[throwaway2037]

I am confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".

[j-r-d]

Because companies were already paying for it. Where I work now moved to Teams and they openly said it's not as good as Zoom, but we need to move because we're already paying for Office and so it doesn't make financial sense to pay for an additional duplicate service.

[3D30497420]

That seems to be the reason for a lot of services. Amazon/YouTube/Apple/etc. Music don't need to be better than Spotify, but just good enough that someone won't pay for a competitor. This limits the competitors potential revenue and helps keep them from growing into stronger competition.

Plus, you use your market incumbency to stifle competition in other ways (e.g., putting advertisements for Apple Music in settings).

[BoxOfRain]

Also you can just wear your customers down over time apparently. I wish I could make Apple Music's subscription nag screen go away for example, I have local music I sync to it iPod-style for when I'm travelling through areas with poor data reception and every single time I open the app it whinges at me that I'm not subscribed.

What will it take to make these companies realise I'm perfectly happy with my current music streaming service and I don't want theirs regardless of the price it's offered at? I find it very disrespectful as a user when software can't take 'no' for an answer; my 'no' isn't 'maybe if you wear me down with enough nag screens' it means 'no I'm not interested please go away'.

[daemin]

Unfortunately because you're not a customer, they'll never stop.

Often times they won't stop even if you are a customer as in the case of Microsoft insisting that I backup all my files to their OneDrive that came bundled with Office. I get constant nag notifications to "finish setting up backup" even though I have alternative backup solutions and only want to use OneDrive as an offsite storage, not as a sync system.

I would love to tell the software to "never bug me again", but instead we only have options of "Yes!" and "Not now, please bother me again".

[lrem]

Oh, Apple is way more forceful than that. I keep finding myself in the situation where I pause YouTube on my headphones, speak for a while with someone, click to unpause and instead of resuming on YouTube that starts Apple Music playing the same U2 album. I'm still refusing to set that damn thing up, much less have it be the default recipient of the play button.

[wila]

macOS I assume? I use a little app called noTunes (it's on github) to prevent that from happening.

edit: should be this one: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

[lrem]

iPhone

[miki123211]

To be fair, this is mostly due to Youtube and their very strict "no video playback when the app isn't open" policies. If you were using any other app, anything from Spotify to really niche audiobook apps, you wouldn't have that problem.

[lrem]

I’m paying for this and use YouTube almost exclusively when the app isn’t open.

[zer00eyz]

>>> need to be better than Spotify

I think you meant to say not WORSE than Spotify.

The product has gone to hell, they need to fire all the product managers. I don't know how you fuck up a music UI this badly but...

[throwaway2037]

Hi. I use Spotify in a web browser (at the office), on Linux (at home), and Android (mobile). To me, the Spotify UI has barely changed in 3 years.

You wrote:

    > The product has gone to hell

Can you provide some specifics? To be clear, I am not defending Spotify. One big thing that is lacking: They need a plug-in system like modern web browsers. This will allow them to offload a lot of the UI innovation to tech savvy users. At the moment, only Spotify can make changes to the UI.

[zer00eyz]

Right

Open a random play list, start playing a track.

Close the client, try to get back to the track you paying right now... Pick a big list will it get you back to the track. There used to be a few ways to do this, now there is one (and it's ugly).

Is there a rhyme or reason to show or not show the tracks of an artist that I have liked/followed? Is that display consistent?

Why are we mixing liked artists and liked playlists now. Why is "like" some global list. Albums, songs, Artists are not the same thing. Globing these preferences together is like telling the waiter you like ice cream when he asks for your drink order, at breakfast on a Tuesday.

Why do I have to click into an album to find the publish date of a track? They have this whole right panel now with half assed track info and nothing useful.

The UI needs burned to the ground and an adult, who likes music needs to tell them what they need to show...

[nemomarx]

Anecdotally, Teams has a lot more penetration compared to Lync and co, since it kinda took over Slacks marketshare once that was an established thing to use.

[caminante]

Every entrepreneur wants to assume the counterfactual that but for their startup dying for reason #6354, it would've lived!

[DANmode]

How many of those entrepreneurs are explicitly agreed with by antitrust regulators of major jurisdictions...?

[constantcrying]

You are just assuming OP is telling the truth. Look at his product: https://taskulu.com/ it wasn't killed by Teams, but by Jira.

