Slack's innovative idea was to build IRC as a service. They knew MSFT was going to come after them years ago. Why weren't they more prepared? Why did investors believe this day would never come?
It isn’t just IRC as a service. There are numerous other small design decisions that add up to a productive product. I feel like comparing it to IRC is a massive trivialization of Slack and doesn’t recognize why it succeeded where other products didn’t.
I also don’t think investors didn’t anticipate threats from bigger players. It’s more that it is unfair that Microsoft can get away with blatant copycat products. The leadership and employees at Microsoft aren’t better at any of this than Slack’s, and in fact they are almost certainly worse than those who worked through the grueling startup journey to get Slack to where it got. But Microsoft has capital, the ability to soak up losses (without needing to climb the mountain of acquiring customers/learning/clawing a way to revenue and profit), lots of existing Office customers to pivot onto Teams, and the ability to bundle products.
To put it another way, if Microsoft wasn’t Microsoft, Teams would be no different than another random Slack competitor. But they’ve reached big success without the same degree of hard work, innovation, and struggles as Slack or others. The fact that Teams is as successful as it has become is evidence that lopsided capital (and other traits of mega corps) breaks the notion of a fair free market with healthy competition - an environment that assigns success where it is most deserved.
I also don’t think investors didn’t anticipate threats from bigger players. It’s more that it is unfair that Microsoft can get away with blatant copycat products. The leadership and employees at Microsoft aren’t better at any of this than Slack’s, and in fact they are almost certainly worse than those who worked through the grueling startup journey to get Slack to where it got. But Microsoft has capital, the ability to soak up losses (without needing to climb the mountain of acquiring customers/learning/clawing a way to revenue and profit), lots of existing Office customers to pivot onto Teams, and the ability to bundle products.
To put it another way, if Microsoft wasn’t Microsoft, Teams would be no different than another random Slack competitor. But they’ve reached big success without the same degree of hard work, innovation, and struggles as Slack or others. The fact that Teams is as successful as it has become is evidence that lopsided capital (and other traits of mega corps) breaks the notion of a fair free market with healthy competition - an environment that assigns success where it is most deserved.