Yesterday, a product guy asked me why his company chose Teams over Slack, when Slack is “way better.”
That made me remember my time at ZaloPay. In the beginning, everyone complained about Teams. Slow. Clunky. Hard to like. A few months later, nobody complained anymore. Not because Teams improved. People just accepted it.
Slack is the better product. Teams isn’t. But Teams didn’t need to be loved. It just needed to be there.
Internet Explorer wasn’t loved either. It was bundled with Windows. That was enough. Microsoft did the same thing with Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook already there, Teams shows up quietly. Nobody installs it. Nobody removes it. Every small integration makes the exit door heavier.
The numbers tell the same story. By 2023, Teams hit 320 million monthly users. Slack stopped reporting at 12 million daily users back in 2019. But look closer: Microsoft quietly switched from reporting daily active users to monthly active users in 2021. When you can’t win the metric, change the metric. The bundle still works either way.
When users don’t have to choose, they usually don’t.
At my first startup, we used Slack. Fast. Fun. Later, at a bigger company, I was forced onto Teams. I hated it. Then I noticed emails turning into meetings without effort. Reports lived where conversations already were. Going back to Slack felt like extra work. Once your work, files, and habits live inside a system, leaving stops being a technical decision. It becomes personal.
Slack still belongs to startups. Teams owns corporations. Different gravity.
Same pattern everywhere. I started using Grab for rides. Now it’s food, payments, groceries. I didn’t choose to stay. I just never found the exit.
Don’t build what users love most. Build what they find hardest to leave.
That product guy is still on Teams, by the way.
Reach me if you have other perspectives, or just want to say hello.
Say something.