[hibikir]

Their growth is being bulldozed, and they are losing/have lost more than a few big enterprise customers. This doesn't mean that their revenue will drop to zero, but it drastically changed the fortunes of the company: Without teams doing what it did, slack might not have to have gotten acquired.

But really, this isn't really about users not caring about product quality: Users definitely do! The whole point of the Teams strategy is that enterprise sales is not about users at all.

I'll use as an example a large multinational, with a market cap over 50 billion.Many divisions had been using slack since at least 2015: integrations all over the place, engagement throughout the day and night.. a wonderful example of slack being a strong incumbent. But this winter, Slack was completely ripped out, despite the fact that the only group that prefers teams are counting money. Teams is for all intents and purposes, free with everything else that they are paying Microsoft for, and from the perspective of the people making the decision, Slack and Microsoft are the same: But we already have slack at home! Executives weren't using Slack much at all, they will not use Teams either, and for them, it's a matter of dollars. Losses from having to adapt? Communication losses from a tool that works badly? Invisible, just like when you outsource your cloud team to big outsourcing.

Some divisions wanted to just keep a slack that they'd be billed for directly. Hell, some teams would have paid for the monthly fee from their own pocket, given how much worse their work lives have become with teams... but this was a mandate from above, and with the head of IT behind it, you are going to have a lot of trouble connecting to any slack while on the VPN. Yes, I am told that their async collaboration culture, is severely damaged... but productivity losses are blamed on factors that have nothing to do with executive decisions.

This really is the secret of enterprise sales: Users and decision makers are different in almost every case, and large conglomerates understand this very well. And when dealing with said decision makers, bundling is always an advantage. To compete against a bundled product, you need to have something that is far better than the competition, in a way that is very clear to the people that pay for the software. So it can work for, say, zoom, as remote meetings are still a part of the executive suite. But selling, say, a better Jira? It better cost zero, or be far better at executive reports. Being better for the teams themselves is just not going to be very valuable.

[sdoering]

You are telling a story I can relate to. I am part of an org that uses both. As an employee from an acquisition we are still using slack internally. And teams as mandated by mothership.

It is okayish when talking to colleagues from different parts of the corporate. Or clients. But usage internally is near 0.

We are not forbidden to use it, but will be forced (due to "security") move to the most expensive tier on order of HQ. I know that there are talks if it is feasible with this price tag attached.

And I know the brain drain it would mean when loosing another symbol of not fully being the mothership.

[civilized]

The charts don't suggest to me that Teams stole Slack's growth. Slack's trajectory looks about the same before and after Teams was introduced. I'm sure there was some negative impact but it's impossible to read off what it was from the graph.

As for the rest, yes, this is an old story, but doesn't apply to all companies. Slack will always have its niche. I know of a much larger multinational that didn't ditch Slack, it just added Teams.