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Slack Accuses Microsoft of Illegally Crushing Competition (nytimes.com) 113

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
Microsoft is undeniably one of the Big Tech elite, given its size, wealth and stock market value. But the software giant has stood apart from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple in one important respect: Microsoft, once the bully of the tech world, has escaped antitrust scrutiny so far. Now Slack, whose popular chat and collaboration software has become embedded in the daily routines of millions of workers at thousands of companies, is hoping to change that. From a report: Slack said on Wednesday that it had filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission, accusing the tech giant of using its market power to try to crush the upstart rival. In its filing, Slack claims that Microsoft has illegally tied its collaboration software, Microsoft Teams, to its dominant suite of productivity programs, Microsoft Office, which includes Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. "Slack threatens Microsoft's hold on business email, the cornerstone of Office, which means Slack threatens Microsoft's lock on enterprise software," Jonathan Prince, vice president of communications and policy at Slack, said in a statement. Slack's complaint is just a first step. The European Commission must assess the complaint to see if a formal investigation is warranted. In recent years, European regulators have more aggressively pursued antitrust actions against large tech companies than American regulators. But the complaint threatens Microsoft's recent ability to largely avoid regulatory scrutiny. Federal and state regulators in the United States are investigating whether the other tech giants have broken antitrust laws. On Monday, the chief executives of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook will testify before Congress, which is also looking into them.
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Slack Accuses Microsoft of Illegally Crushing Competition More

Slack Accuses Microsoft of Illegally Crushing Competition

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  • Slack CEO = Ostrich with Head in Sand (Score:5, Informative)

    by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @09:06AM (#60318451) Homepage Journal

    Just a few months ago he publicly said "Slack does not compete with Teams. Microsoft is not our competition in this area."

    It's not Microsoft's fault you closed your eyes and stuck your head in the sand and ignored the 500lb gorilla running at you.

    (Of course, Microsoft is a monopoly and didn't learn their lesson from the anti-trust lawsuit. But ignoring them and acting like Teams didn't exist is just stupid on Slack's part.)

    • Just a few months ago he publicly said "Slack does not compete with Teams."

      He probably meant to say "Slack can not compete with Teams."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

        Perhaps. But faced with Microsoft breathing down your neck with a copycat application - bundled with a monopoly Office suite, what would you say? From a marketing perspective, they need to minimize the threat - and at the time, Teams probably wasn't competitive on a feature-set basis. But that's the MS way. Wait for a new category to arise, copy, bundle and voila! Play catch up on features for a few years, and let marketplace turnover - and the Office monopoly - work their magic.

        Just because it hasn't

    • Just a few months ago he publicly said "Slack does not compete with Teams. Microsoft is not our competition in this area."

      It's not Microsoft's fault you closed your eyes and stuck your head in the sand and ignored the 500lb gorilla running at you.

      (Of course, Microsoft is a monopoly and didn't learn their lesson from the anti-trust lawsuit. But ignoring them and acting like Teams didn't exist is just stupid on Slack's part.)

      What do you expect from a company that names its app after Church of the SubGenius terminology? J. R. "Bob" Dobbs should sue...https://slashdot.org/story/20/07/22/1357212/slack-accuses-microsoft-of-illegally-crushing-competition#

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • "Microsoft is a monopoly and didn't learn their lesson from the anti-trust lawsuit"

      IMO they learned plenty from it. They learned that the profits outweighed the penalties by such a ridiculous amount that it would make no sense to change their behavior. The simplest analogy I can think of would be...

      "This is Homer Simpson, aka Happy Dude. The court is making me call everybody back and apologize for my telemarketing scam. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to Sorry Dude

    • Just a few months ago he publicly said "Slack does not compete with Teams. Microsoft is not our competition in this area."

      Of course he said that. Did you think he really believed that?

    • Sounds like the Slack CEO must have been "niche marketing" his company to investors and Wall Street.

      All CEOs should maintain "situational awareness" of potential competitors in the marketplace. If a potential comptetitor's product looks similar, look at it much closer; it might be an actual competitive product to yours. Sometimes competitors make their products "look not quite the same" so other competitors in their industry / product field don't initially perceive a threat. Call it "hiding in plain sight"

  • Any fifteen year old can program a chat app. Your product is stupid and you can't get paying customers for it. Find a buyer already. You're not a viable business.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ddtmm ( 549094 )
      How can they find a buyer? They're not a viable business. They're doomed...

      • How can they find a buyer? They're not a viable business. They're doomed...

