[pocketsand]

I would disagree. I work in healthcare and we’ve always used SQL Server. While I wouldn’t pick it, it’s been reliable and integrates with auth.

No one “loves” Teams, but honestly it serves its purpose for us at no cost.

No one loves OneDrive but it works.

I think people underestimate how much work it would take to integrate services, train people, and meet compliance requirements when using a handful of the best in class products instead of MS Suite.

[mbreese]

People use Teams and OneDrive because it’s “Free” when you use Office. IMO, that’s a bit of an anti-trust problem. Both have good competitors (arguably better competitors) that are getting squeezed because of the monopoly pricing with Office.

But with SQL Server, on the other hand, I think you are right. It is a good piece of software. But it also has high quality competition from multiple vendors. Some of it enterprise (Oracle, DB2), some of it FOSS (Postgres, MySQL). Because of this, it has to be better quality to survive… they couldn’t bundle it to get market share, it actually had to compete.

[josephd79]

Word, no one uses teams because its great. The only reason it's used is because it's bundled with $M365.

[throwaway3306a]

People use Teams because it's well integrated into Office, 365, Entra and other MS products, they would (and recently do) pay for it. It has functionalities that no other alternative has, e.g. it can act as a full call centre solution through a SIP gateway.

[ta1243]

> No one “loves” Teams, but honestly it serves its purpose for us at no cost.

Of course there's a cost, its just hidden and you are forced to pay it. Microsoft used its monopoly position to move into a new market.

[pocketsand]

Yeah, sure. But the marginal cost is zero, whereas a Slack subscription for every person in our org will cost about 1 million dollars a year. And it doesn’t integrate as well with every other piece of functional but mediocre software.

The person approving the $1 million dollar budget item doesn’t really care that Teams isn’t “free” in the sense that there is no free lunch, and while they perhaps have moral qualms of antitrust, that’s outside their purview. We’re locked into Office suite and right now there is no extra charge for Teams.