(2019-08-20) Pember The Commoditization Of The Enterprise

James Pember: The Commoditization of the Enterprise. The challenge for Slack though, is just how quickly those features have become a commodity. What does this mean for Slack? Well, it means Slack will have to start fighting a fight they probably don’t want to fight.

to win the enterprise they have to fight against - the bundle. Against the default choice. Against the integrated stack. Remember, “No-one ever got fired for buying IBM”.

It was announced in mid-2019 that Microsoft Teams had overtaken Slack in active daily users - reaching 13 million DAUs compared to Slacks reported 10 million DAUs.

What Teams has managed to really do well is to build a truly “deep” product, and this is made possible by the fact that they own the entire productivity stack, they own the bundle. Teams integrates natively and well with pretty much the entire MsOffice stack: Outlook, Word/Powerpoint/Excel, OneDrive, OneNote, Planner and Forms.

Of course, Microsoft is still, in many ways, up against it. As Ben Thompson wrote a few months ago: "At the same time, the reason to use Microsoft is very much grounded in the past."

At the end of the day, there are really only two viable options for a fully integrated enterprise productivity stack today - Microsoft Office365 and Google’s G-Suite.