Reimagining the Effect of Microsoft’s Unbundling of Teams on Slack
As Microsoft unbundles Teams, it might not have the impact on Slack you thinkOne of the primary reasons that Slack joined forces with Salesforce in 2021 in a $28 billion deal was to give the communications company the clout to compete with Microsoft.
For years, company co-founder Stewart Butterfield railed against Microsoft bundling Teams with Office 365, calling it anticompetitive and saying at one point that Microsoft was “unhealthily obsessed with killing Slack.”The company went so far as to file a complaint against Microsoft with the European Union in 2020.
This morning, Microsoft announced it was finally unbundling Teams from Office 365 in the future, although current customers could continue to use the bundled license.
The market has matured to the point that many larger firms have made their choice, and since swapping out solutions isn’t a trivial matter, unbundling Teams is unlikely to have an appreciable impact on market share.
What’s more, rather than aiding Slack, he sees this as helping Microsoft to get Teams into more accounts where companies weren’t buying Office 365 licenses.
