Microsoft Teams – a chat-based workspace to compete with Slack

An open letter on the back page of The New York Times is a good way to throw a wrench in your competitor’s product launch.

Here’s the full-page Times ad, shared below by Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. Microsoft said it already has integrated services from more than 150 partners including call-center service Zendesk Inc., web- collaboration provider Asana Inc., and social-media aggregator Hootsuite Media Inc.

Microsoft’s newest internet service provides a central place for workplace groups to chat, share files and use other Microsoft programs like Outlook for email and calendars and Skype for voice and video conferences and workplace groups to chat.

“We’re glad you’re going to be helping us define this new product category”.

And much like Microsoft in the nineties, Microsoft Teams takes that platform advantage and turns it into an offer that its considerable base of existing customers can’t refuse.

Announced at an event in New York, Teams is meant to allow colleagues to communicate and share tasks in a central hub. “And now with Microsoft Teams, Office 365 accommodates all workstyles”. One of the key differences I saw between Slack and Teams is that Slack places one-to-one chats and group conversations on the left rail, simultaneously; Teams breaks this up into separate views.

Microsoft Teams will be free to Office 365 Enterprise customers. For instance, after praising the “thoughtfulness and craftsmanship” in Slack’s user experience, the ad says such traits are not common in enterprise software, Microsoft’s traditional forté.

Just like Apple versus IBM in 1981, it’s unclear who will come out on top in the Microsoft-Slack battle. Microsoft certainly won’t shy away from pushing Microsoft Teams to Office 365 customers, and a lot of them will embrace it without giving it a second thought.

Teams is like Slack in a number of ways: it allows conversations to be separated into various channels (topics) and across teams, of which you can be a member of as many as you like. You can also attach files, and that’s where you can see the Teams’ complexity issue begin to rear its head.

And while Slack, understandably, will get name-checked a fair amount when discussing the new collaboration tool, the software giant has taken a very cleanly organized business approach that sets it apart from that chief competitor.

In other words, Microsoft has weaponized Office into something that no startup can compete with head-on. “We’re glad you’re going to be helping us define this new product category”, it reads. Are you an individual or family subscriber to Office 365? After all, the company successfully converted its traditional Office software business, once its biggest cash cow, into a subscription revenue stream. While Slack has rocketed to 4 million daily users only three years after its launch, Microsoft can claim “85 million active monthly users” for Office 365.

“This is an experience that truly empowers that art form of how teams work and drive success”, Nadella said.

Facebook is also attempting to move into the area with its own Workplace platform.