Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft
Dear Slack,<p>You&#x27;re selling something that isn&#x27;t a product. Standalone chat is a feature, and you won&#x27;t win against a full product offering unless you drastically reduce your prices. You need to get acquired (by Google or Facebook), because I don&#x27;t think you can innovate an office productivity suite fast enough to compete. And that&#x27;s clearly the enterprise puzzle piece where chat fits into nicely.<p>Microsoft isn&#x27;t being anti-competitive here. Out of all the FAAMG, they&#x27;re the one that least resembles a monopoly.<p>You&#x27;re struggling because you are selling <i>chat</i> as a service. Something that has been free since IRC and AOL Instant Messenger. Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets. You built a pretty (through opinions vary) version with access controls.<p>You had a chance to build a moat and make acquisitions to fortify your position, <i>but you didn&#x27;t do it</i>. You invited competition from Microsoft and instead of doing something, you rewrote your Electron layout six times and made a WYSIWYG that everyone hated.<p>You had four or five years to do something. You had a chance most startup companies dream of. But here we are. You squandered that chance while you reveled in hubris.<p>You&#x27;re going to get eaten, and there&#x27;s not much you can do about it now.