Slack is in a tough position but they don't really sell "chat as a service" as much as they sell an incredibly convenient workplace experience. They're like the netflix / amazon of enterprise; convenience and ease of use is their product more than anything else. From everything I've read, heard, and experienced, Teams is way worse of an experience. What MS _can_ do that Slack can't is append Teams as a line-item it to an existing invoice, or shift spend within a contract. It happens; Salesforces does this with Heroku.
Slack has created the blueprint of what to make. It’s much easier for MS to copy those features until the difference between the two products is small. I think Slack is hoping their focus will save them, but in the end they’re going to lose most of their MS oriented customers
It doesn't matter, it has become the reference already. You could say the same about Nike or BMW or Dropbox. The truth is that these brands enjoy a certain (literal) mindshare (through proper execution) that is hard to replace.
> It's easy to replace Slack the tech, it's hard to replace Slack the app that people are used to when they say they want a chat app for their company.
Well, that's not true. That is easily refuted by it having been replaced at least once.
> It's like saying Windows is not difficult to replace. Technicaly true but practically false.
While you may believe that Slack offers something that other solutions lack, that simply isn't true. I know of two companies which have replaced Slack, one with a commercial offering, and the other with an in-house solution. Rewriting most of Slack is a week-end project.
Slack, over time, actually locks a company more and more into their ecosystem, since to have history you must pay them. With many other solutions, including 50 year old email, messages can be stored locally and filtered as is beleived to be appropriate by each user. If all you want is a chat bot with channels, then use Slack, and throw it away when you're finished.
