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Microsoft Working On Skype Teams, Its Slack Competitor (mspoweruser.com)
Earlier this year, we heard rumors that Microsoft was interested in purchasing the popular team-chat app Slack for as much as $8 billion. The deal never happened, so naturally, Microsoft has decided to make a Slack-like app. Microsoft-centric news blog MSPowerUser reports: Meet Skype Teams. Skype Teams is going to be Microsoft's take on messaging apps for teams. Skype Teams will include a lot of similar features which you'll find on Slack. For example, Skype Teams will allow you to chat in different groups within a team, also known as "channels". Additionally, users will be able to talk to each other via Direct Messages on Skype Teams. Skype Teams will also feature Threaded Conversations, which is a major feature that's lacking on Slack. With Threaded Conversations, you can simply reply to a message on a channel by clicking on the reply button and anyone else can join the thread whenever they want -- just like Facebook Comments, or Disqus Comments. Microsoft, of course, isn't leaving out some of the core features of Skype on Skype Teams. Similar to Skype itself, teams will be able to make video calls in a channel or privately. To take this even further, the company is adding the ability to schedule online meetings, which can be quite useful for large teams.
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No thank you. Between their wanktastic Lync/Skype For Business product, butchering Skype, their barely functional netmeeting, and their original Access product that was so terrible that they gave up and re-used the name for their equally bad database product, Microsoft has a long and cherished history of putting out collaboration software that makes fingerpainting in a bucket filled with phlegm, vomit, and diarrhea, a viable alternative.
I'll stick with Slack, TYVM.
IRC had this 30 years ago.
"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it. Poorly." comes to mind, i.e. "Reinventing the square wheel", a well known sign how Microsoft performs business decisions. Does not invent, just makes poor implementations of other existing inventions, then pushed out with windows as a critical non-stoppable update (as Skype was).
Look at the MS smart phone for another example. Does it has 0.1% market share still? Late to market, and poorly implemented.
There's already "Skype for Work", why is a third parallel implementation of a sucky app needed? Fix the first two instead! _Do one thing an do it well_
I guess people were right that when MS buys up a company chances are it might be where that company goes to DIE. If any product they acquired should be integrated with Skype to compete with Slack it should be Yammer...but I didn't hear a peep about that..
Wasn't Yammer supposed to be a competitor for Slack? Didn't MS buy them just for that?
Slack is already pretty established and so I would think Microsoft would have a hard time here...
Microsoft won't have a hard time here.
Skype Teams will be part of Skype for Business, and Skype for Business is part of Office 365, and many/most companies buy their employees O365 subscriptions. Thus, Skype Teams will be "free". Companies will choose the "free" option because they're too stupid to realize that sometimes paying for something saves them money in the long run.
Microsoft is just leveraging their Office monopoly to crush a competitor. You know, business as usual.
It's unfortunate, because Slack is really nice, and Skype is a pile of crap.
Everything new UX designers touch gets so bloated... The Slack client feels as if it itself is Google Chrome, and it is the only non-browser I've seen which takes process delegation to the extremes only reserved by that or all the other bloated browsers.
It takes SEVERAL 70-100 MB processes for a single session and in workplaces such as mine there were more than 2 official instances. I had a 4GB (3GB available thanks to 32-bit OS) last year and when loading Skype (100MB), Outlook (120MB), Firefox (1.2GB when using flash), helpdesk telephony (100MB), IRC (30MB), Antivirus, and Slack (300-400 MB) there was little room to open Word docs or PDFs, let alone a secondary browser for troubleshooting. We threw money at the problem and 3 years down the road we'll probably be seeing the hard limits being grazed again when the RAM max gets reached.