A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?
In our office, we'd definitely need the enterprise version for compliance reasons, not because of the features. That's about 14/user/month.
At a workforce of roughly 2500, that's a 4million+ yearly cost for something that is comparable to something you can get without that pricetag. It's no competition at all at that point. Think about it, would you be willing to ask your boss to pay 4 million so you can have a different chat app? No matter how much more ergonomic and friendly and intuitive it is.
The question is: "are staffers $14 / mo more productive with it, than the free version?"
The answer may also boil down to satisfaction, support calls, other things, aka 'total cost of ownership' as well.
Not 'But it costs $X million!'.
Companies will spend a fortune giving staff the right monitor, or chair, but literally don't think they're smart enough to know the dam tool they use all day?
Let them pick their chat software, like they pick their monitors.
"It’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10 dollars?"
Regulators should be all over it. EU has tried, but unsuccesfully, since it was lawyers who came up with the mitigation.
Define absurdly expensive here. I can probably guarantee that for small to medium sized business paying Slack or Microsoft for chat software is miles cheaper than self hosting it yourself.
My Google-Fu says Slack costs $18.00 /user/mo for their Business+ subscription plan. That's still relative peanuts compared to the yearly salary, let's say 60k/year, of developer you hire to self-host and maintain an on-prem Matrix/Jitsi instance with all the equivalent bells and whistles of Slack/Teams, but guess what, even then your clients/partner will send you MS Teams invites for calls, so you still have to pay for it anyway.
Then isn't it easier if you just fork out the cash for Teams so you can focus on your product instead?
