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How Microsoft crushed Slack - by Casey Newton - Platformer

platformer.news · 2,315 words · saved by 1 readers

Slack’s life as an underdog darling of Silicon Valley ended on November 2, 2016. That’s when the upstart communication startup published an open letter to Microsoft in the New York Times, offering the tech giant an insincere “welcome” to the world of workplace chat software. The occasion was Microsoft’s launch of Teams, a Slack clone that would come bundled with the company’s popular Office 365 suite of products. In its letter, Slack warned Microsoft that “Slack is here to stay,” adding: “we’re just getting started.” But the 4 million users it had at the time would increase to just 12 million four years later, while Microsoft — which added Teams to its 365 bundle without increasing the price — took Teams from zero to 115 million users. That disparity helps to explain why Slack sold itself this week to Salesforce. The deal, which values Slack at $27.7 billion on revenues of $833 million over the past year, has largely been greeted with cheers. (Ben Thompson offers a typically excellent

Slack’s life as an underdog darling of Silicon Valley ended on November 2, 2016. That’s when the upstart communication startup published an open letter to Microsoft in the New York Times , offering the tech giant an insincere “welcome” to the world of workplace chat software. The occasion was Microsoft’s launch of Teams , a Slack clone that would come bundled with the company’s popular Office 365 suite of products. In its letter, Slack warned Microsoft that “Slack is here to stay,” adding: “we’re just getting started.” But the 4 million users it had at the time would increase to just 12 millio

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