        So they should go public, which now only happens when a business is not profitable and never will be.

        • So they should go public, which now only happens when a business is not profitable and never will be.

          That's right all these publicly traded businesses on the world stock exchanges never made a profit. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon especially.

      • How can they find a buyer? They're not a viable business.

        To become viable, a chat system would need to offer something more than the garden variety "same service as IRC has been providing for free for more than three decade, but now locked inside your browser window" (With the only difference that now extra features are called "Apps" instead of "IRC bots") as Slack and everyone else offers.

        One possible thing to offer, is *integration*. The promise of Microsoft Team is that it's not only chat, it's chat that is part of their Office suite and thus can integrate wit

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

          You're probably right. But that doesn't mean Microsoft can (or should) be able to get away with bundling Teams with Office at no extra cost. If antitrust laws mean anything, that's anti-competitive. Just because they were allowed to do the same thing while putting together the Office suite doesn't mean they should be allowed to continue to use Office to glom on to every emerging and conceivably adjacent new software category.

          That doesn't mean that organizations that value the Office integration aspect of

          • If I accept your premise (and I'm not saying that I do), where do you draw the line? I quote:

            Just that Microsoft can't give it away to kill off the competition.

            So can they give it away if they don't use it to kill competition?

            What if they CLAIM they aren't?

            What if it was only text like IRC? Or only voice?

            What if it's something no-one else offers - they have to market it completely independently because they have a successful long lived product with which it integrates well?

            Thing is Skype for Business (which was previously Lync 2013 and 2010, Office Communicator 2007 R2 and

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

              Look, when you have monopoly power, you have to play by different rules. I'm not going to say exactly what those rules should be, but if they don't exist, then anti-trust laws are meaningless. And there's a reason for those laws.

      • They aren't viable as a profitable standalone business, but as part of a bundled business applications... it would probably work.

        Perhaps Oracle should buy them and try to integrate Slack as part of the Netsuite product line. It's not a great fit, but they seem like the only big software company that doesn't already have their own big team chat application. I mean, Google has Meet, Apple has iMessage, Amazon has Chime, and Microsoft has Teams.

        • If you want to see every single customer Slack has cancel and run away, then Oracle buying them would probably be the quickest way to have that happen.

    • As opposed to Microsoft?? Who the fuck would buy Teams? Seriously Microsoft says it's free, it's part of the suite. No sane person would pay for Teams.

      • For a company that is already using Office365, Teams is a viable alternative to applications like slack/zoom/webex/etc. I say that as someone who has used a number of these applications in the recent past. I mostly consume Teams these days since that is what my employer has standardized on. It's not the best of breed, but it's good enough for my needs. If it was up to me, I don't think I would be able to justify spending additional money for another product to displace Teams.

      • Teams is indeed annoying. For one, it wastes a lot of screen real-estate trying to be finger-device-friendly. Separate out the mouse version so we see fuller listings etc. One Size Fucks Up All.

    • Yup.
      Nearly all of what these "chat start-ups" have been doing seem to boil down to putting some "Web HTML5" lipstick on plain old IRC from three decades ago.
      Very little new to offer once you've scratch the layer of Javascript-glitter.
      (hmm... threads, maybe, allowing slightly easier way to veer off into side conversations, compared to the channel/direct chat paradigm of IRC? and logs being a base feature* instead of relying on a bot or a permanently connected client?)

      I've haven't found any new revolutionary

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DMJC ( 682799 )
      I was half expecting Slack and Cisco Jabber to merge to try to fight Teams. But yeah without an office product to integrate with.. Microsoft really do have a monopoly. We're already seeing customers trying to push Teams instead of regular SIP solutions because it all ties into Office. Microsoft needs to be broken up. They're too big.

  • Break them up (Score:5, Insightful)

    by simlox ( 6576120 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @09:09AM (#60318459)
    All the big companies, that is. The anti-trust laws don't work well. It takes too long before a complaint comes through the system and then the small company is crushed. Instead: once a company reaches, say, 50 billion USD in market cap, it is forced to pay dividends - by taking loans and eventually selling off business areas. Then all this could be avoided and there would be more room for smaller innovative companies.

    • Yeah, you wouldn't want successful corporations. Success is poisonous. We should crush it wherever it is found.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jez9999 ( 618189 )

        When it becomes monopolistic then, yes, success absolutely IS poisonous.

        • There's something called a "natural monopoly". These natural monopolies are net boons to society because what makes them "natural" is their intrinsically lower cost of operation.

