One of many major causes that Slack joined forces with Salesforce in 2021 in a $28 billion deal was to present the communications firm the clout to compete with Microsoft. For years, firm co-founder Stewart Butterfield railed towards Microsoft bundling Groups with Workplace 365, calling it anti-competitive and saying at one level that Microsoft was “unhealthily obsessive about killing Slack.”

The corporate went as far as to file a grievance towards Microsoft with the European Union in 2020.

This morning, Microsoft introduced it was lastly unbundling Groups from Workplace 365 sooner or later, though present prospects might proceed to make use of the bundled license.

Butterfield stepped down from Slack on the finish of 2022, however he appeared much less involved about Microsoft after he turned a part of the CRM large, telling TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos in 2021 that Groups appeared to be extra targeted on assembly software program like Zoom than Slack, and he wasn’t conscious of the standing of the grievance his firm filed earlier than turning into a part of Salesforce.

Salesforce, for its half, didn’t have any touch upon the unbundling announcement, however Microsoft’s bundling technique appears to have labored fairly nicely, with the corporate reporting it has over 320 million customers worldwide. Evaluate that with Slack, which has 32 million customers or 10% of Microsoft’s whole. It’s laborious to know what precisely meaning given the variations in how the 2 firms depend their customers, but it surely’s clear that Microsoft has opened up a major lead.

Perhaps Butterfield was proper, but it surely’s in all probability too late to matter. “Whereas Microsoft is unbundling Groups merely to keep away from an antitrust mess, it’s good for Salesforce/Slack for certain, however in some ways it might be a pyrrhic victory,” Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Evaluation advised TechCrunch. The market has matured to the purpose that many bigger corporations have made their alternative, and since swapping out options isn’t a trivial matter, unbundling Groups is unlikely to have an considerable impression on market share.

Microsoft’s announcement seemingly permits them to have their cake and eat it too, preserving their present prospects below the prevailing Workplace 365 bundling settlement, whereas charging future prospects for utilizing the product, and presumably giving the corporate an argument with regulators that they’ve unbundled Groups and should not in violation of any anti-competition guidelines..

The truth is, Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Analysis, says that this might be the primary prevalence the place an anti-competitive regulation helps the seller’s enterprise. “Microsoft has merely bought Groups to sufficient firms with its present Workplace accounts and now not wants the power and energy of the enterprise license settlement,” Mueller stated.

What’s extra, quite than aiding Slack, he sees this as serving to Microsoft to get Groups into extra accounts the place firms weren’t shopping for Workplace 365 licenses. Redmond can now promote standalone Groups licenses into non-Microsoft outlets way more simply, all whereas constructing goodwill with regulators, and nonetheless sticking it to Slack within the stand-alone market battle.

That’s in all probability not the end result that Butterfield envisioned when he began complaining about Microsoft all these years in the past, however the regulatory consequence doesn’t at all times come out in the way in which you count on, particularly when the market shifts so dramatically within the intervening years — or Microsoft’s bundling technique merely labored.