Zoom used to be a video call service, Now it is a calendar app and a chat app.
Slack used to be a chat app, now it is a video call service, a documentation tool, and also a task-tracking tool.
G Suite started as an Email service, then they added an office suite, a chat app, and a video conferencing app.
Zoom was the best in class Video service already, why did they have to launch a shitty calendar feature that doesn’t work half the time? Or does the chat app that more than half the folks don’t know even exist?
Why does Slack need to launch a task-tracking app? Or a documentation service inside a perfectly good
Short answer: Microsoft is executing well in the last 5 years when it comes to the Office suite of products.
Long answer: Unlike the consumer market, enterprise software sales is highly leveraged. Instead of each employee choosing which software he likes to use, a team of 2-3 CXOs and a procurement manager decide which software is used by thousands of employees.
And if Microsoft provides “good enough” service with teams, why do your employees need Slack and zoom? If you eliminate Slack and Zoom, that is two less negotiations to make each year, two less info security permits each year and, most importantly, two less PoCs you need to keep in touch with for any issues and escalations.
Microsoft has been playing the spray-and-pray strategy with work productivity apps for quite a while now. Offering 30+ products including teams, outlook, word, excel, but also things like onenote, wunderlist and others. Now microsoft is not perfect here, they have crazy bloatware and overlap in use cases of many (MANY!) products. But they seem to be providing the core functionality fairly well.
Zoom and Slack have built great distribution with their specialized products but Microsoft Office is an existential threat to both. And both are trying to secure their foothold by expanding in other products to increase their percived value to the enterprise customers. Who cares if people don’t use the zoom calendar or slack lists but these are important check marks in the sales (and more importantly agreement renewal) presentations to the procurement managers.
I do not believe this is a long term sustainable strategy for these companies unless they do incredible M&As and actually make their offering as compelling as Microsoft’s. Or who knows, maybe this is a stop-gap strategy till they figure out something entirely different.