Microsoft Bashes Slack Complaint in European Antitrust Filing (theinformation.com) 23
Microsoft has privately told European competition authorities that Slack's antitrust complaint against the tech giant was motivated essentially by sour grapes [Editor's note: the link is paywalled; an alternative source was not available.]. From a report: In a recent confidential filing, Microsoft told the European Commission, which oversees competition regulation, that Slack brought its complaint against Microsoft because the lockdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic has exposed deficiencies in Slack's messaging product, according to a person who has seen the complaint. In the filing, which runs about 40 pages, Microsoft said the sudden surge in people working from home this year has made more apparent shortcomings in Slack's product, including its handling of videoconferencing, while also benefiting Microsoft's competing Teams software, the person said. [...] Slack declined to comment directly on the "confidential exchange of documents" between Slack, Microsoft and the commission. But the company's vice president of policy and communications, Jonathan Prince, told The Information that Microsoft's argument was the equivalent of a schoolyard taunt. Further reading: Slack CEO: Microsoft is 'Unhealthily Preoccupied With Killing Us.'
Huh? (Score:2)
Wait ... Slack does videoconferencing?
Re: (Score:2)
To be clear, every company I've worked for in the last 5-6 years has used Slack. And every one has also used a separate video conferencing system (Skype, Zoom, BlueJeans, take your pick). These are companies where employees are geographically dispersed, and teams rely on video conferencing for day-to-day work. Not once has the idea of using Slack for this purpose ever been mentioned to me. Neither has anybody ever expressed a desire for Slack to be the all-in-one solution for this.
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Indeed, Teams happens to have that embedded, but there's very little value to it. When doing chat one-on-one it is marginally easier to escalate to an audio/video call, but not so useful that I would be phased by the lack of it.
Re: Huh? (Score:2)
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Re: Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Huh? (Score:4)
Yeah, just as much as Teams, Zoom, Skype, Facebook, etc all do. The problem for big companies is you are limited to 15 people in the group no matter what. So when the CEO wants to give a video speech live to 200 people working at home, what do you think happens? The whole company switches from Slack to Teams overnight, because Skype doesn't exist for some users (we have people on Ubuntu laptops), Zoom is a security nightmare the IT department won't allow, and obviously Facebook is right out.
It's Slack's own fault for this super-low limit, and I'm pretty sure tons of other companies suddenly found themselves in the same situation when Covid-induced mass work-from-home started. And have they gone back and fixed this 15 person limit yet? Not that I've heard. So yeah, now Teams is the only choice left.
We would not be using Teams... (Score:2)
If it wasn't defaulted into Office365. It is worse than Slack but since our company gives money for Office365 anyway, and there's no benefit to opting out of Teams, everyone is made to deal with Teams rather than pay extra for a product that while better, isn't fundamentally distinct to justify another expense.
The nature of the complaint is whether the move by MS is comparable to their illegal bundling of a browser. They have the market of office suite as pretty much a monopoly and have used that to force t
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The nature of the complaint is whether the move by MS is comparable to their illegal bundling of a browser. They have the market of office suite as pretty much a monopoly and have used that to force the adoption of Teams at the expense of competitors. Microsoft arguments right or wrong about 'capability' are moot in the face of that complaint.
This. This right here. That's what Microsoft does. That's what they have always done. It was wrong in the 90s and it's still wrong today. I hope EU slaps them down for this.
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If it wasn't defaulted into Office365.
Teams is included in the subscription of Office365, but the choice to present it to your users and install it on your clients is entirely within the control of your IT department.
I doubt that this being "illegal bundling" would hold legal weight. Fundamentally groupware programs have dependent on communication and Microsoft has offered this for the best part of 10+ years already, long before Slack even entered the market. At some point a system becomes so fundamental and integrated that it is expected to sh
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Teams is included in the subscription of Office365, but the choice to present it to your users and install it on your clients is entirely within the control of your IT department.
I could have similarly ignored internet explorer all I wanted if I didn't like it, however the bundling was still ruled to be anti-competitive.
Microsoft has offered this for the best part of 10+ years already, long before Slack even entered the market.
While MS has long done email and instant messaging, they haven't done what Slack is primarily known for: IRC-like paradigm rooting a team together online. As much as I hate to admit it, Slack highlighted that the chatroom oriented communication design was an underserved use case.
(i.e. a modern OS is expected to come with a browser, which is why Edge bundling is not an issue)
It actually continues to be an issue, MS still has to do browser prompts in some regions
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It actually continues to be an issue, MS still has to do browser prompts in some regions to explicitly tell the customer they have choices.
The problem with a finding against you is that it sticks even if the context behind it changes.
While MS has long done email and instant messaging, they haven't done what Slack is primarily known for: IRC-like paradigm rooting a team together online. As much as I hate to admit it, Slack highlighted that the chatroom oriented communication design was an underserved use case.
Yes indeed, but that comes back to my point of further development. MS has always offered chat, group chat, and similar things. So adopting the chatroom approach is a minor change, not like bundling a completely new unheard of internet thing in with your OS. MS would rightly get criticised for not having similar features if they didn't introduce them.
Also yeah I feel your pain. I'm forced to use Teams at work, it'
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So adopting the chatroom approach is a minor change
And yet they royally screwed it up, so evidently it's a bigger change than one would think.
it's utter garbage from a usability point of view.
Indeed. Want to join a public channel? No, don't just search, click on the channels, then click join or add a channel, then, don't use the big text field in the middle of the display that appears to try to search for a channel, instead go to a search bar in the upper right, but not the upper middle search, to search for the channel.
Also, if you search for 'Marketing' when the channel is named 'The Marketing Channel',
Slack is not good ... but (Score:2)
Slack is not a good product but it is far better than Microsoft Teams, which like pretty much all of MS Office software is overburdened with useless features and settings needlessly obscured. They've had a couple of decades to learn the beauty of KISS and still cannot grasp it.
Slack can't keep up with Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
I've used both Slack and Teams extensively. Teams is far and away better on its own. If your company uses Office 365, then it's not even a competition. And with the level of money and resources MS is throwing at Teams since Covid, it's not going to get better for Slack.
It's sad to see successful niche products like Slack get crushed by the bigger players, but this happens all the time. If your products aren't novel (Let's admit, Slack/Teams is just a small variation of the many different ways we've already been communicating) and you don't own the suite of products you want to integrate with (email, messaging, video conf., storage, etc), you're going to lose eventually. If they were smart, they would have been shopping the company to the bigger players a long time ago.
Re: Slack can't keep up with Microsoft (Score:2)
Slack today, zoom tomorrow (Score:2)
MS's plan is pretty clear. They want teams to be the only conferencing tool left standing.
There are millions who eschew MS and some with a vengance and would not be seen dead using the MS slurp tool, Teams.
MS can go [redacted] themselves for all I care. I'll carry on using Zoom and Slack.
{proudly MS Software and hardware free since 2016}
Another company is going to be killed (Score:1)