Team Slack or Team Google? Best Approach Is to Remain Neutral

For all the talk about cloud-native collaboration and productivity apps, business leaders can attest to the fact that it’s hard to make Team Slack play well with Team Google. Enterprise collaboration software like Microsoft Teams is great, but it also results in a virtual lock-in, making it challenging to switch collaboration ecosystems. Madhan Kanagavel, the founder and CEO of FileCloud revisits the best-of-breed versus all-in-one solution debate and explains why a smarter approach might be to remain neutral. 

We’re no longer in the “Remote Work Era”—working from anywhere is here to stay. 

A Gartner studyOpens a new window found that 82% of business leaders say their organizations plan to let employees continue to work from home at least some of the time, while 47% plan to allow employees to do so permanently. The emerging model has geographic flexibility where the entire companies’ workforce is scattered around the globe, allowing people to live and work wherever they want.

The other shift that goes hand-in-hand with working from anywhere is the acceleration of digital transformation. It’s a term that has been around for a few years. Still, the pandemic forced companies to speed up their efforts to reimagine every part of their business—remote teamwork and learning, sales and service, cloud computing and security—for the digital age. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a company blog postOpens a new window earlier this year, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

This wave of digital transformation has also pushed companies to make a choice about the platforms best suited to their needs. Who offers the best features both to keep their teams aligned and to communicate with customers and partners?

Big players already have staked their claims to this new work environment. Microsoft has bundled productivity apps, including Microsoft Teams, into its Office 365 offering. By tightly integrating these apps with established Office apps like Word and Excel, Microsoft has made it difficult for companies who are already paying for Office to switch.

Learn More: 17 Essential Microsoft Teams Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know in 2021

Google recently rebranded G Suite as Google Workspace, positioning its combination of Gmail, Docs, Meet, Sheets, and Calendar as an alternative to Office. Google Meet and Gmail are now more integrated than ever as Google aims to combine productivity and communication. 

Finally, there’s Slack, who has gone so far as to file a competition complaintOpens a new window against Microsoft for “force installing (Teams) for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.”

Even though those companies have made cursory effortsOpens a new window with a nod toward having their platforms work together, it’s clear that they’d rather build any features into their native apps rather than share that functionality.

That leaves businesses with a decision to make? Do they choose Team Microsoft, Team Google or Team Slack, taking on the advantages of each platform while recognizing the limitations of each work to work with the other? If you use Teams and your partners or customers use Slack, your communications are likely to pass up both in favor of good old email.

Learn More: Google Meet vs. Zoom: Which One’s Best for You?

A smarter approach might be to remain neutral. While the giants are fighting with each other, you become SwitzerlandOpens a new window , an independent entity willing to work with everyone. You could choose a communication and collaboration platform that works with Microsoft and Google, rather than selecting one over the other.

A new generation of products, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, have emerged into this platform-neutral space. Notion describes itself as an all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. AirSend is a collaboration platform with a model of a contextual workspace for remote work across organizations. And Taskade also looks to bring your team tasks, notes, and communication into one unified workspace.

The advantage of being platform-independent is that it works on any device and system. People are hesitant to change technology, and those outside your company won’t change their technology just to suit you. They’ll stick to what keeps them productive for now, even if there might be long-term benefits in switching.

No one operates in a silo anymore. An iPhone doesn’t only call another iPhone. Gmail doesn’t only send to other Gmail accounts. Not within your company and certainly not in this distributed world with customers and partners in all sectors all over the world. Rather than choosing sides in this battle, it makes sense to find something that works with everything.

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