While Slack’s revenue climbed twice as fast at 43 percent, Microsoft’s sales still dwarfed Slack’s $903 million. During the two-year period the case examines, Microsoft’s revenue jumped 18 percent to $168 billion in its 2021 fiscal year compared with 2020. On paper, Microsoft appears to have the upper hand. His co-authors include 2021 graduates Kriti Gupta, Mehek Punatar, Poonam Sacheti, and Poorvi Vijay. Yoffie and a group of MBA students at HBS used public information to analyze the competition in the case study Collaboration Wars: Slack vs. It’s the dream of both Microsoft and Salesforce.” “Can these collaborative software platforms become an operating system for the office-the centerpiece of how we do work? That is open at this point. “It is a dramatic story,” says Yoffie, the Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business and Administration. The winner is anyone’s guess, says HBS Professor David Yoffie, who co-wrote the case. Now, a David-and-Goliath contest is underway, and the outcome could change how colleagues communicate, especially as remote work becomes a fixture in business. 'Can these collaborative software platforms become an operating system for the office-the centerpiece of how we do work?'Įven with Salesforce’s extra muscle, Slack’s executives have puzzled over how to compete with a free rival, a new Harvard Business School case study illustrates.

Microsoft, meanwhile, was finally able to draw users to Teams, the free business communication platform it introduced in 2017 as part of Office 365. The pandemic propelled Slack beyond its core following in the technology industry and piqued the interest of cloud computing giant Salesforce, which acquired the firm in 2021. When COVID-19 forced companies to send employees home two years ago, newly remote workers largely reconnected on two collaboration apps: Slack and Microsoft Teams.

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