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One of the elemental reasons that Slack joined forces withSalesforcein 2021 ina $ 28 billion dealwas to give the communications company the clout to contend withMicrosoft . For years , society co - laminitis Stewart Butterfieldrailed against Microsoftbundling Teams with Office 365 , calling it anticompetitive and saying at one point that Microsoft was “ unhealthily obsessed with killing Slack . ”
The companionship went so far as tofile a complaintagainst Microsoft with the European Union in 2020 .
This morning , Microsoft announcedit was finally unbundlingTeams from Office 365 in the future tense , although current client could carry on to use the bundled license .
Butterfieldstepped downfrom Slack at the destruction of 2022 , but he seemed less implicated about Microsoft after he became part of the CRM giant , telling TechCrunch ’s Connie Loizos in 2021 that squad seemed to bemore focused onmeeting software package like Zoom than Slack , and he was n’t aware of the condition of the complaint his company filed before becoming part of Salesforce .
Salesforce , for its part , did n’t have any input on the unbundling announcement , but Microsoft ’s bunch up strategy seems to have worked quite well , with the company reporting it has over 320 million user worldwide . Compare that with Slack , which has 32 million user or 10 % of Microsoft ’s total . It ’s hard to know what exactly that intend given the differences in how the two company count their users , but it ’s exonerated that Microsoft has afford up a significant lead .
perhaps Butterfield was right , but it ’s probably too late to matter . “ While Microsoft is unbundling Teams simply to avoid an antimonopoly mess , it ’s good for Salesforce / Slack for sure , but in many shipway it may be a Pyrrhic triumph , ” Alan Pelz - Sharpe , founding father and principal analyst at Deep Analysis , told TechCrunch . The grocery store has age to the head that many larger firms have made their selection , and since swapping out solution is n’t a trivial matter , unbundling Teams is unlikely to have an appreciable wallop on market portion .
Microsoft ’s announcement ostensibly allow for them to have their patty and rust it too , keep their existing customers under the existing Office 365 cluster accord , while charging succeeding customer for using the product , and presumably giving the companionship an debate with regulators that they ’ve unbundled Teams and are not in misdemeanor of any anticompetition rules .
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In fact , Holger Mueller , an analyst at Constellation Research , say that this could be the first happening where an anticompetitive rule help oneself the vendor ’s business . “ Microsoft has simply trade team to enough fellowship with its live Office accounts and now no longer needs the vigor and index of the enterprise permission concord , ” Mueller said .
What ’s more , rather than aiding Slack , he sees this as aid Microsoft to get Teams into more accounts where companies were n’t buying Office 365 licenses . Redmond can now betray standalone Teams licenses into non - Microsoft shops much more easily , all while build good will with regulators , and still stick it to slack up in the suffer - alone market fight .
That is probably not the outcome that Butterfield envision when he commence plain about Microsoft all those age ago , but the regulatory outcome does n’t always come out in the path you expect , especially when the market shifts so dramatically in the intervening year — or Microsoft ’s bundling scheme just work .
