On the new Microsoft antitrust probe

I believe this time it's wrong.

It's without doubt that Microsoft has a dominant position, in the operating systems market but, more importantly, in the office automation market. In the end, there is no good alternative to the Microsoft office suite and the level of integration it has into the whole Microsoft ecosystem. It doesn't help that alternative suites, are nowhere near Office features and quality-wise (we could mention LaTeX, but it's way too nerdy).

A lot of people are trying to compare this new, potential, investigation, with the one about the Internet Explorere bundling that happened in the late 00's. However, there is a big differentiator between the two potential issues:

It was more of a consumers market issue.

Windows literally needed Internet Explorer to work.

This time, instead:

The affected market is, more, the enterprise one.

You are not forced to use Teams, to have the rest of your system working.

Why the Slack complaint, then? Why are companies switching to Teams when they were using Slack previously? Actually, Slack is way less worse than Microsoft Teams from a UI perspective. Even functionally, at a first glance, Slack feels superior at it's core scope: chatting. However, companies are ditching it because:

It's too expensive, for "just" a chat client.

More importantly: it lacks the same level of office automation Teams has.

Slack plugins, aren't the same thing as Microsoft Office automation with Teams. Teams hooks into Outlook, and Outlook hooks into Teams, you can share advanced objects between the two, and with Sharepoint, and with Viva, and with.... everything else Microsoft, at a level where a Slack plugin (essentially a JSON HTTP api) can just dream. It's not a matter of "reading code in the chat", but how the software integrates with everything else into your company stack. When you are not a Technology company first, and you have hundread of thousands of employees, plus the requirement of self-hosting your services in the country you operate (yes, Switzerland, for example, have this requirement), it's a no-brainer to choose Teams compared to another product like Slack.

Plus, when you are a big customer with deep pockets, Microsoft is ready to send you an army of experts ready to increase the level of office automation you have.

Slack has some big contracts, but they are all in the tech world (IBM uses it for sure, plus others), but the majority of those customers are technology companies more into consulting than anything else, where the need for office automation are much lower compared to, say, a bank. Slack is loved by coders, but not by the business types that doesn't see any additional value into it. Additionally, Slack has no other product to sell. I'm not even sure they developed some real integration with Microsoft Office and such but, critically, Microsoft Office is not going to hook into Slack. Why then should an enterprise pay, say, 11.75 EUR/month per user, for something they can not even host in their own environment? Of course they will say: "We will be using Teams, from now on", it just makes so much sense and, for Microsoft, it's an additional tool to keep their customers happy.

What will happen if the EU say: "Stop bundling Teams with office!"? IMHO, nothing will change, because administrators around the world will download the MSI, drop it into their Active Directory automated installation profiles and install it into the clients anyway. Because with a click users will be logged in with their AD username, without the need to digit another password. Sure, in theory, Slack has Active Directory integration, but just reading the following will put you off:

> Note: On its own, ADFS does not support automatic de-provisioning through Slack’s SCIM API. After de-provisioning a member in your IDP, make sure to also deactivate them in Slack if you haven’t implemented a SCIM provisioning solution outside of ADFS.

Seriously?

Or this:

Even worse

If I was the sysadmin of a big enterprise, I'll say: "No way I'm going to do that crap! Just install Teams, FFS!".

Unless Slack (or Salesforce, it's owner) starts to offer an ecosystem of applications to compete, I believe the company revenues reached a plateu. Hence, this complaint to try and "win" some market share in the enterprise world. But Slack, have nothing more to offer, and it's a consequence of being just a chat app, plus a shitty video-conferencing on top.

Competing with Microsoft is simply impossible for them, they have nothing else to sell, or to leverage to sell Slack itself (like Microsoft selling, or giving away these days, Windows to sell Office).

I believe Slack will continue to happily coast as the honey of the programmers (well, I hate it with a passion), but there is no way they can grow much more than now.

They are done and this is a sign of their limits.