          Monopolies aren't bad. And that's why anti-trust law is formed around abuse of monopolistic position, rather than outlawing monopoly itself.

      • Two smaller companies are better for society than one combined. Big companies are rarely effective. They are competitive but mostly due to their market power and favors they get from politicians as they can bully their way by threatening to move elsewhere. If they had to compete on equal terms terms, they would loose big against small, effective companies.

        • MS is competitive. There's no question of how they became a monopoly. They are good at what they do. And aside from the OEM abuse which they were forced to stop decades ago, they've not abused their "monopoly" in any meaningful way.

          If MS has a monopoly of MS ecosystem, then Apple has a monopoly of the Apple ecosystem. And if they are monopolies in their respective ecosystems, it's clear it's Apple who is the abusive actor, not MS.

          • Microsoft phone, was that competitive- even with billions poured into it? Microsoft makes money on Windows and Office - which are clearly monopolies, as almost all business systems are build around them. Sure they want to catch up with AWS, but it is still based on those two old monopolies. Now, if MS was split in a Windows company and an Office company, the latter would clearly have tried to expand to other platforms earlier, and the Windows company would maybe have preinstalled OpenOffice or something l

            • I work as a software developer in CA. I haven't seen a Windows machine in an office for a decade. I think you may have a skewed idea of how powerful MS's so-called "monopoly" is.

              Standard Oil became a monopoly because they took a product that was bespoke and hard to use (lamp and heating oil) and turned it into a low-cost, consistent, safe commodity. The Standard Oil monopoly probably saved tens of thousands of lives.

              Monopolies aren't evil. Big corporations aren't evil. Success is not evil.

      • Success is good and drives people ahead - but there is absolutely no benefit for the society to let it go to extremes like for instance Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet. With the rules I proposed all those companies would have been started and driven to success, but instead of seeing a handful of huge, very powerful companies we would have seen many more still large and successful but more competitive companies. The stockholders would just get their money out sooner to invest in something new. Free market do

    • Antitrust laws work just fine, the key is you actually need to prove antitrust. And as usual this isn't an example of it. Teams isn't even bundled with Office 365 as a default install. Even in enterprises it's a separate package you need to choose to integrate. Simply offering integrated services doesn't make something an antitrust case.

      Then all this could be avoided and there would be more room for smaller innovative companies.

      I'm interested to know what this would achieve in this scenario. What is the benefit of a Teams competitor without any of the integration in an office suite which is precise

      • In Soviet Russia every company was owned by the state and had a chance to integrate with each other. How well did that work? Large companies with monopolies like Microsoft becomes as ineffective as the socialist state. It doesn't benefit the consumers at all that they are are allowed to stay together to be able to offer integration. If they want integration inside their products they can publish an API for theirs parties to integrate - and we can keep competition.

        • In Soviet Russia every company was owned by the state and had a chance to integrate with each other. How well did that work?

          About as well as your completely irrelevant strawman.

          Large companies with monopolies like Microsoft becomes as ineffective as the socialist state.

          Just saying something doesn't make it so.

          It doesn't benefit the consumers at all that they are are allowed to stay together to be able to offer integration.

          So what benefit does the consumer get in literally only have a feature removed in your scenario?

          If they want integration inside their products they can publish an API for theirs parties to integrate - and we can keep competition.

          Break up companies and mandate they provide completely open APIs for everything? In the Soviet USA your software suddenly triples in size and RAM usage as every damn function has a mandatory API. No thanks the Russians are doing better even in your completely bizarre and nonsensical post.

  • Tying in itself is not illegal (Score:4, Informative)

    by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @09:13AM (#60318473)
    Microsoft lost their case not just because they tied their Internet Explorer to their OS. They also were found guilty of other behaviors. For example, their dealings with OEMs specifically were designed to harm Netscape. Threatening to raise Windows pricing if OEMs preinstalled Netscape for example. Slack must demonstrate MS doing other things than just bundling Teams. From what I know, MS has bundled a messaging app within Office for a long time. Teams is just the latest iteration of Messgner, Lync, Skype, etc.
    • Microsoft did not develop Skype. Microsoft bought Skype. So, no it's not an iteration. It's a bundling of different messaging software.

      Teams is nothing more than a front end to SharePoint. It's bloated. Anything would be better than Teams.

      • Antitrust law doesn't care if you acquired a monopoly or built it. All it cares about is how you use it.

      • Yes MS bought Skype and yes MS has iterated on it. Those are not exclusive. The last versions are not the same versions as when MS bought them.

