My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true.
The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce.
But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub).
The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and <insert anything else here> to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no one was coming back into the office.
Source: I bought enterprise software for a Fortune 20 during COVID until I launched my startup.
In Enterprise settings, I have never seen anything than MS bundling over 20 years for that many clients.
To my European eyes, Slack and Zoom have been always an US centric or Linux first small companies centric tools.
Zoom became a major business because of Covid and Slack benfited majorly. Neither were powerhouses like Microsoft before then.
Whether a small European startup would have won out locally without Microsofts market position + price advantage idk. But without details I'm not sure the financial decision making of a Fortune 20 matters in this conversation which was part of my point.
Once your sales team is competing on price vs Microsoft it's basically over for young companies. Your value prop has to be much more than that until you're a mature business.
My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true.
The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce.
But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub).
The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and <insert anything else here> to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no one was coming back into the office.
Source: I bought enterprise software for a Fortune 20 during COVID until I launched my startup.