[ChrisBland]

It is a plus to have them integrated, I believe the issue is m$ was basically giving it away for free for anyone who has the office suite. As a CTO faced with reducing spend on SaaS, do you cut slack for essentially a free clone of it? Not a hard call, but that becomes anticompetitive behavior. Similar to the shipping of IE with windows back in the day.

[Terretta]

Thinking Teams is a clone of Slack suggests neither Office nor Teams is being fully used.

Teams is a re-imagining of UI atop SharePoint and SfB/Lync APIs or functionality we all loathed, and does a not terrible job of it.

When you realize that "screen sharing" is now "app sharing" instead, and every user can collaborate, a light bulb goes off.

When you realize you can offer Teams with web-based office suite collab at $3/seat to remote collaborators, fireworks go off.

When you realize all of this is fully compliant for regulated industries, there are no other choices, because the incumbents didn't bother becoming compliant for actually collaborating.

Most tools in this space are siloed chat, or presentation viewer, and god bless for permissioned file spaces.

As far as we've been able to find, both at the 2nd largest bank in free world and a startup of just dozens, the M365 E5 suite with Teams backed by SharePoint makes this all work together for role based group access to real time collaboration at scale while remaining seamlessly compliant.

[Analemma_]

> I believe the issue is m$ was basically giving it away for free for anyone who has the office suite.

That's the OP's point: what you call "giving away for free for anyone who has the office suite", I call "adding another feature to the office suite". Particularly for features which everyone understands are now just necessary in the space, it's a little weird to say "you can't add new features to your software, that would be anticompetitive".