto-embeds somewhere and counts those users (which it doesn't, but I'm only in one O365 org) it's legitimate users.
Having all those tools integrated with the rest of another suite like Microsoft 365 would be enticing to corporate users. It would definitely starve out competition, but isn't new in Microsoft playbook.
And no, anything based on Sharepoint is not that.
Which is a pretty low bar, if you ask me. The fact that Sharepoint doesn't clear that bar says a lot about how bad it is.
I guess this space is so boring that we aren't seeing any exciting startups tackling it and giving the incumbants reason to innovate.