Earlier this year, Microsoft toyed with the idea of buying work messenger app Slack for US$8 billion. Now it’s working on a Slack competitor based on its very own Skype brand. Here are the details.
Collaboration tools are essential to ensure teams can work effectively even when some members are working remotely. In recent years, work chat apps have become increasingly popular and Slack is a big player in that market. Microsoft wants in on the action and instead of forking out billions of dollars to snap up Slack, it is creating an offering called Skype Teams to compete directly against it. That’s according to a report by MSPoweruser.
Skype Teams will combine familiar features from Slack and more. Users can directly message each other and chat in different groups within a team. Skype Teams will have Threaded Conversation which lets users reply to a message on a channel to create a thread, similar to how Facebook comments work. This is a feature that Slack doesn’t have at the moment.
Naturally, Skype Teams will have video calling functions and Office 365 integration. According to MSPoweruser, Skype Teams is currently being tested internally at Microsoft. There’s no launch date as yet. Head over to MSPoweruser for more information about features in Skype Teams.
[Via MSPoweruser]
Comments
4 responses to “Microsoft Is Working On A Slack Competitor”
Apparently Office 365 subscribers only… Takes away one of the nicer things about Slack, being able to create teams ad-hoc from multiple organisations, across all sorts of platforms, without needing to pay for anything.
Whats the difference to Skype for Business, or Lync, or Communicator…?
Given how woefully MS have managed Skype in all its forms, can only assume this will fail too.
^ This
The idea has so much merit and potential on paper, but you just know that the execution will be disappointing at best. Look at every other “Microsoft does Cool Startup X” thing:
Flow: Microsoft does IFTTT
Planner: Microsoft does Trello
Onedrive: Microsoft does Dropbox
Would anybody seriously consider using the MS version over the original? But hey, if the MS versions were actually any good, it would have been amazing. Full integration, etc. and Office365 would even be worth paying for.