Yeah I'm not fully buying a startup lives or dies based on packaging deal of a long-embedded mega corp.
Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense.
Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the early days or you're already DOA when facing an entrenched opponent whose team can easily undercut you well beyond generic bundling deals (whether via strong existing relationships, making wider non-standard sweetheart deals that wouldn't be under regulatory scrutiny, and marketing budgets).
Don't get me wrong this can harm markets generally, and megacorps should be held to higher scrutiny, but usually it's not that simple.
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.
I have first hand seen Teams eat a whole bunch of better product's lunches. Overnight Meet Slack Zoom all got poopoo'd by finance because the company was already paying for MS Office
Technically Netspace wasnt a startup, they IPOd early and were bought by AOL for 4 billion in 98. They were real large scale contenders where such a dynamic could really be do or die.
There's degrees to market manipulation and market position where this sort of explanation would hold water as being the root cause of death knell.
Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense.
Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the early days or you're already DOA when facing an entrenched opponent whose team can easily undercut you well beyond generic bundling deals (whether via strong existing relationships, making wider non-standard sweetheart deals that wouldn't be under regulatory scrutiny, and marketing budgets).
Don't get me wrong this can harm markets generally, and megacorps should be held to higher scrutiny, but usually it's not that simple.