Zoom Team Chat?

Microsoft won Team Chat.

It's a true statement, at least at this point in time. While some may disagree with that conclusion (most won't), the real point of contention is the word "won." Normally, winning requires a competition. Teams became a dominant enterprise workstream communications application in part because it didn't have any competitors.

How can that be? Chat isn't even new. I recall using chat in UNIX in the 70s. ICQ was open, free, and briefly popular. I was a heavy user of AOL's AIM in the 90s with colleagues at the office.

Skype for Business (SfB) taught the enterprise about persistent group chat, and that was the game changer. The concept of team chat or workstream communications was on its way and there was a lot of interesting startups (anyone remember Kato?). These apps were similar/better than email in many ways. They were so much richer than chat that they changed how we work and manage information.

Microsoft knew workstream comms was going to be big, and that it had a lame horse in the race. It had to orchestrate a change from premises-based SfB to cloud-delivered Teams. This transition was truly impressive. Microsoft knows how to execute when it chooses to.

So what about the competitors? The startup that broke-through was Slack. There was also Cisco Spark. Slack and Cisco started at about the same time (years ahead of Teams).

What could possibly go wrong for Cisco? It had enterprise accounts, deep pockets, a huge installed base, and complementary leadership in meetings and telephony. All Slack had was a good idea.

After Cisco spent years being monomaniacally focused on Spark, it abruptly decided to completely ignore workstream communications. Its early mover advantages evaporated, and this was right about the time Teams was getting its legs. The robust team chat feature that lives within Webex doesn't even have a name.

Slack was a glorious app that was out to change the world -- at least part of it. Slack liked technical teams. It became (remains?) the best team chat solution for people that earn more than $75k. Salesforce bought Slack for $27B! (think about that). Perhaps we will learn more soon at Dreamforce, but it seems like Slack has shifted from an enterprise Team Chat app to a (compelling) feature of Salesforce.

There were others too. RingCentral, Vonage, 8x8, Amazon, Dialpad - team chat became a standard feature of UCaaS, but it's hard to compete with Microsoft's perception of "free." Microsoft makes $200B a year giving away "free" software.

I have to also mention Google Hangouts - a viable alternative that also had an early mover advantage. That's the app Google is about to turn off while it continues to figure out how to get Chat, Meet, and Duo to be as seamless as Hangouts.

Microsoft had no viable competition in enterprise team chat. But that's beginning to change. Google is revamping Chat, Cisco remembered its team chat capabilities, and then there's Zoom...

Zoom has a great chat product too. I have more contacts in Zoom Chat than any other messaging app. I'm a one person company, so apps like Teams aren't as useful to me as Zoom Chat, Webex, and GChat.

Zoom's decision to start promoting Chat might be related to its long time GTM partner Slack expanding into video meetings.

Zoom's first act was to rename Zoom Chat to Zoom Teams Chat. I would have preferred read-receipts, but I'm glad that chat is getting some love at Zoom - the industry needs it. Microsoft needs it too as a source of inspiration.

Zoom Chat has the potential to shake things up in enterprise comms. First, like video, it spans enterprise, SMB, and consumer - and that's important in chat. Perhaps more importantly, people seem to like Zoom. I hear lots of love for Teams from admins and consultants, but not so much from Teams users.

Microsoft may have won chat, but is that leadership sustainable? Probably not. Bill Gates himself says their's usually two winners. That's generally true, but Microsoft is the exception to that rule (Office).