Recently, a list of apps that Microsoft prohibits for internal employee use leaked, including Slack, Grammarly, and others. It’s tempting to think these are the actions of a company hating competition, but the truth is more complicated.
Over the weekend news starting trickling out across the web. Microsoft has a list of apps and programs that it either bans or discourages its employees from using on the job. The list of prohibited apps includes consumer versions of Slack and Grammarly while the discouraging list includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Docs, the cloud version of Github, and the enterprise version of Slack.
In place of Slack, Microsoft wants its employees to use Teams (which is developed by the company), instead of AWS or Google Docs, employees are pointed towards Azure and Office 365, again products offered by Microsoft.
At first blush, it’s easy to think this is a choice to push employees onto company products as a way to drive business uptake. One might even accuse of the company of doing this solely because its own offerings aren’t comparable to competitor products and employees wouldn’t use Teams and Office 365 otherwise.
But that’s not the case. Prohibiting and discouraging specific tools is standard practice at nearly every large company. And it’s a protective measure that prevents Intellectual Property (IP) from accidentally leaking out.
As spelled out by the leaked list, the Free, Standard, and Plus versions of Slack aren’t secure and can’t promise to protect IP. The last thing a company wants is to find out source code was compromised after an employee posted some of it on a chat app for help.
And that’s precisely the reason Microsoft didn’t block Slack Enterprise. It does have the necessary tools and protect IP. Instead, it’s discouraged in favor of Teams. And that’s a simple business decision. Slack Enterprise comes with a cost per user, one the company doesn’t quote on its website. Teams, on the other hand, doesn’t cost Microsoft anything to use, because the company owns it. It’s only natural the company prefers the cheaper option. If another company developed Teams and it cost more than Slack, then Microsoft would prefer Slack Enterprise and discourage Teams.
Grammarly has similar issues. Grammarly checks for errors by sending your text to its cloud servers. If an employee pasted source code into an email, they may accidentally hand that code to Grammarly. Obviously, that risk would be unacceptable to any company concerned with IP and source code.
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