Microsoft: Slack doesn’t have the "breadth and depth" to reinvent work
Summary
I sat down with Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365, recently to really understand Microsoft’s vision for Teams and his thoughts on the Slack competition and the future of productivity and Office. That includes the company’s new Fluid Framework, which takes the idea of documents and turns them into a cloud app that multiple people can contribute to with graphs, tables, text, and more. Slack, which has started with a very interesting innovation with chat-based workspaces, but we think will not have the breadth and depth that’s really required to reinvent what it looks like to work together.” Microsoft and Slack’s strategies are different because, ultimately, the end product and customers are different. “It pushes us to make sure we’re best in class, and it offers people opportunities to get started small, and there’s nothing but goodness out there right now.” Slack has been focused on integration points for its own service, but it’s also relying on its customers just loving the app more than Microsoft Teams. Slack claims it’s not worried about the reach of Office 365, but the success of either solution will come down to which product manages to truly change the way we work today and at what price.
