No, Microsoft Loop won’t kill Notion. Quite the opposite, really.
November 2, 2021 was full of tech uproar.
History was repeating itself.
Exactly 5 years prior, on November 2, 2016, Microsoft announced Teams in New York. And Slack decided to extend a warm welcome:
The ad was ‘congratulatory’ while reiterating Slack’s positioning:
Dear Microsoft,
Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition.
We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. It’s validating to see you’ve come around to the same way of thinking. And even though — being honest here — it’s a little scary, we know it will bring a better future forward faster.
However, all this is harder than it looks. So, as you set out to build “something just like it,” we want to give you some friendly advice.
The following ‘advice’ went on to focus on Slack’s distinct advantages:
- Features aren’t everything. Simply copying features won’t make the cut
Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software.
2. An open platform is essential. Integrate before you implement.
The modern knowledge worker relies on dozens of different products for their daily work, and that number is constantly expanding. That’s why we work so hard to find elegant and creative ways to weave third-party software workflows right into Slack. And that’s why there are 750 apps in the Slack App Directory.
We know that playing nice with others isn’t exactly your MO, but if you can’t offer people an open platform that brings everything together into one place and makes their lives dramatically simpler, it’s just not going to work.
3. Got to do this with love. Work closely with your community.
When we push a same-day fix in response to a customer’s tweet, agonize over the best way to slip some humor into release notes, run design sprints with other software vendors to ensure our products work together seamlessly, or achieve a 100-minute average turnaround time for a thoughtful, human response to each support inquiry, that’s not “going above and beyond.” It’s not “us being clever.” That’s how we do. That’s who we are.
What happened next?
Roughly 2.5 years later, Teams overtook Slack and was growing faster than Slack in terms of daily users, despite being larger.
This success wasn't surprising.
It was an example of how Microsoft could supercharge its new products just by distributing them to its large collection of existing customers. It has done this in the past with Internet Explorer and SharePoint.
And distribution isn’t its only distinctive advantage. There are three more:
- Not freemium but free: Teams is practically free with the Microsoft 365 bundle. And Slack has a 10k message limit on its free plan. This practically prevents a typical Microsoft customer from even trying Slack.
- Superior trust with larger organizations (e.g., Google still doesn’t allow internal teams to use Notion)
- Microsoft-specific integrations: If you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, emails, and 3rd-party applications. This is especially true with the new Fluid Framework.
As Ben Thompson puts it:
By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
But this isn’t the full picture.
Microsoft Teams was adding massive numbers of users through large companies, schools, and its existing Office 365 customer base.
But Slack was still the clear leader within startups and among developers and other young, tech-savvy users.
Why did this happen? 🤔
The Slack chat experience is delightful. And its ability to integrate with a wide variety of tools that are probably different on a company-by-company basis helped it shine. Especially with startups that are not bound by corporate policies in which tools they can use.
Third, because Slack is not deeply integrated with a bunch of other applications, it is actually easier for it to horizontally connect different companies.
Also, the first mover advantage. 🏃♂️
Okay, so what about Notion?
Notion in many ways is in a stronger position compared to Slack in 2017.
- Features aren’t everything: Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people share knowledge requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software. (Microsoft 👀)
How far you go in helping companies truly transform to take advantage of this shift in working is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.
You need to do both (for your target user):
a) 🧠 Doing a better and better job of providing what people want (whether they know it or not)
b) 📣 Communicating the above more and more effectively (so that they know they want it) - An open platform is essential: Notion’s thoughtful integrations are what allow it to be the ‘all-in-one workspace’ of choice. Their distinctive advantage is being early in integrating tools their users value most.
3. Love thy community: Notion actively works with its community to build and improve the product. And this community in turn helps Notion attract and onboard new users. Something difficult for Microsoft to replicate given the corporate-y brand ethos.
Funny thing to note…
Some of the most powerful features of Loop are closely related to Coda than Notion. Yet, all the uproar on social media seems to be about Microsoft cloning Notion.
Brand Notion to the moon 🚀
“This market has been hiding in plain sight for 40 years. There’s a clear community of people who will never use anything made by Microsoft. But there’s a very large community of people who will use anything made by Microsoft.”
~Shishir Mehrotra (Founder, Coda) speaking with Platformer
Final Take 🔥
Microsoft cloning Notion is a validation of Notion’s journey. They will likely coexist; challenging one another for the benefit of the user.
Microsoft Loop will dominate in mid to large-scale businesses.
Notion will dominate in startups and small teams.
The real challenge comes when Google decides to build a Notion clone. (by fine tuning its smart canvas?) A lot of startups are already a part of the GSuite and store a ton of data on Google drive.
A thoughtful, Google-built Notion with universal search capability like Raycast would be a true competitor. Does that look like Mem?
If you’ve liked this, you’ll probably like my newsletter focusing on the latest SaaS products. The next Notion, Figma, and Calendly before they breakout.
Check it out here: The Probably Nothing Newsletter 🔮
You can start off with a 👆custom onboarding in 2 mins.
Further reading/references:
- The Slack Social Network by Stratechery
- How Notion Built A $2B SaaS Startup Through Community & Templates by Foundation Inc.
- Microsoft Teams vs. Slack by Kinsta
- We don’t sell saddles here by Stewart Butterfield (Slack founder)