      • Microsoft did not develop Skype. Microsoft bought Skype. So, no it's not an iteration.

        As I've written above, it's a different Skype.
        That "Skype for business" is just a rebranding of Lync, their SIP-standard VoIP client for corporate environment. Nothing to do with the Skype they bought.

        Teams is nothing more than a front end to SharePoint.

        That it is integrated into the rest of Microsoft's offering is the main selling point according to most academic institutions I've heard from.

        Anything would be better than Teams.

        In my opinion, an open-source solution that you can host on your own server would be better. But that opinion isn't shared by the institution's admins.

        • An open protocol. An email from Microsoft can be read by GMail, heck even Apple.

          When, eventually, instant messaging et al takes over email will finally die and you will need the right software to talk to the wrong people.

          I am amazed that email has lasted so long. Every major software mogul has a reason to get rid of it.

          The good news is that nobody thought of using email as a messaging transport. That would have killed it.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by starless ( 60879 )

      I suppose they're referring to the "modern" (post-Gates, post-Ballmer) Microsoft.

      Later in the article it says:

      The browser wars led to a landmark federal antitrust case against Microsoft in the United States that found the company repeatedly violated the nation’s antitrust laws. Europe also ruled against Microsoft.

  • Maybe slack should look at themselves. Their per user charges are high, and I see tons of people looking into alternatives just for that. I paid for slack for a while but it didn't make financial sense to go from free to that cost so we just reverted it. It's a nice app, but it's not unique in any way, there are tons of free/paid alternatives available. Slack needs some secret sauce or wow feature if they want to retain and improve their user base. I intend on scrapping slack at some point when I have some

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      Slack's competition wasn't Teams, it was Cisco Jabber and Skype/Lync before Teams came along.

      The office I occasionally work for dumped Cisco Webex (Jabber) for Teams, and many of the people in the office who were familiar with Slack literately said "this looks exactly like Slack"

  • Slack has never held a candle to anyone, including Microsoft. Their product/service sucks. It always has. Nobody who uses it sticks with it.

    If they want to blame someone for their lack of success, go look in the mirror and then everyone fire each other until nobody remains.

    This is like "BASIC" blaming C++ for being too Java like... sorry, you didn't survive the 1980s.

    E

  • Forced installation is crap (Score:4, Interesting)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @09:19AM (#60318509)

    I don't support Slack here but MS force installing Teams is crap. The forced Teams on all Office 365 users last year. Some of the company was using Skype - they forced us off of Skype and onto Teams. After forcing Teams on everyone they went and publicly claimed they had a large number of users. But those users didn't have a choice. Office 365 updates magically slipped the Teams Machine-wide Installer so anyone that logs on gets Teams forced on them - those kind of actions really are wrong. I'll decide what software gets applied to my computers thank you.

    • Re:Forced installation is crap (Score:4, Insightful)

      by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @09:35AM (#60318545)

      You should be using the deployment tools that Microsoft gives you in order to prune down the O365 app suite to something that is appropriate for your org rather than just taking whatever apps MS gives you.

      You would not have been "force installed" Teams had you excluded that from your deployment.

      • That's bullshit and you know it jackass. Microsoft forced businesses to use Teams. Microsoft removed Skype for business users.

        • So use any one of the dozens of competitors. Just because MS stopped supporting Skype doesn't mean you have to bend over and take their replacement.

          I get it, you want MS to help make all your IT decisions. Lots of companies work this way. But don't complain about being "forced" into the decision to tie all your tooling to a single vendor. You did that. Not Microsoft.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by E-Rock ( 84950 )

          No it isn't. My company is still on Skype. They're not selling it to new customers, but no one made your company switch early.

          • Re:Forced installation is crap (Score:4, Informative)

            by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @11:00AM (#60318987)

            Bullshit. Here is the message from MS:

            "Your Skype for Business Online upgrade to Teams is scheduled
            Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork in Office 365. As the primary communications client for call, chat, video, and meetings, it will replace Skype for Business over time. Microsoft is committed to supporting your organization’s upgrade to Teams.

            Your organization will be automatically upgraded from Skype for Business Online to Teams on June 15, 2019."

            Once they sent that message there was nothing that I could do to stop the rollout of Teams, I could delay it by 1 month by special request but I could not prevent it.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by E-Rock ( 84950 )

              We're in different parallel universes!

              https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/skype-for-business-online-to-be-retired-in-2021/ba-p/777833

              Skype for Business Online to Be Retired in 2021
              Today we’re announcing that Skype for Business Online will be retired on July 31, 2021.

