I run an open source team chat product (Zulip) and I have no love for Slack (https://zulip.com/why-zulip/). But I also think Microsoft's behavior in the team chat market is definitely anticompetitive.
* Many businesses have purchasing rules that discourage buying 2 duplicate products -- so by bundling a bad team chat product with Office 365, they significantly reduce Slack's ability to get paying customers simply because of their monopoly position (not because of their product's quality).
* Microsoft is in a market position where they can effectively bribe potential customers with discounts on other services they sell (E.g. we'll add another $250K in Azure credits if you agree to go all Microsoft).
> You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.
This I agree with -- but the reason is that we're in a world of essentially unconstrained monopolistic tech giants, and it's basically impossible to stop a tech giant 100 times your size from taking your market if they really focus on doing so. And Microsoft is clearly very focused on the team chat market.
There are very few markets where it's possible to create a moat that can resist a monopolist copying your product (however badly) and then making the price of their copy zero (or negative!). I don't think we should accept a world where the only long-term outcomes for a fast-growing technology company are to be acquired or destroyed by a tech monopoly.
> Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets
This is a common misconception. While you can make "chat" as a demo with any web framework, nobody would willingly use that tool. Creating a team chat user experience that isn't terrible requires a huge amount of work because there are hundreds of features that significantly improve important workflows for large classes of people (if you don't believe me that it's hundreds, read https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/changelog.ht... and https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen...).
* Many businesses have purchasing rules that discourage buying 2 duplicate products -- so by bundling a bad team chat product with Office 365, they significantly reduce Slack's ability to get paying customers simply because of their monopoly position (not because of their product's quality).
* Microsoft is in a market position where they can effectively bribe potential customers with discounts on other services they sell (E.g. we'll add another $250K in Azure credits if you agree to go all Microsoft).
> You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.
This I agree with -- but the reason is that we're in a world of essentially unconstrained monopolistic tech giants, and it's basically impossible to stop a tech giant 100 times your size from taking your market if they really focus on doing so. And Microsoft is clearly very focused on the team chat market.
There are very few markets where it's possible to create a moat that can resist a monopolist copying your product (however badly) and then making the price of their copy zero (or negative!). I don't think we should accept a world where the only long-term outcomes for a fast-growing technology company are to be acquired or destroyed by a tech monopoly.
> Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets
This is a common misconception. While you can make "chat" as a demo with any web framework, nobody would willingly use that tool. Creating a team chat user experience that isn't terrible requires a huge amount of work because there are hundreds of features that significantly improve important workflows for large classes of people (if you don't believe me that it's hundreds, read https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/changelog.ht... and https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen...).