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Microsoft Might Crush Slack Like Facebook Crushed Snapchat (vox.com) 144

Posted by BeauHD from the copy-and-paste dept.
"Tech workers' favorite communications tool, Slack, is losing ground to its biggest rival, Microsoft Teams, which has copied its way into popularity," writes Rani Molla for Recode. "In other words, Slack has the same problem as Snapchat, which has suffered from its bigger rival Facebook's relentless appropriation." From the report: Slack's market share among the world's largest companies is mostly flat, adoption rates are declining, and a bigger portion of these companies indicate they plan on leaving the service, according to a new survey by market research firm ETR, which asks chief information officers and other leaders at the world's biggest organizations* where they plan to spend their company's tech budget. Meanwhile, Teams is seeing increased market share, relatively higher adoption rates, and low rates of defection, according to the data.

Slack, which is currently trading below its first-day opening price, has been beset both by smaller companies hoping to improve upon it and tech giants trying to copy and replace it. Microsoft, at one point, had even considered buying Slack. Instead, nearly four years after Slack's debut, Microsoft launched Teams, which has since adopted many of its competitor's functions, including the basic premise of creating an online office space for coworkers to collaborate and communicate. The situation was similar with Facebook, which after failing to buy Snapchat began to copy it, feature by feature. Facebook did this with impunity because it's not really possible to copyright what software does -- you can only copyright the code itself. Since products like Slack and Microsoft Teams or Facebook and Snapchat are built on different platforms, the code for each is likely distinct, so copying features is fair game.
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Microsoft Might Crush Slack Like Facebook Crushed Snapchat More

Microsoft Might Crush Slack Like Facebook Crushed Snapchat

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  • When Microsoft crushes Slack, maybe they will revive their old company Tiny Speck and revive their MMO game called Glitch.

    We can hope.

  • Microsoft teams? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Seriously I know way more startups replacing slack with discord. I haven't heard of a single one replacing slack with Microsoft Teams.

    • Re:Microsoft teams? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by spire3661 ( 1038968 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @06:54PM (#58905104) Journal
      Discord is no better. Run your own damn comms people.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by chrish ( 4714 )

        We replaced Slack with Mattermost so we could self-host. We have no interest in MS Teams at all.

        The worst part of switching was people complaining about the name. "Slack" is so much easier to say...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          I did the same at one point for my own team until the company adopted Teams and we had to drop it. You still have to be careful though extension and plugins tend to ship your data out in the same manner as they do on Slack. No third party integrations, ever!

    • Re:Microsoft teams? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Thursday July 11, 2019 @10:16AM (#58907696)

      The company I work for has chosen teams over slack. The reasoning is pretty simple... no corporate security policy should allow slack. Period. Ever. Slack treats private corporate information the same way that Facebook or Android treats user data. That might not be your biggest concern on an open source project but it is a pretty serious concern.

      The way slack treats information just using it for any project at my organization would send enough confidential information to third parties that we would be obligated to notify clients and shareholders of a breach.

      Here an example that might come up at my wife's former employer using a persistent group chat to coordinate work flow:

      "Hey Jean, I've got John Smith. He has missed payments but they were just on medical and student loans and I know we don't really care about those. Can you check file #5587987987 for an exception on a first bike purchase?"

      Normally fine but now you've got a PCI violation because it was said on Slack and Slack isn't hosted and secured by your company, isn't certified as PCI compliant, and doesn't even have so much as an agreement to keep your data confidential. Oh and because of the way slack works, that breach was probably spread to a dozen plugin/extension vendors as well. Slack touts a built in mechanism for cross site scripting exploits as a feature and not a bug!

    • No joke - I've never heard of Microsoft Teams. I work in a tech company. A little rumbling from Discord, but Slack is still king of communications last I checked.

  • Say it ain't so! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @06:27PM (#58904962)

    OMG. You mean that the guys who packaged and wrote a wrapper around an IRC server aren't going to become the world's next billionaires? This is insane.

    Disclosure: I use Slack.

    • Well, the guys that created an easier to use news feed became billionaires (Facebook). As did the ones that built a slightly better search engine (Google). And at a local level, ones that just built a better bug tracking system (Atlasian).

      Slack was hot. All the cool kids were using it. It was all over the in-flight magazine which drives C-level decision making.

      That said, I get enough email as it is. If I need something urgently or to have a conversation I go for a walk or use a telephone -- but rarely

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        "slightly better search engine"

        Wha? Google didn't win because it was a better search engine, it wasn't even better than the best available at the time which was altavista. Google won because they took all the not search bullshit off the page. Slowly but surely Google has gone the other direction since then but they've killed the competition and the differences are less noticeable with faster internet speeds. Go back to a 28.8k dialup or an expensive lightning fast 56kbps modem and load aol/yahoo/altavista v

    • Nah, they're already billionaires. Too late.