        • That's bullshit and you know it jackass. Microsoft forced businesses to use Teams. Microsoft removed Skype for business users.

          Removing a package does not force you to use another. Teams is 100% optional as is evidenced by all the people using Slack.

      • Teams was not an option at install time so I could not have avoided it. We installed Skype because we were using it. I never chose Teams, MS chose it for me.

        • If it helps, MS has a tool for customizing your Office 365 installer https://config.office.com/ [office.com]. You CAN opt out of Teams. At least, your Office 365 admin can do it. The other option is to configure an installation .xml file manually.

          • because we already had Skype for Business our tenant was automatically 'upgraded' to Teams. Click-To-Run just added it to our computers when Microsoft executed their 'upgrade'. I had already used an admin template to install Office, which included Skype but Teams was not an option at the time. I had an option to defer the Teams roll out for 1 month. Yes, I can uninstall it but its not clear that I could have stopped the roll out at the time it was rolled out. MS installed Teams into O365 tenants that h

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Totally Agree With Slack (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @09:42AM (#60318569) Journal
    I work for a Fortune 500 company. I've noticed our IT department suddenly transitioning every piece of software to a Microsoft offering. When I ask about it, I'm told there's a substantial cost savings. Apparently Microsoft is bundling products to large companies to drive out competition.

    It's a major disruption to business. We've had to redevelop a lot of tools to work with MS offerings. I don't think that was accounted for in the bid. I'm also waiting for the other shoe to drop on this bundle. I'm guessing the subscription price is going to jump once everyone is locked in to Microsoft.

    • I work for a Fortune 500 company. I've noticed our IT department suddenly transitioning every piece of software to a Microsoft offering. When I ask about it, I'm told there's a substantial cost savings. Apparently Microsoft is bundling products to large companies to drive out competition.

      It's a major disruption to business. We've had to redevelop a lot of tools to work with MS offerings. I don't think that was accounted for in the bid. I'm also waiting for the other shoe to drop on this bundle. I'm guessing the subscription price is going to jump once everyone is locked in to Microsoft.

      I work with a nonprofit software company that has a growing ecosystem of users and support vendors. When we reached out to Slack to see about the nonprofit purchasing a license that permitted all its stakeholders the ability to review history beyond the latest 10,000 without costing two arms and two legs, they declined. So the nonprofit setup RocketChat and moved on. Happily, I might add.

      So, while we didn't add to MS Teams' user base, we didn't add to Slacks bottom line. Should I be shocked that Slack is fe

    • Mod up! The TCO is never looked at. It's just one budget that's looked at and a cost savings is declared. Ignoring all other budgets and their cost over-runs.

      • Mod up! The TCO is never looked at.

        No you just think it isn't because you aren't part of the process and don't like what they selected.

    • Then you guys need to do a better job costing all that extra work you're doing to make MS apps work right. I've never seen an independent analysis that puts MS TCO below any of their competitors (with the possible exception of Apple, but they're not really competitors).

      MS is going to point at license fees being waived and call that a reduction in TCO. But most of MS's competition has no licensing fees. The only thing MS can do is match that.

    • Apparently Microsoft is bundling products to large companies to drive out competition.

      That is literally what every vendor who ever deals with your company does. Bundling of products is common. It's common for your company with it's multi-million dollar programs, it's common in my house with with our Spotify family account magically being cheaper than buying 6 separate Spotify accounts.

      The thing with MS's offering is that not only is it cheaper to adopt the entire ecosystem, it does provide major benefits in terms of software integration as well. Sure you can run Slack as your video conferenc

      • ... you could run Teams with each Team directly linked to O365 groups for easy group and access management, with files automatically stored in Sharepoint giving you direct access to them from within Word/Excel/Powerpoint, allowing you to run BI reports directly from the excel tables in your Team displayed and embedded within said team.

        I don't understand who does this. Why is Microsoft encouraging the use of Excel as a database? There are much better tools available, but Microsoft is trying to force them out through this bundle. If you really have so much data to need a BI report, you should be using a real database like SQL. You don't need BI to make a pie chart.

        Maybe I'm a corner case, or I need to totally rethink my workflow, but whenever I try to use this bundle of tools together, it just doesn't work. I have to download the d

        • Why is Microsoft encouraging the use of Excel as a database?

          It's not. Excel is a table. BI is an aggregate service. MS encourages the use of SQL Server. The problem ultimately is that people who use BI typically are the same kind of managers who maintain pointless spreadsheets and as such it makes perfect sense for an analytics tool to allow the use of excel as a data source.

