Slack wanted to stay independent, but was unable to compete with tech giants
&gt; These giants, armed with nearly limitless funds and extensive client relationships, frequently abuse their advantage and bully smaller upstarts into oblivion.<p>I don’t really understand this viewpoint. Companies are _choosing_ to use Microsoft’s products for various reasons. Maybe they already use Office and the integration with Teams made Teams the best choice over Slack. Maybe the company had an existing relationship with Microsoft so onboarding Teams required less Administrative overhead. There are probably many more that I am not listing. These are legitimate reasons to choose a product over another, not Microsoft abusing its power.<p>Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem. Lone, un-integrated startups, like Slack, still pop up and shake up the market. Then big companies replicate their product and integrate it into their existing software suites and sales pipelines, providing value that the smaller startup cannot. In this case the smaller startup merged with a larger company and will likely be integrated with their systems, providing value that both companies could have easily created alone. This all seems like it’s working as intended to me.