s/ Microsoft $ForProfitCompany

Because Slack is a time-wasting splatter of 1,000 channels of nothing on. "Integrations" and "apps" are sloppily-designed and poorly bolted together junk. MS knows exactly what they're doing - add features from a massively popular competitor to a client that isn't doing great, and make it the new "collaboration app" that has hooks to your calendar, to Sharepoint, and to your Office docs. If you're an MS shop, Teams is great. Slack is like Google - the 'kids' use it. Noise != productivity. So many of these people have forgotten that. Creating random chatter doesn't let you surface 'good shit' - it just buries it farther down.

They don't have to require it. We willingly opted in.

You people are truly fucking clueless. Airborne pollution has dropped by 17% globally, according to numerous studies, some say 25%. CO2 levels down, NOx levels down ... All while human population has nearly quit traveling - especially air travel. Factories are idled; cities don't have commuters. So exactly HOW does this disprove the model?

All of the comments here decrying the "Oh noes, MS upgrade BAD!" are the same fanbois and mouthbreathers I see lauding "agile development" and "streamlining the enterprise" for pro-Linux/pro-short-cycle development and deployment approaches. For the Fortune 500, software deployment is slow, painful, and takes MONTHS of regression testing and upgrade/interoperability testing. That's why stuff takes SO LONG to move off of in the real word. I personally love being on the bleeding edge of most things, but many departments due to Oracle integrations, custom VBAs, API hooks, reporting exports/imports, massive Excel spreadsheets, SQL reporting, etc., etc. are the reason we can't go to the latest and greatest. Forcing frequent and potentially damaging upgrades is not in Microsoft's best interest. If you read the RTFA (I know, this is Slashdot), you'll see they're talking basically automatic point releases - NOT major revision drops. I'm OK with that - if something is broken/incomplete/incompatible, streaming the update after being vetted isn't *ALL* bad. What I do fear is the inability to opt-out of forced upgrades. Some of my environments are "point-in-time" locations that cannot be changed without MAJOR planning and testing. If I can put my developers and IT staff on new versions, the pilot group, non-integrated staff, and the early-adopters group on this, and then do some testing for the static groups ... it's not a bad thing.