The new Microsoft Teams, now in preview
techcommunity.microsoft.com
techcommunity.microsoft.com
Their market is big legacy companies where tools aren't chosen based on merit (instead chosen on buzzwords, kickbacks or money under the table) and where the day-to-day users of those tools don't have the power to demand change.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery puts it well:
This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”; I explained my personal experience with Teams in a December 2018 Daily Update:
"Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than One Drive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically."
This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
It's been my experience, too. M365 really actually just works and Teams and Outlook (for the web) are a pleasure to use.
I would say the real reason it "works" for non-tech workers is because they don't have enough bargaining power to reject crap such as Teams and similar Microsoft software, and/or haven't had the chance to try out anything else and don't know what an actually good experience is, while tech workers generally do and reject it as a result (that's why this garbage is non-existent in startups and tech-centric companies).
Spinning it as a tool for non-tech workers is a nice cop-out from the truth which is that non-tech workers merely lack the political power needed to reject this shit (and similar - Windows, etc) just like the vast majority of tech workers do. If those non-tech workers were given a choice, Microsoft's marketshare would significantly shrink overnight.
Enterprises don't go Microsoft Suite because they are primarily good enough. In some categories, there is virtually no competiton and in others, the good enough is tolerable.
Do you really think that if non-tech workers had enough bargaining power they would really waste their time with Slack vs Teams instead of, say, better wages ?
> If those non-tech workers were given a choice, Microsoft's marketshare would significantly shrink overnight.
X doubt. Most people (rightfully so) use their work computer just to work.
Those aren't mutually exclusive - you can fight both for better wages and for better tooling that makes you more productive and your work day less miserable.
> Most people (rightfully so) use their work computer just to work.
That's the issue - people should focus their limited time, brain power and "bullshit tolerance" on actual work stuff rather than wasting it on dysfunctional software. The tools should work and get out of your way as much as possible.
Ask yourself why most tradesmen have 5-figures worth of expensive professional-grade tools in their van? It's not that cheaper, consumer/DIY-grade tools can't do the job at all, but the professional-grade tools will do that job better/easier/quicker and will generally be more reliable and less annoying to use. Tradesmen understand that the more expensive tool is still worth it if it saves on time, frustration and malfunctions and that's why those tools sell despite costing 10x the price of their DIY-grade equivalent.
The equivalent of Teams in the above scenario would be if a beancounter joined a construction company, saw the expensive tooling on the balance sheet and having never ever used a power tool himself, decided to replace it with cheap consumer-grade versions because the Home Depot salesman told him it's just as good.
> That's the issue - people should focus their limited time, brain power and "bullshit tolerance" on actual work stuff rather than wasting it on dysfunctional software.
Exactly. Which is why Excel is king in finance, and not a free alternative with half the important features missing [1]
Microsoft do many things wrong, but they also do many things right, and I suspect that you underestimate a suite that really does contains power tools.
Add to that the deployment story for a big enough company, and it's no wonder why it has such a huge market share.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
the thing that most people don't understand is that Microsoft doesn't make only slack, and their other software is usually pretty good.
Excel for example is a marvel of software engineering, Word is pretty great too. Outlook works well in an enterprise setting (though i wouldn't use it for personal needs). And their groupware works remarkably well. And their ActiveDirectory (Domain controller + LDAP/Kerberos) is fairly good.
And guess what? If you're a 10-people company sure, you can do without Excel/Outlook/Word/ActiveDirectory/etc.
But when your company gets bigger it's just the choice that makes the most sense.
Oh and guess what: most of the software in named is native software and works offline too.
So basically your company is not buying Teams... Your company is buying an office suite and gets Teams for free.
Also... People (developers mostly, I must say) tend to forget they're not the only people on the planet. People from the accounting/hr/logistics/marketing departments are probably just fine with Teams.
Agreed, though I would say that whatever "good" is there is mostly a relic they seem hell-bent on destroying. I say that as someone who happily switched to Windows 7 after almost a decade of Linux, and then took refuge in Apple-land when Microsoft took a turn for the worst and started churning out shit. Since then the shit stream only increased unfortunately.
Their Office suite on Windows is indeed unparalleled (assuming you need that, which not all companies - or at least not all employees - need). Likewise for Active Directory - it's something Apple still hasn't caught up on, and don't even get me started on Linux.
But all that is no good if you constantly have to fight it, which is increasing more and more. Windows + Active Directory is supposed to make managing a fleet of workstations easier so that end-users can do their work efficiently. If the admin (or end-users) now have to fight with literal adware being introduced into the OS every few updates, the value proposition falls apart. Same if the chat client can't effectively paste text without fighting you on formatting, or max out the CPU on a video call so that your machine slows down to a crawl and is no longer an effective tool to get work done.
> People from the accounting/hr/logistics/marketing departments are probably just fine with Teams.