[Rinzler89]

It's why we need the full context before believing everything these "serial entrepreneurs" say whenever they cry "wah-wah #BIG_CORP killed my product", so we can be the judges if indeed big corp killed it, or if it was just a DOA product coasting on the pandemic IT spending boom fueled by zero interest rates, like the other thousands of unprofitable startups of the time that are now under.

Since the OP refused to provide any further details or answer any questions people sent towards him, I tend to believe it's the latter.

[DANmode]

I think it's way more necessary to note Microsoft's aggressive use of market leader to stifle competition in previously unrelated industries, than to theoretically award anything to this founder in our court of opinion.

[throwAGIway]

Why should I care what a protectionist government agency thinks? As a customer, I am very satisfied with the deal Microsoft offered.

[bratbag]

For now you are.

Enshitification ramps up after the competition has been destroyed.

[DANmode]

I was going to say...as long as you're happy with, say, the current state of Windows, you should have no problem with whatever user-hostile changes their cloud offerings make over time.

[dmix]

Yeah I'm not fully buying a startup lives or dies based on packaging deal of a long-embedded mega corp.

Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense.

Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the early days or you're already DOA when facing an entrenched opponent whose team can easily undercut you well beyond generic bundling deals (whether via strong existing relationships, making wider non-standard sweetheart deals that wouldn't be under regulatory scrutiny, and marketing budgets).

Don't get me wrong this can harm markets generally, and megacorps should be held to higher scrutiny, but usually it's not that simple.

[jollofricepeas]

Nah.

My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true.

The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce.

But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub).

The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and <insert anything else here> to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no one was coming back into the office.

Source: I bought enterprise software for a Fortune 20 during COVID until I launched my startup.

[Foobar8568]

In Enterprise settings, I have never seen anything than MS bundling over 20 years for that many clients. To my European eyes, Slack and Zoom have been always an US centric or Linux first small companies centric tools.

[dmix]

Zoom became a major business because of Covid and Slack benfited majorly. Neither were powerhouses like Microsoft before then.

Whether a small European startup would have won out locally without Microsofts market position + price advantage idk. But without details I'm not sure the financial decision making of a Fortune 20 matters in this conversation which was part of my point.

Once your sales team is competing on price vs Microsoft it's basically over for young companies. Your value prop has to be much more than that until you're a mature business.

[DANmode]

Are you open to opportunities?

[djtango]

I have first hand seen Teams eat a whole bunch of better product's lunches. Overnight Meet Slack Zoom all got poopoo'd by finance because the company was already paying for MS Office

[throwaway2037]

Yeah, Symphony chat lost to Team also. Why didn't Symphony add voice and video chat? I never understood that.

[appstorelottery]

Netscape would probably disagree. :-)

[dmix]

Technically Netspace wasnt a startup, they IPOd early and were bought by AOL for 4 billion in 98. They were real large scale contenders where such a dynamic could really be do or die.

There's degrees to market manipulation and market position where this sort of explanation would hold water as being the root cause of death knell.

[jpalomaki]

Teams was the first tool from Microsoft on this space that was "good enough". The tools you mentioned were mostly for calls and instant messaging, not so strong on collaboration. With Teams Microsoft is really building a collaboration platform. They would like work to take place inside the Teams app.

[watwut]

The difference is that no one was using those. Since companies already pay for office and Teams is bundled, managements are forcing workforce to use it.

[Mashimo]

> Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.

I don't think MS Windows ever shipped with these.

[jabroni_salad]

All of those products were actually rather difficult to implement, to the point that they were job creators. It's honestly a case study for saas dominance: some ornery cludgery dying to 'it is a website'

[girvo]

Teams actually has adoption. Those other options didn't, when compared to Teams.

[cm2187]

I don't think it's end users asking for it though. I haven't met anyone who likes it. Seems to me that it is more of a "good enough for the cattle" decision by the IT department.

[girvo]

Oh absolutely, its not a good product for end-users. Doesn't change the fact that Teams has adoption that Skype For Business can only dream of however

[_cenw]

for anyone that has been spared, teams is the kind of product where you have to make an appointment for an ad-hoc meeting, or you'll be stuck in some unreliable p2p skype call that doesn't work on anything but chrome or edge.

[Angostura]

Because it Teams isn’t just a chat app? It includes things like Planner integration?

[darkwater]

So, why had Microsoft created Teams, if they were already covered?

[jbluepolarbear]

I know that a lot of companies (I’ve worked for and colleagues worked for) were asking Microsoft for an all-in-one solution like slack that would integrate with their office and share point systems. They didn’t like that Microsoft had similar products but as different apps.