|
Just about the entire business world? M365 is like, six times the size of Google Workspace (see the Superhuman for Outlook release announcement: https://blog.superhuman.com/superhuman-for-outlook/ - the company specifically notes that it's startups that use Google), let alone Slack. It's pockets of hyper early adoptery / fashionista startups and small media production companies where people started on Google because it's what they were used to from non-work life (they've probably been on Gmail as long as it's existed because it's just been the cooler product for forever). A good example being a recent LTT WAN show where Linus and Luke went "Who even uses Outlook?" and were genuinely surprised when people said that Outlook's actually good. https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/xt5uho/wan_s... Ben Thompson on the Silicon Valley attitude towards Redmond: Back in the 1990s Silicon Valley was terrified of Microsoft; then, over the intervening years, that fear faded, and Microsoft became yesterday’s news at best, and the punchline of jokes at worse. Obviously the company has completely turned around its fortunes over the last decade, but even then the primary source of growth has been Microsoft’s ability to bring its pre-existing customer base to the cloud. There have been other intrusions into Silicon Valley consciousness, of course, particularly when a seemingly unstoppable startup ran into the Microsoft distribution advantage wall, but few people in Silicon Valley use Microsoft products, and that’s that. Indeed, the response of several folks I talked to after Microsoft’s demo was “what demo?” I think this is a massive mistake: Silicon Valley needs to rediscover its Microsoft fear, and Business Chat gets at why. Make no mistake, the Copilots are impressive, although it is reasonable to expect that Google Workspace’s implementation will be at least comparable. The problem with the Workspace + vertical SaaS app stack, though, is that none of it is designed to work together. I’ve been arguing for years this is an underrated reasons why Teams beat Slack; from 2020: "This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”…This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that." |