It's been four days since I posted asking whether Microsoft Teams interops with Slack. What little I've heard indicates that it doesn't, that there is no meaningful interop.

Microsoft has clearly positioned Teams as a Slack-alike or Slack-killer. Maybe they don't use those words, but the message comes through anyway. They want their product to be compared to Slack. And Slack has taken the bait, running a full-page ad in the NY Times that's similar to the one Apple ran when the IBM PC shipped in 1981. I'm sure that's what they were thinking of. Really bad idea, imho. Why? Because Microsoft has to earn the right to say they're competitive with Slack. And since Slack is more of a backplane than an app, if you don't interop with it, well you've kind of missed the point of Slack. It's all about interop.

The old Microsoft, the one I knew in the 80s and 90s not would have missed this. They would have latched onto every bit of openness in Slack. At the outset, advertise how it's not either-or, it's and. Your team members can use either Slack or Teams to participate in a formerly Slack-only network. That would have been a reason for Slack to run the full-page ad, maybe. Or sell out to a bigger company quickly so they can match Microsoft with distribution and financial strength. 

And it's important to note that if Microsoft had chosen the embrace-extend model, that would have been a win for the open web, at least a temporary one, which is another reason I asked the question. It takes a second vendor to ratify Slack's open protocol to give them a real chance of being a standard. Support from Microsoft would have certainly helped. 

Since I haven't heard from either company a definitive yes or no, the possibility is still there that Microsoft did chose the interop path.

BTW, the victory is only temporary for the open web if neither company dominates, esp not the bigger one, Microsoft. If they do, they're likely to use their power in the market to add special features that only work in their product. So it's in the interest of the market that it be a two-party system. I've written about that many times in other contexts.

I'll turn the comments on in this post if people have information they can add that sheds light on compatibility between the two products. As usual the comment guidelines apply. I delete comments that don't respect them.