Microsoft Teams Powers Past Slack
In the whole of last week, my Linkedin feed was filled with articles on how Microsoft Teams’ user base surpassed that of Slack even though it was launched after Slack and was pretty much an imitation of its features. Now that Microsoft is creating it’s Canva equivalent, tech journalists are predicting that Canva will see the same fate as Slack and some are even going to the extent of saying that it’s eventually going to kill it.
Now, I have my own thoughts as to why it was “obvious” for Teams to surpass Slack and why Microsoft’s Canva will not kill Kawasaki’s Canva. However, that’s not the point of this blog. Instead I think it’s more useful to talk about how Web3.0 can learn from these strategies to increase its own user adoption.
On a separate note - they were already building a Canva of sorts with their Powerpoint features such as predictive icons, AI based designer and so on. Things were already in the roadmap. How come we never saw it ?
This graph is amazing. So in the innovation world an “incumbent” like Microsoft started Teams when Slack’s popularity started growing. What Slack did was find the product market fit for Teams. They had already verified the “channel -like” features and their benefits over skype - the de facto communicator within organisations then.
Microsoft had a better strategy. They were already building a whole ecosystem of tools starting from Power BI, Dynamics, Sway, Planner, Forms, Bookings and a sweet integration system called “Microsoft Flows”, now Power Automate, that allowed a whole myriad of apps to connect into Teams, write into Power BI, Excel, trigger emails and so on. So when the product matured, and the pandemic locked people home, buyers of microsoft enterprise started now doing - everything - on Teams. Institutions on the other hand who were considering “Google G Suite” vs “Microsoft” naturally migrated towards the Microsoft route.
So why are we surprised that Teams eventually overtook Slack ? It is only natural.
Slack had nothing in comparison to this bundled offering. In addition to that, their target audience was not in the enterprise segment.
Although if personally asked - hands town Slack over Teams - anyday. It still has the cool startup vibe that makes you slack and work and slack some more. Teams can’t remotely match that.
Don’t Re-invent the wheel.
So we have a lot of great products in the Web2.0 world. Don’t do the same thing in Web3.0 just because it’s super cool to put things on the chain. For e.g we don’t need email on chain. We could probably do with integration on chain and that too only if it really makes sense.
On a similar note, wallet based chat is great, but then again there are tons of providers who are building this. Chat is a great feature, but chat apps should make it modular so other dapps could use them. It will grow the chat’s user base and at the same time add value to other organisations. This leads me to my second point.
Bundle Things up - like Microsoft did.
There is so much power in bundling up. When you’re building a product then think niche and think about interoperability. When you do these two, you are opening yourself up for product level collaborations. If you’re building a platform - like a dex, cex or a lending platform then think broad and collaborate with other products. Don’t build them again.
Let’s take Founders Lab for example. We are building the upwork on steroids. Our platform has a project management tool where every task is an SBT that the “freelancer” or the “BUIDLER” can earn upon completing. Now we could go ahead and build a chat within our platform, or build our own on ramping and off ramping solutions. But that would be re-inventing the wheel. So instead we are integrating with tools like code scanners, Automated NFT generators, git, embeddable chats, on ramping and off ramping solutions, Jira, Clickup and so on.
What happens when you do this is that the user base flows from one product to another. It generates stickiness and it beautifully keeps the entire ecosystem together. In your price offering, bundle them up - ($X per user for all these products or 10% of transactions and you get all these products for free). Take the cost initially and when you reach great user base, charge incrementally for premium versions of the bundled products)
The downside however is that each of these integrations require close partnership. PMs from either organisations need to work together to make the user journey is seamless. Your devs and designers will need to collaborate on executing this. It’s not easy, but it’s definitely very profitable in the long run.
Don’t believe me ? Ask Microsoft, Ask Temenos, Ask our dear Steve Jobs.
Collaborate and create win-win partnerships
So what if your products can’t integrate ? Get your communities to collaborate. See this is the beauty of Web3.0 that Web2.0 doesn’t have. Apart from the massively interoperable and standardised EVM layer, we have strong, passionate and close knit communities. Create “Non fungible” partnerships and affiliate programs. If you belong to a DAO because of an investment you’ve made, then let’s make your investment worthwhile by giving you access to another DAO and their products. See ? User still flows, communities grow and web3.0 adoption grows.
At the end of the day everyone wins.
In web3.0 the dream was to have a decentralised world. An incumbent from the Web2.0 world could easily copy your little product made in your garage, bundle it up, use Polygon Edge as their private blockchain and then offer its Web3.0 solution as a part of their product suite. They can build on top of your work and sell it at no price. Instead if we could work together and think about a bundled offering to our target audiences, we would be making a strong proposition that the web2.0 world didn’t believe was ever possible.