          You don't need BI to make a pie chart.

          You don't need a lot of things. The point is easy quick automation in one quick and easy place. Yes in many cases BI is used for little more than to make a pie chart. An always up to date pi cha

    • I don't know your specific situation, but yeah, Slack's pricing structure is worthy of public shaming. 8 bucks per month per user to get unlimited message visibility, 15 per month per user if you need enterprise features, like reporting and administrative visibility, which any fortune 500 will. There is a roughly 83% discount for a 1 year commitment. Assuming a fortune 500 did the 1 year plan, 1000 users would run $150,000 per year. FOR A CHAT PROGRAM. That is insane. In your use case, do you think to

      • The maths doesn't seem to be quite right. Your 1000 users at $180 per annum with the 83% discount (so basically 1/6th outlay) would be $30K. Still high (no breakout costs to compare to for Teams, unfortunately). But Teams is part of the E1 plan, which is about AU 130 per annum (retail!!!) per user - so if you assume it's 10% of the total "value" in an E1 for the sake of the argument, then 1000 users would cost less than half the Slack costs before any MS enterprise discounts.

    • In my experience at a smaller company, the cost of O365 over 3 years is about the same as buying the retail version of Office every 3 years. The hosted bits help keep our IT needs lower and make access from home/remote easy. We get a lot of value from the online services beyond the Office apps too, like Flow and Sharepoint.

  • If Teams is an anti-trust violation, Outlook is an anti-trust violation. Maybe Slack should just try to build a better product, because I gotta tell you, no amount of litigation will fix Slack's broken design decisions.

    • > Slack's broken design decisions

      I hate Slack as well but could you expand on that last point please? TIA.

      • The most recent annoyance is global notification settings. When you disable notifications in the desktop client, it disables it on the mobile app. I'm currently dealing with a Slack bug which causes the UI to freeze every time I get a notification, so I disable them on desktop, but then I don't get them on my phone. Then this is exacerbated by the fact that, as far as I can tell, there's no way to change the notification settings from the mobile app.

        It's a fractal of bad design, starting with the very idea

  • Microsoft was in this market loonngg before Slack (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Daltorak ( 122403 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @10:21AM (#60318753)
    .... and Slack knows this. Five years ago, Slack's CEO was making a big deal [fastcompany.com] about how they were going to supplant Exchange in the workplace:

    Replacing Exchange Server as the essential hub where all the information flows, I think that's something we'll do very well. We can be the bottom layer of the technology stack, and make everything else better.

    Exchange is only one of Microsoft's many entrants in the company collaboration/communication market. Microsoft has also had Windows Live Messenger, Yammer, Office Communicator / Lync / Skype for Business, and Groove. And pretty much all this stuff has been a part of Office in one fashion or another for 15 years. Heck, Microsoft NetMetting videoconferencing software came out in 1996, fully 20 years before Slack introduced similar functionality!

    • Perhaps a little known tidbit, Microsoft Exchange 5.5 used to have an IRC server component. This stuff is certainly not new to Microsoft.
  • When the elephant walks around, the ants need to watch out. Even if it's an old elephant.

    Double-space for DOS (whoever the original company was) learned about that the hard way. "Let me show you how it works so you can invest in our company!" "Gee, thanks, we'll get right back to you."

  • Microsoft found itself in the litigation limelight back then, and since lost some muscle anyway.
    But Microsoft is still Microsoft. Nobody should be surprised by anti-competitive patterns of product bundling and offering things for free to choke someone else's air supply, in a maybe less litigable way.

  • There's always open source off you go, compete with free and open
  • Slack is one of the worst programs ever written. People use it until they realize there are alternatives that do not suck as bad. Teams works pretty ok. RocketChat is quite good. Mattermost is another hog, but not as bad as Slack.

    I do not use teams as we have 20,000 users and Teams and Slack would screw our budgets up. Buying into Slack is like buying into Oracle... it is not too expensive at first, and before long, you wonder why using it actually negatively impacts your quarterly results.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by labnet ( 457441 )

      Have you seen how much RAM Teams use. 800MB just sitting there idle. It ludicrous. Teams only became popular because corps stopped trusting zoom.

  • Slack is looking for excuses. The software is terrible. I talk to more people in a day than will stay in my contacts list, often pasting things from documents into it doesn't just go in as text like I want it to. Copying images from it is way more complicated than it has to be, and you can't even type a slash or a pound without complicated windows popping up. Try pasting in a simple absolute directory, it takes all kinds of hoops.

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