[mcintyre1994]

We use Slack at work, and everyone we work with uses Slack, and we all work together with Slack Connect. I suspect if we moved to a competitor that’s pretty much the main impact we’d see, and it wouldn’t be good unless everyone else work with moved too. I think that network effect is probably the only meaningful differentiation in that space.

[mbreese]

You could also look at it as: in order for a Slack competitor to compete with Slack's network effects, the new program will need to offer an easy way to extend chat workspaces with external collaborators. It's not impossible, but it does make Slack's moat explicitly clear.

[haute_cuisine]

The problem here is that companies artificially limit integrations, so it's impossible to exchange messages between different providers like how email works.