[chipdart]

> I mean, for the majority of people, does this really give us something good?

I think it clearly does the world a whole lot of good. It would be disastrous if a single company leveraged it's monopoly over a platform to force-feed the world their own instant communication service just because they can deploy an email client bundled with a spreadsheet, word processor, and misc office productivity software.

Put yourself in the position of a company such as Slack. It is beyond any doubt a far superior service than Microsoft Teams. Yet, forcing Teams to be bundled with Word, Excel, and specially Outlook ends up forcing Teams upon people in spite of being a clearly inferior alternative. If any person in the world was forced to choose between the two, I assure you that no one would pick Teams ever if not for Outlook.

So, how exactly is forcing Teams upon the world anything other than abuse of a de facto monopoly and anti-competitive business practices?

[jodrellblank]

> "If any person in the world was forced to choose between the two, I assure you that no one would pick Teams ever if not for Outlook."

And you'd be wrong. I've joined internet groups that use Slack and left specifically because Slack is so bad, but stayed in places using Discord because it's much better. Teams is nice. Part of why Slack is bad is because they're trying to turn "send small amounts of text over the internet" into a billion dollar VC funded business and the foundations can't hack it. Part of why Teams is nice is because it integrates well with Office and Microsoft 365, that makes it a clearly superior alternative.

> "So, how exactly is forcing Teams upon the world anything other than abuse of a de facto monopoly and anti-competitive business practices?"

How exactly is making a better product (Teams) which integrates well with other products (desirable features) 'forcing' or 'abusing' anything just because you're a hater with an axe to grind?

[chipdart]

> And you'd be wrong. I've joined internet groups that use Slack and left specifically because Slack is so bad (...)

I don't know what counts as good in your book, but to me Slack is by far the best professional-oriented messaging tool around.

Certainly Microsoft Teams is not it. It's messaging UI feels as if the goal was to copy 1990s ICQ, with matching search capabilities.

[ghusto]

Slack is at once a poor communication product, and a beacon of excellence in comparison to MS Teams. It says much that I'd rather use Slack than MS Teams. The bar was low, but by god did they limbo under it somehow.

Basic UX like it being clear when I'm replying to a message or starting a thread are fantastically broken. It's clunky, buggy, slow. It's just a shit-show in every respect. Normally I respect people's preferences, but your preference is wrong.

[vouaobrasil]

I agree, which is why I said I believe in antitrust. But my point was that the good it does is an incremental movement to a local maximum, which is in a series of descending local maxima that is leading to a worse world.

So while you are correct that it does do good (and I acknowledged that), the good it does is merely the movement to the next in a long line of shrinking islands in a poisonous sea.