Go back to my previous posts - I'd argue they are "fine" with it because they're used to terrible tooling and never had a chance to discover how good tooling can be. You could say the same about healthcare workers being "happy" with healthcare software even though it's often awful by any technical person's standards, but since they do not have those skills they accept the mediocrity thinking there's some unsolvable technical reason why the software they are using is bad, rather than incompetence/mismanagement on the suppliers' part.
The Google suite isn't bad, but Google Spreadsheet is no Excel either.
Microsoft Team in itself is clearly behind Slack, but it's also nice to have a single sign-on solution where your Chat app (Team) is well integrated with your mail app (Outlook), and your shared file service (Sharepoint).
Add stuff like PowerBI, Yammer, and of course the main Word/Excel/PowerPoint applications, and you can clearly understand the value proposition for companies that aren't cash-strapped, while on the other hand Google is more famous for their habit of sunsetting their products.
I say that as someone who's been mainly on Linux for more than 15 years now, loves 'artisanal' TUI tools, and who quickly gets annoyed at Windows 10 bloat and adware.
/rant mode on
On the opposite side of the single sign-on solution, I've also seen an extremely startup-ey company using Discord as the official chat app, and having the displeasure of realizing that Discord doesn't really allows for multiple accounts using the same phone number for 2FA. I already have a Discord account, I just don't want to use it in a professional setting. Single-sign on is indeed nice.
/rant mode off
It's like living in Japan and saying, I rarely see people speaking English, how come it is the most spoken language in the world?
Most corporations, employing hundreds of millions of people, run entirely on Microsoft's suit of products, so it makes sense for them to go with Teams and 365, it integrates better with the rest of the stack, easier to manage from an IT perspective and then there's licenses cost and complexity as well.
I use Google G (or Workspace now) and Discord for my small business, but my customers at a corporate level use 365 / Teams.
I have my own preferences of course, I think Discord is better than Teams for meetings and collaboration, I particularly like the ability to stream multiple screens at the same time, for pair programming and troubleshooting it is very helpful.
But I don't think Teams prevents me from doing my job either, it works pretty well in my opinion and there's really not much difference in 365 and Google G as far as I can tell, in terms of what you can accomplish with it for basic tasks related to work.
It's pockets of hyper early adoptery / fashionista startups and small media production companies where people started on Google because it's what they were used to from non-work life (they've probably been on Gmail as long as it's existed because it's just been the cooler product for forever). A good example being a recent LTT WAN show where Linus and Luke went "Who even uses Outlook?" and were genuinely surprised when people said that Outlook's actually good.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/xt5uho/wan_s...
Ben Thompson on the Silicon Valley attitude towards Redmond:
Back in the 1990s Silicon Valley was terrified of Microsoft; then, over the intervening years, that fear faded, and Microsoft became yesterday’s news at best, and the punchline of jokes at worse. Obviously the company has completely turned around its fortunes over the last decade, but even then the primary source of growth has been Microsoft’s ability to bring its pre-existing customer base to the cloud.
There have been other intrusions into Silicon Valley consciousness, of course, particularly when a seemingly unstoppable startup ran into the Microsoft distribution advantage wall, but few people in Silicon Valley use Microsoft products, and that’s that. Indeed, the response of several folks I talked to after Microsoft’s demo was “what demo?”
I think this is a massive mistake: Silicon Valley needs to rediscover its Microsoft fear, and Business Chat gets at why. Make no mistake, the Copilots are impressive, although it is reasonable to expect that Google Workspace’s implementation will be at least comparable. The problem with the Workspace + vertical SaaS app stack, though, is that none of it is designed to work together. I’ve been arguing for years this is an underrated reasons why Teams beat Slack; from 2020:
"This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”…This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that."
I think Outlook is much better than Gmail and the built in Apple mail program, and will always choose it if it is available. I actually use Apple Mail on my personal computer as I don't need the advanced filtering + calendar solutions that Outlook provide.
We use Slack for chat, but Teams for video calls. We have tried alternatives to Teams for video, but they are either too expensive or not good enough. Teams is also included in our 365 package, and non-technical employees get tired of testing alternatives as long as Teams "works".
I agree that Teams is much worse than Slack for chats, which is why the company has standardised on Slack for chat.
I would bet the largest org on Google Apps is Google itself
At some point, there is always experienced people hired that “need” office, then a period of confusion and duplicated out of synch files, followed by a decision to switch everyone to MS.
It is 2023, how can they find it acceptable that loading is so slow that UI elements appear one by one? That's something I expect from a computer running Windows 95 on a 386DX.
No matter how much revenue Teams is generating, given the number of users, it deserves a native app, not a webview!
That ship sailed long ago after they excreted the turd that is Windows 8 and its successors.
Advise from a recovering UWP advocate, stay away from Windows Runtime (WinUI and WinAppSDK) as much as possible.