[underwater]

It makes sense for Teams. The app is a chat client, sure, but it also contains the entirety of Office 365 and a third-party app platform. Chats can have tabs with Excel documents, wikis, polls, etc.

By leveraging browser technology they have a platform that is incredibly extensible. Building that from scratch across iOS, Android, Windows and macOS is not feasible. And the benefit of having people reach to the tools at hand and strengthen Office's position outweighs the performance penalty.

[Aaargh20318]

> Building that from scratch across iOS, Android, Windows and macOS is not feasible.

Building a few chat apps is not feasible for one of the largest software companies in the world ?

[dan-robertson]

This misses the point. The parent isn’t talking about just building a few chat apps. They are talking about building a chat app which can have basically any ms office thing embedded inside it.

[Aaargh20318]

Not real office, web-based office. Why not make a native chat app that opens Office files in the real full-featured Office ?

[WorldMaker]

Office is going the other direction and moving more of the "full-featured" Office components to React Native and sharing them with the web. Teams was built as a quick spike by the SharePoint team to prove they could slackingly build a chat client. It might not be a surprise if it moves to React Native in the future.

[baud147258]

Office 365 could just as easily be opened in the browser, instead of slowing down the app for all users. I mean it's a chat app, how many users are going to need to edit a document inside the app?

[icebraining]

Microsoft had something called OLE just for that kind of embedding, and it was already cross-platform, as part of Office.