  • Wait.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @06:30PM (#58904976)

    You're saying that a company whose only product is a piece of fairly simple software can face competition from other companies pretty easily? Maybe such companies aren't worth billions of dollars?

    I'm shocked.

    • Microsoft isn't the tiger they once were. Mostly, they imitated other people's stuff through a half dozen or more major revisions, then maybe got it right if they were paying attention and it didn't break much.

      They didn't lead cloud, but they did invest and it wasn't hard to gain marketshare because AWS has had their fingers in their ears forever and like Jobs did, played specifically to a fawning crowd.

      Slack has an ecosystem, yes, other decent apps, some of them pretty cool. Microsoft wants some of that lo

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        "Microsoft wants to make you one more added license construct. Teams will never be really free, as in works-anywhere-on-anything."

        Lacking those legal constructs makes Slack a non-starter for any large business because where it doesn't violate government regulation outright it opens gaping security holes. Slack is a worse data siphon than FB and unlike personal bullshit on FB leaking the data that Slacks leaks from a company is grounds for numerous lawsuits.

        • Slack makes no pretenses. Their ToS are pretty clear. Yes, there are those that will do dastardly things, and Microsoft will try to take a more ostensibly secure path which will be riddled with the same QA problems they already have.

          All the PR in the world doesn't have enough corks to plug the problems that Microsoft faces. Their dominance is still huge, and they face the fate of mundane eras as the world moves past them. The same can be said for Google. Even Apple has become mundane.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            "Slack makes no pretenses. Their ToS are pretty clear. Yes, there are those that will do dastardly things, and Microsoft will try to take a more ostensibly secure path which will be riddled with the same QA problems they already have."

            Yes they are pretty clear and they are a problem. I'm sorry but some people aren't picking a fun tool to use in their mom's basement. They have to answer in court for their decisions and follow government industry compliance regulations. They can't do business without a secure

            • I don't doubt the security compliance and audit needs of organizations. Most do it badly, in my experience. That's not to vanquish the goal, instead, to say that Slack doesn't make the pretense of absolute compliance, then fail with regularity.

              Should Slack tighten up? IMHO, certainly. I advise all who use it that it's swiss cheese, and not unlike Facebook in many ways. My experience also says that Slack is vastly faster to respond to problems that violate its sense of ToS and has far better QA and trust for

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Shaitan ( 22585 )

                "I don't doubt the security compliance and audit needs of organizations. Most do it badly, in my experience. That's not to vanquish the goal, instead, to say that Slack doesn't make the pretense of absolute compliance, then fail with regularity."

                See you are already confused about the purpose of security compliance and audits. The purpose isn't to do them well or secure anything (at least not before there is egg on your face but since everyone is getting breached it really isn't much egg) the purpose is to b

  • Teams is a miserable copy of Slack - many companies switch to it because they're already using MS and its integrated and comes with an Office 365 sub but it lacks the simplicity and "just works" functionality of slack.

    would switch back in a heart beat and I make sure to bitch about it whenever possible.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Teams also does other things. Teams, for example, provides a storage for files and similar. Yes, the file store is a pretty facade over SharePoint, nothing more, but it is something. There's a (simple) on-board per-channel wiki. There's real-time skype-like[1] audio and video chat (including multiple people.) Embedded tabs of other services. Integration (to some degree) with MS Planner. Oh, and does Slack offer PSTN (phone network) integration? (I honestly don't know.) Organisational information (pu

      • Used both extensively. All those features in teams that aren't pure chat-link (wiki, files, onenote, etc) are a real pain to use collaboratively, and every time you use one, you'll use your current scroll position in a chat if you aren't at the bottom already. The UX issues are astoundingly bad in teams. Trying to get info for a teammate or direct them to info from another group/team is maddening because of such things. It feels like every single non-chat feature, including search, was bolted on afterwar

      • Teams, for example, provides a storage for files and similar.

        So does Slack.

        There's a (simple) on-board per-channel wiki.

        I'm sure that's super heavily used. Slack has a channel purpose which is probably about as much as anyone would ever read.

        There's real-time skype-like[1] audio and video chat (including multiple people.)

        With desktop sharing and screen markup like Slack also has while you are on an audio or video call? That all works with a Teams mobile app?

        Embedded tabs of other services.

        I've not used

      • How did SharePoint become a file store? I feel like Teams is just another layer of smog over existing Microsoft products.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tora ( 65882 )

        But by all your logic you presume somebody WANTS to use O365, or any other microsoft product.

