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Comment by youniverse | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used teams but if it's so bad there has to be a good open source alternative? Let's build one???

People use Teams because they're already using Microsoft office products and it is "free" in that way. Then it's entrenched and folks can't imagine doing things any other way.

>Then it's entrenched and folks can't imagine doing things any other way.

It basically works the same as every competitor, I'm not really sure why you'd need to do things 'any other way'.

I can imagine my calendar working / not dealing with Teams issues. A chat interface that is better.

Granted plenty of office drones can't imagine / use much else at this point.

We had to start using it because all of our clients demanded it. Managers/Owners don't say no to big money.

But then you'd be onboarded (as a guest) on their Teams environment, right? You wouldn't need to have your own to make that work. In fact, when I had the need to switch between environments I found that experience to be extremely confusing, frustrating and buggy.

Yep. Companies sign up for O365 and then the bean-counters insist on killing any other products that can be replaced by that (if you squint hard enough) because they see it as cost savings.

Yeah, that's the whole point of M365. If you are all in on the stack it's great. If you use 5 different products instead, it doesn't make any sense.

It’s not about bean counting, though. As a small startup, should you really spend like $15/user/month on a chat app that you get included with your office suite? Try to explain these expenses to your investors.

Is it common for startups to provide all of their employees with Office nowadays?

Google Workspace isn’t really popular here, most non-technical folks need office tools, and you’ll definitely need email, cloud storage, and communications, so yeah—I’m not quite sure how we would be able to do business without O365 or an equivalent platform.

Seems like you're unfamiliar with enterprise IT

Your comment is unnecessarily dismissive.

Disrupting the space now doesn't seem any less hard now than it was 10 years ago when slack and zoom did it.

But yes, if your point is that it's hard, then indeed. It is hard. Should that stop someone? No!

I think it's dismissive to say that explaining something is harder isn't important.

And something being harder stopping your from doing it is ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much effort something will take and weighing the risks and rewards.

Let’s try to turn this into a productive thread that adds some value here.

What is it about enterprise IT that is preventing us from building a better alternative?

How can we get around those hurdles?

If you built that alternative, would companies choose to use it? they get teams built into their outlook and office 365 contracts and all the other integration. Slack didn't lose because it was worse, so just being better isn't enough.

The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical without their funding to start with.

Cronyism and nepotism is how you get "Enterprise IT"

Chat is a commodity. Right out of the gate, that's not great for margins.

Enterprise chat might not be a commodity quite yet - SSO, DLP/data classification, auditing, retention, compliance checkboxes - but these seem insurmountable at first glance to get a FOSS solution to reach a viable enterprise feature matrix.

Killer features as a moat might help, but while almost everyone uses chat, everyone probably uses chat differently, so that means discovering killer features for a niche and trying to own that segment before expanding. Unfortunately this is the "Draw the rest of the owl" part, because while I have quibbles with chat apps, I struggle to envision a chat app that does something radically different than any other chat app.

Slack is not open source. Neither is Zoom.

Your comment is just fake empathy noise.

Slack and Zoom both predate Teams. Teams only gained penetration through bundling with the rest of MS products on large enterprise contracts.

There are already open source alternatives built for both Teams and Zoom. The issue is that open source projects don’t have salespeople that will promise compliance and integration (whether or not they can actually deliver).

> Teams only gained penetration through bundling with the rest of MS products on large enterprise contracts.

Hard disagree on the "only" modifier. Surely integration helped, but I've used Zoom, and I hate it every time I have to use it. Teams is comparatively a godsend.

He wasn't dismissive, he was countering dismissiveness. It was dismissive to throw out "just build your own". 99% of companies don't have that option, most companies are customers, not builders. This commenter was pointing out the obvious lack of perspective on the majority of businesses. That is a huge problem in SV and software development these days, the lack of awareness and context about real problems out in the market. "Just build a replacement" is a non-viable route for most people and most companies.

I work at a large company, and we use Mattermost, which is open source.

There are plenty of better alternatives. Companies won't adopt them, and the bare concept of those applications is problematic already.

(Disclaimer: Teams is in my "red flag" list when evaluating a company - I hate it that much)

Teams is not popular because it does something that no other app does. It is popular (IMO) because it does everything (calendar, chat, videoconference, and wiki - all of it badly) and, if you're a Windows user, you're paying for it one way or another.

All that Microsoft had to do during the pandemic (which is when they unleashed Teams) was to approach a higher-up and pitch "why would you pay for Slack and Zoom when our product does the same? And since it's already included in your Office license you're already paying for it, so really, you're throwing money away". I know me and my friends complained about it, but so what? The company saved on licensing costs and IT people are always complaining anyway. And while the bundling of Teams got Microsoft in trouble in the EU [1] they still haven't paid any fines for it (I think) so it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have done that.

</rant>

[1] https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-teams-eu-european-union...

While Slack doesn’t do all of that natively. Everyone integrates with Slack. For instance if you get tagged in a comment in Google Docs you can reply to the comment in Slack. You can start a Zoom meeting from Slack and Google calendar (corporate) integrated with it.

There are proprietary competitors.

Oracle have a dark team working on what will become "Oracle Team Fusion".

I'm looking forward to the competition.

Most of the functionality is available in NextCloud which is open source and self-hostable.

There are many! None of them have power of Microsoft monopoly

Microsoft a monopoly in 2025??

In what?

- operating systems? The Mac has over a 20% market share in the US. I haven’t used a Windows PC for work since 2017. I’ve used Macs across 4 companies

- Office Suites? GSuite has a higher market share and the company I work for now uses it.

- Chat? Slack has 25%.

Absolutely no one in the industry is afraid of Microsoft anymore

Azure, SQL, Dynamics and PowerBI come to mind. Together with the integration in the Microsoft 365 suite/page/ecosystem.

Azure is not a monopoly and not even the largest cloud provider. Sql Server/Dynamics and PowerBI aren’t exactly market leaders.

Just a quick internet search shows that PowerBI has around a 25% market share.

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