Microsoft Teams Picks Up the Slack (Premium)

Two years ago, we were debating whether Microsoft should buy Slack to gain credibility in the emerging market for chat-based collaboration. But the software giant went in a different direction, and it announced it would develop its own product, Microsoft Teams.

Today, it's clear that the software giant made the right decision. But that wasn't always so clear. In fact, Microsoft was considering acquiring Slack in early 2016 for about $8 billion. But Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates both believed that Microsoft could build a Slack competitor based on Skype for Business. And so it did.

This kind of convergence---where an existing product is adapted to meet previously-unexpected use cases---doesn't always work.

For example, when the web became a thing in the mid-1990's, Microsoft tried to adapt Word, its word processor, to become, in turn, a web page editor and then a blog editor. The theory was sound---web pages and blog posts are just documents, after all---but the results were underwhelming, to say the least. So Microsoft purchased FrontPage along with Vermeer in 1996 to address web page and web site creation. And it created Windows Live Spaces and, later, Windows Live Writer, for blog posts.

But converging Skype for Business into a chat-based hub for team-based collaboration did make sense. In fact, there were many inside and outside of Microsoft arguing that the software giant had, if anything, too many products and technologies (like SharePoint and Yammer) that could be adapted to this use. And as critics will rightfully point out, Microsoft had squandered its early lead with Skype and allowed competing services to surpass it. Maybe it should try to salvage this disaster.

So Teams---which, not surprisingly, was originally named Skype Teams---was announced in late 2016. Microsoft being Microsoft, it was positioned as a component of the commercial versions of Office 365. This made sense: The whole of Office 365, if you will, is greater than the sum of its parts. But this bundling also marked the single biggest difference between the Microsoft offering and Slack. Where Slack is a modern, web- and mobile-based solution that first targeted cash-strapped start-ups and small businesses, Teams got lumped into an offering that appeals to bigger, more traditional corporations.

This cultural divide was necessary at first. And to give Microsoft the credit it deserves, it did race to address this immature new product's most obvious shortcomings. Better still, it listened to customer feedback to determine where to focus first.

I have to assume that feedback led inexorably to where we are today. It started with guest user access, which came on board earlier this year. And this week, it reached its logical conclusion with Microsoft announcing that Teams will now be available, for free, to anyone.

In other words, two years into this journey, Microsoft has finally delivered on something that literally does comp...