One the holy grails of IT departments since the dawn of time was always to find the one place where all employees do their business and control it. All the way back to Lotus Notes, R.I.P and the early employee portals, these initiatives came and went throughout the last several decades, each era highlight a new shining star to take a sizeable chunk of the market but with no clear winner. Whether it was Jive, IBM Connections, SAP Portal, WebSphere, Plumtree (yes, that was a thing) and perhaps the most prominent one - Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint was one of the more interesting examples, since it was one of the few which made it easy for employees outside IT to create and organize their content. Of course - IT Managers hated it and sought ways to ‘contain’ the “mushroom effect” of SharePoint sites popping up.
And then came the cloud.
Photo by Juskteez Vu on Unsplash
The emergence of cloud based tools (together with mobile) changed a lot of things. However - specifically for this topic, it enabled employees to start choosing and using their own tools. Initially for personal productivity and later on for team productivity. As a completely disorganized person I’ve tried almost every known productivity app out there - Evernote, Any.do, Timepage, Bear, UpHabit, Todoist, Sunrise, Apple Reminders, Notes and of course - outlook tasks. The only category of apps I have tried more than productivity apps are fitness apps, but that’s another story. The same goes for team productivity - Asana, Trello, Monday.com (formerly dapulse), Jira, Shared excels on Google, Shared excels on OneDrive, pretty much everything. For a while - it seemed that the ease of getting started with different tools, all of which invested heavily in low-friction onboarding and smart customer retention, will mean that the market will remain bifurcated and constantly changing. It became harder and harder for employees (and IT) to choose and manage the right productivity tools from this cornucopia. (A good write up of how productivity tools are evolving can be found in this blog post by Benedict Evans).
And then came Slack . A lot has been said about Slack as a company which invented a new way of selling to the enterprise (bottom up adoption through developers) even tough so far they are probably the only one who pulled off this trick. From the beginning, slack invested heavily in integrations. These integrations initially were focused around the relevant development tools one would like to integrate into their slack channels and then extended towards all other tools - EFSS systems (Dropbox, Box, Evernote), Project management systems and many more.
Following Slack’s success in the enterprise, Microsoft got it act together and released Microsoft Teams. I belittled their efforts initially, claiming that they could never ‘win’ with such a clear ‘me-too’ product. I was wrong. Microsoft Teams is actually a pretty good product and coupled with Microsoft’s amazing sales motion inside enterprises - it quickly gained popularity and even overcame slack in number of subscribers.
However - the ‘A-ha’ moment for me came with Slack’s announcement on their new workflow tool. Workflow (and integration) is the key to any enterprise solution . This is software 101. Having a single place to get all your business done - this is employee experience 101. Every portal and every productivity suite since the dawn of ages kept looking for that title - the single point of entry for all employee needs. Now - if you are a software vendor (especially of the HRIS variety) and you are still fussing over how your home page looks like - you missed the point. Between Slack and Teams (there is enough market for everyone, it would seem) - all the HRIS systems, even the new fancy cloud ones, have been turned into backend systems (‘backended’? That sounds nasty).
So it took a while, but it seems like the good ole’ productivity suites are here. Slack and Microsoft are dominating the market while others have aspirations to play (ServiceNow, SAP, etc.). The bundling is at its peak.
