As Slack makes its stock market debut, there’s a major company that won’t be allowing its employees to use the business collaboration and chat app as part of their daily work. It’s Microsoft, and it’s not just because the Redmond giant is Slack’s biggest competitor through its own Microsoft Teams collaboration app. At least, that’s not the primary stated reason. And it turns out Slack is far from the only piece of popular technology to earn this distinction.
GeekWire obtained an internal Microsoft list of prohibited and discouraged technology — software and online services that the company doesn’t want its employees using as part of their day-to-day work. We first picked up on rumblings of the prohibition from Microsoft employees who were surprised that they couldn’t use Slack at work, before tracking down the list and verifying its authenticity.
Slack is on the “prohibited” category of the internal Microsoft list, along with tools such as the Grammarly grammar checker and Kaspersky security software. Services in the “discouraged” category include Amazon Web Services, Google Docs, PagerDuty and even the cloud version of GitHub, the popular software development hub and community acquired by Microsoft last year for $7.5 billion.
Since taking the reins five years ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has espoused a “learn it all” philosophy that encourages employees to understand and adapt to new viewpoints and information. Under his leadership, the company has struck a series of partnerships with longtime rivals. Of course, Microsoft still competes energetically. In the competition with Slack, Microsoft has the benefit of decades of experience in enterprise software. It touts the security and compliance features of Microsoft Teams as a selling point for its big business customers. Slack launched its Enterprise Grid version in 2017 as a way of catering to many of these same customers.