        I've been mostly Microsoft free for over a decade, and it's been very pleasant. As much as I dislike Google's privacy practices, gSuite is bar none a better product than O365--I was at a company last year who was stuck on O365, and they didn't realize how much pain they were in, and how much they were missing.

        No thanks, and I'm glad to leave it behind. Teams? How successful was Microsoft with their Skype acquisit

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 7213 ( 122294 )

      And Slack is a miserable copy of IRC.

      Don't fear the command line.

      I mean, Christ, this is Slashdot, have we forgotten our roots?

      • Having used IRC for nigh on 20 years, I much prefer Slack these days - IRC lags behind it in many ways, so it amuses me when people say shit like "its just a copy of IRC". Well, IRC is just a copy of any one of the dozens of things that come before it, but IRC users never cared about that, so why should Slack users care about IRC?

      • Oh IRC, I remember waiting until 5AM for two split servers to rejoin to take over a channel - those were the days before the +ts patches.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      On the contrary, I've worked at two firms now that have switched from Slack to Teams and on both occasions it's simply because of both the fact Teams does more and has better integration coupled with the fact Teams is cheaper for the majority of businesses given that it comes included with Office which is still far and away the most popular office suite across the globe.

      So the fact is, people can either use Slack with it's free tier and suffer incredibly tight restrictions like a 10 app limit, or they can p

  • As a tech worker, please don't group me in with the mouth breathers who worship slack.

  • Teams will be just another Skype (Score:3)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @07:08PM (#58905154)
    On the surface it has a lot of shiny blingbling to impress middle management but Microsoft will manage to ruin this anyway after it becomes part of their core products.
  • Kinda like Slashdot’s stories are a copy of Hacker News’ ?

  • I say “no thanks” to either one (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @07:25PM (#58905232)

    If I’m gonna slack off at work, I’m gonna do it right - by reading Slashdot, like God Intended.

  • No decent sized company would agree to use a product that they can't host internally. Mattermost has a much better future for this reason. And there are dozens of others.

    • So no "decent sized" company use Office 365? Then you have to set the bar for "decent sized" pretty high. Like 7 digits...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by couch ( 83548 )

      Moving from a Slack company to a Mattermost one was horrible! Mattermost looks like someone wrote it in VB6 after a 10 minute conversation with someone else that watched someone using slack once!

      And Teams isn't great, but at least its better than Mattermost and Skype for Business.

  • Maybe if Slack didn't completely suck. No other software has made me want to push my phone into a wood chipper with my bare hands like Slack does.

  • Wherever I go, I look around to see what apps people are using, and it's almost always Snapchat.

    Sure there are some users of FB, Instagram, then a bit less of WeChat and Whatsapp, but Snapchat seems to be the leader at least for people under 30

    FB is "dead man walking."

  • thought: (Score:3)

    by buddyglass ( 925859 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @08:51PM (#58905576)
    Seems like Discord should compete with Slack more than it does. Different demographic and focus area, but the tech is very similar. Seems like they could make a "corporate version" of Discord and compete directly with Slack.

  • Looks like Slack copied everything from HipChat. Now people are crying about Teams copying from Slack.
    ITS A CHAT APP! AOL had this back in the early 90s! These things take about 1 - 3 months to write from scratch!
    Its like I am taking crazy pills over here.

  • Why do M$ make it almost unusable to type/paste with fixed width characters?

    ```This will be fixed width
    as will this

    but this won't
    ```until I do this again
  • Our management forces Teams on us as they intend to get all the office software from Microsoft only. But it sucks, and most people still stay on Slack. It's more intuitive, less cluttered, easier to search, and works better on mobile devices (Teams doesn't work at all because of some too-much-security misconfiguration).

  • My biggest complaint is how Slack, which basically looks like an IRC program where you have some channel and some private messages with people, takes more than 1GB of RAM?!? ircII took a few kilobyes in the 80s and did the same thing, minus emoji?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      Slack is so bad in that regard that it is often given as an example of what not to do.
      The usual response from Electron supporters when someone tells them that their framework is bloated is "not all Electron apps are like Slack".

      It kills me how a multi-billion dollar company whose only product is a chat system care so little about optimization. It is not about being able to make it run on a toaster, even though it could with a lot of effort. It is just about spending a small part of the ridiculous amount of

  • We have both at work but most prefer Teams over Slack.

  • Can't we just extend IRC a little bit and retake this market with an open standard?

  • We've got an issue between Comms wanting to use Webex Teams as our company standard and Productivity wanting to use Microsoft Teams. As 'conversations' become more ubiquitous, it shouldn't matter what client you're using. I can read my email in Thunderbird, Outlook, or Roundcube. Group conversations shouldn't be any different.

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