<story><title>Slack wanted to stay independent, but was unable to compete with tech giants</title><url>https://www.fastcompany.com/90584382/slack-salesforce-antitrust</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>remir</author><text>The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don&amp;#x27;t really &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; a chat service. It&amp;#x27;s not a must for them.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, what knowledge worker today can function without video conferencing, desktop sharing, file sharing and VoIP?&lt;p&gt;No that many.&lt;p&gt;Teams provide all of that natively. That&amp;#x27;s why they&amp;#x27;re wining.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s be frank, if Teams had been just a chat application, it would never have had the success it currently has, even as part of O365. Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that.&lt;p&gt;The reality is that MS made Teams a complete collaboration platform and Slack couldn&amp;#x27;t do the same with their product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nemothekid</author><text>I disagree that Slack couldn’t have survived when Zoom exists. We will see where Zoom is 5 years; but Slack never expanded beyond Chat and their video calling product just isn’t competitive.&lt;p&gt;From the outside, Teams (and Zooms) growth was accelerated because video conferencing became way more important. People didn’t need video conferencing pre-COVID because that would have just been a meeting. When they suddenly did, Slack wasn’t that good. My pet peeve continues to be that on Slack I cannot see someone’s screen on iOS - that one annoyance had us move to Zoom then teams.&lt;p&gt;An argument could be made that Slack was ultimately unable to compete in video by virtue of not having an army of high paid engineers to throw at the problem like MS does, but the features that Slack chose to focus on (like the WYSIWG editor) doesn’t say that to me</text></comment>
<story><title>Slack wanted to stay independent, but was unable to compete with tech giants</title><url>https://www.fastcompany.com/90584382/slack-salesforce-antitrust</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>remir</author><text>The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don&amp;#x27;t really &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; a chat service. It&amp;#x27;s not a must for them.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, what knowledge worker today can function without video conferencing, desktop sharing, file sharing and VoIP?&lt;p&gt;No that many.&lt;p&gt;Teams provide all of that natively. That&amp;#x27;s why they&amp;#x27;re wining.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s be frank, if Teams had been just a chat application, it would never have had the success it currently has, even as part of O365. Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that.&lt;p&gt;The reality is that MS made Teams a complete collaboration platform and Slack couldn&amp;#x27;t do the same with their product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dismantlethesun</author><text>&amp;gt; Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that.&lt;p&gt;Not sure what the example of IE would entail. IE was insanely popular during its prime of 2006-2008. Even today, Chrome has not captured as much of the market as IE6 did at that time.&lt;p&gt;It was only years of neglect (i.e nearly the entire IE6 team was reassigned to other projects), and governmental intervention that allowed other browsers to even have a significant plurality.&lt;p&gt;So yes, you can win merely by being bundled for free with another popular product.&lt;p&gt;If Slack for instance just came preinstalled on iOS&amp;#x2F;OSX, then people would have standardized on it so long as it was also available on Windows.</text></comment>