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posted by janrinok on Friday October 25 2019, @06:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the David-v-Goliath dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Stewart Butterfield says Microsoft sees Slack as existential threat – TechCrunch

In a wide ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal’s global technology editor Jason Dean yesterday, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield had some strong words regarding Microsoft, saying the software giant saw his company as an existential threat.

The interview took place at the WSJ Tech Live event. When Butterfield was asked about a chart Microsoft released in July during the Slack quiet period, which showed Microsoft Teams had 13 million daily active users compared to 12 million for Slack, Butterfield appeared taken aback by the chart.

“The bigger point is that’s kind of crazy for Microsoft to do, especially during the quiet period. I had someone say it was unprecedented since the [Steve] Ballmer era. I think it’s more like unprecedented since the Gates’ 98-99 era. I think they feel like we’re an existential threat,” he told Dean.

It’s worth noting, that as Dean pointed out, you could flip that existential threat statement. Microsoft is a much bigger business with a trillion-dollar market cap versus Slack’s $400 million. It also has the benefit of linking Microsoft Teams to Office 365 subscriptions, but Butterfield says the smaller company with the better idea has often won in the past.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @09:05PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @09:05PM (#911866)

    I can't think of a single small, for-profit company that has ever beaten Microsoft.

    This is dangerously close to the No-True-Scotsman fallacy, as any company which has beaten Microsoft pretty much can't be "small" anymore because the act of winning will make them big.

    However, your general point is true. The summary has this wide sweeping statement of "yeah, people beat Microsoft all the time," and I can't really think of many at all. Maybe Skype? Oracle (which isn't really "small" now, but not sure in the past)? Netscape (for a while)? Whoever owns the mp3 format?

    Regardless, given the wide sweeping statement from the summary, I think the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate... and I think we can conclusively say that it's not obviously true.

  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday October 25 2019, @10:21PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday October 25 2019, @10:21PM (#911888) Journal
    Skype? I don't think so. Microsoft bought them from eBay in May of 2011.
    --
    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @03:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @03:54AM (#911969)

    Oracle was founded as SDL (can't remember what that stood for) by Ellison, Miner, and Oates to sell the first RDBMS. They got there first and soundly beat all their competitors in the 80s. They have, in many ways, been sailing along on that success as the de facto relational database for the past 35 years.