It's not the government's job to protect companies from competitors. What's disgusting about this is that it encourages companies to turn to governments for help holding or winning customers, That means lobbying and spending money to win government support. Disgusting. And for customers, how does this help? Is that goal for those 300M Teams users that they should instead pay more for Teams so that Slack has a better chance?
As a former Slack user, I can say that it is a pale substitute for Teams. It has only a fraction of the features. For the few features it has, some of them, like text-based chat, it does do better than Teams, marginally. Slack should lean into those strengths and push them for the customers who benefit from them. For the rest of us, who can take advantage of all the other features in Teams, it is just despicable of the EU to stick their bureaucratic noses in this.
Ultimately, it's not just customers who will suffer. Slack as a product will also suffer as a result of this nonsense. Instead of focusing on building a better system, they're wasting resources on government lobbying. Instead of using the risk of market losses to motivate them to fight hard to survive and prosper, they're hoping on regulators to save them.
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