You’re missing the point. The outcomes and upside are irrelevant, what is relevant is that Microsoft’s only strategy to attack was to give it away for free and bundle it, creating a profoundly unfair (and illegal) advantage that continues the trend of consolidating power and reducing choice.
If an electricity company would offer a TV to each customer without any surcharge, then yes that’d be free, because customers are paying the same for less before. So, while I get your point, we are near unfair use of a monopoly situation here. Such a thing is good first for consumers, but once the companies own the monopoly, they own the pricing and can charge more than the former competitor used to, while customers becomes slave of one single monopolist.
Even if you pay the chat history is a massive pain in the ass to get out of the system, something that was a deal breaker for me when I was running a business.
Whenever I build the next feature on my roadmap, have I now bundled and given away for free something that could have been a standalone company? Is there a bright line where it flips from incremental feature additions to anticompetitive behavior?
Predatory pricing is a component of anti trust but a very difficult one to prove legally. One must prove that by giving consumers a cheaper product they are being harmed. It's an interesting conundrum.
But it's not that they just gave consumers a cheaper product - they used their dominance in a specific market to gain dominance in another. It's the same thing as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
Bundling IE with Windows was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court overturned the district court's initial ruling and remanded it for further analysis, but the case was ultimately settled before any ruling could be made.
Also, from the 2020 perspective Microsoft seems to have been right that the browser is an important operating system feature/component and may have simply been ahead of the curve in realizing it. (Today's mobile OSes all make the case that it should be a tightly OS managed component. Most consumers today would be extremely confused if an OS didn't include a browser at all; whether or not they primarily use that browser to install a more preferred browser.) It's easy in 2020 to wonder if the Microsoft anti-trust effort delayed innovations like PWA standards and got in the way of people thinking to build earlier cross-platform, lighter weight HTML "app frameworks" than what we are seeing in this timeline with Electron.
There is 0 reason why help and file browsing needs to be part of a browser. MS forced IE deep into the OS, when firefox and chrome, two incredibly successful and popular browsers do not need this at all, and are better for it.
The browser primarily exists to address Windows's deficiencies in smooth package management for installing basic apps - that is, for "downloading" basic "webpages" - by simply clicking on the link.
Counterfactual are hard, but if you see browsers as a sort of "replacement OS as desktop application" then you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!
Except that in this particular case the aren't "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an (enterprise) Productivity app.
We also know that from a technical perspective Teams actually was a "cheaper product" because it was built on the backs of other existing parts of Office 365. It shares a ton of backend with SharePoint and it swallowed up Skype for Business/Lync. Both key products of the "bundle" before Microsoft decided on a need to compete with Slack.
Except that in this particular case the aren't "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an (enterprise) Productivity app.
You can expand the definition of "(enterprise) Productivity Apps" ad infinitum.
1. Slack from a very early point in their pivot away from games branded themselves as an Enterprise Productivity app and made comparisons to Enterprise Email tools.
2. Microsoft's inclusion of Skype for Business/Lync (and to another extent Outlook, especially given Slack's own email-competitive marketing) for years prior to Slack/Teams implies that Chat/Communications has a long history of being considered an Enterprise Productivity App.
Bundling is a legitimate market strategy and not inherently anti-competitive. So long as the overall package is not sold at a loss I don't think there's an issue.
There's room for independent apps in the face of a bundled solution. By focusing on one thing you can do it better and cheaper than the packaged solution. And indeed Slack, at least to many, was worth the extra money.
Yeah, it is actually weird how these stories are getting written. By any sensible standard slack was insane success. Most founders dream about reaching market value of 1bln. Of course it would be cool to be worth 30bln and have control as well, but tbh many founders are insanely happy if they can get exit even for 30mln.
>Slack was perfectly capable of remaining a stand alone company.
It's possible that Slack's company insiders (founders, C-executives, investment bank advisors, etc) ... all concluded that continuing to compete as an independent company had a more risky outcome:
In other words, let's give the benefit of the doubt and assume all those folks above are above-average intelligent and can use Excel spreadsheets to model user growth, revenue growth, expenses, new products in the pipeline, "what-if" scenarios, etc.
EDIT REPLY to >"It seems like you stopped reading before my last sentence."
Yes, I read that but a healthy business needs to be an ongoing concern and _profitability_ is part of financial health. E.g. Blockbuster Video went from having a market cap worth billions to being worth nothing because of competition from Netflix. Blockbuster went from being profitable to losing money. In one way, Slack is even worse than Blockbuster as it has yet to turn a profit.
Setting your snark aside, what justifies your confidence about Slack's possible independent future more than the company's insiders who have all the internal metrics and private financial data to analyze?
Slack has some pretty weird blind spots as a business, too, like that one where all your hundreds or tens-of-thousands of employees must be part of the same general chat channel, where anyone can ping the entire company.
It takes 5 seconds to change the permissions on that channel to restrict posting to admins only. We figured that out a few hours after rolling Slack out to a small subset of users to test.
They've been spending their their effort giving you their third version of a message-composition "block API" that still doesn't-quite-work as documented.