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.
In recent months, the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — have relaxed their egress fees, which are a tax of sorts that the cloud companies charge customers to move their data to another vendor.
“In the original cloud world, the three major cloud vendors were really fighting to try to build what felt like walled gardens, and as long as you built on top of them, everything was great.
Cloud customers looking to switch providers will need to be retained through innovative and accessible features now that the punishment of egress fees is being phased out,” Seseri said.
David Linthicum, a longtime cloud consultant, says that while these recent announcements are a pleasant PR move, he warns folks to review their bills carefully because egress fees aren’t the only problem.
What are we paying for the networking fees, the egress fees, all the other hidden fees that come along with what people call junk fees that come from the cloud vendors?”But this may not affect startups as much as larger enterprise customers.
Indeed, with numbers hovering around 20% globally, it’s difficult to make the case that the company is dominating the competition the way Microsoft did Apple a quarter-century ago.
Apple suggests, however, that the DOJ’s suggestion that its “share of the entire U.S. smartphone market exceeds 65%” is misleading, as it refers to revenue rather than units sold.
It’s here the DOJ suggests that Apple commands 70% of the “performance” smartphone market.
Today, only Samsung and Google remain as meaningful competitors in the U.S. performance smartphone market.
Even Cupertino’s highly paid legal team would struggle to make the case that Apple Watch owners aren’t hamstrung by its iOS exclusivity.
Now, Coro — one of the startups building tools specifically for smaller businesses — is announcing a big round of funding after seeing its recurring revenues shoot up 300% in the last year.
Sources close to the deal tell TechCrunch that its valuation is over $750 million post-money.
And among SMBs responding to a survey from Digital Ocean, 74% named data privacy a top concern.
The opportunity in the security market for SMBs that Coro has identified is that these businesses typically lack the teams and internal IT budgets to dedicate to building and managing their defenses.
Its round last year, in April 2023, was $75 million at a $575 million valuation (also post-money).
Nvidia could be primed to be the next AWS There are a lot of parallels in the two companies' growth trajectoriesNvidia and Amazon Web Services, the lucrative cloud arm of Amazon, have a surprising amount in common.
But AWS growth has begun to slow down, even as Nvidia’s takes off.
The question is whether Nvidia can sustain that growth to become a long-term revenue powerhouse like AWS has become for Amazon.
The short-term financial outlookAs the above chart notes, Nvida’s revenue growth has been astronomical in recent quarters.
Much like AWS, Nvidia will face stiffer competition eventually, but it controls so much of the market right now, it can afford to cede some.
Liquid Death is just one of many VC-backed beverage startups ready to disrupt Coke and Pepsi Venture-backed beverage startups continue to popOn March 11, a fizzy startup announced that it had raised $67 million at a $1.4 billion valuation and reached $263 million in sales in 2023.
Did you guess that this startup is Liquid Death, a canned water company?
(Liquid Death declined to comment.)
It also rose to be the 11th fastest-growing beverage brand in the last month, besting brands like Monster Energy, Gatorade and Liquid Death.
Olipop and Liquid Death seem well on their way.
Apple is dubbing the litigation misguided and warning the DOJ risks trashing all the things its customers value about its integrated mobile ecosystem.
In an on-the-record statement provided to TechCrunch, Apple said:This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets.
The suit claims Apple holds a more than 70% share of “performance smartphones” and over 65% of the US smartphone market, respectively.
But they are also aggressively briefing that the DOJ case will fail.
In today’s briefing Apple also claimed the DOJ’s case has changed tack multiple times (it suggests at least six) over the four years it’s been in formulation.
Reddit sold $203 million worth of contracts to AI companies for access to its data earlier this year.
In the wake of a compression in tech valuations since the implosion of the 2021-era asset bubble, few tech companies have tested public markets.
Early trading results do not always augur a trouble-free public market life, however.
Secondaries investors recently told TechCrunch that they weren’t sure that a successful Reddit IPO would be enough to bring life back into the IPO market in 2024.
But with Astera Lab’s impressive performance yesterday and Reddit’s strong showing today, maybe there will be more life in the IPO market this year than many thought.
The suit alleges that the company has a monopoly in the premium smartphone market and uses a variety of illegal tactics to perpetuate that monopoly.
Apple’s monopoly position is not nearly as clear-cut.
Microsoft Windows had well over 90% market share in the relevant market of operating systems for personal computers.
This argument is important because Apple’s market share is much lower globally (only 23%, with number-two Samsung at 16%).
There’s also a host of circumstantial proof, such as Apple’s massive and durable profit margins on iPhone sales.
Globally, a third of the food produced is lost or wasted, and in Kenya, that figure stands at between 20% to 40%.
Farm to Feed, an agri-tech based in Kenya, is one of the fast-risers in the space.
Farm to Feed teams then sort, grade and dispatch the products to clients from its warehouse in Kenya’s Capital, Nairobi.
Data collectionOn top of the e-commerce platform, Van Enk said they are building a data platform by collecting granular data including on climate and drivers of food loss, for better farming outcome and to create a more circular food system.
I do think that food loss is such a huge impact opportunity and also a very good commercial opportunity,” she said.
