Microsoft is revealing a lot of improvements to its Teams software today, furthering its competition with rival Slack. While Microsoft’s new Teams improvements include Outlook integration, the consolidation of tasks, and more Microsoft-focused changes, the company seems less focused on third-party app integrations. That’s something that Slack, Microsoft’s main rival, is really relying on to fend off Microsoft’s Teams growth. Slack is making its app support more functional and interactive, and it already has more than 1,800 apps available.

Slack needs these integration points, whereas Microsoft can simply build in its own powerful Office software. It brings us to an interesting point in the ongoing battle between Microsoft Teams and Slack and whether businesses will opt for the integration points of Google’s G Suite, Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox, or Microsoft’s Office integration into Teams. I sat down with Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365, recently to really understand Microsoft’s vision for Teams and his thoughts on the Slack competition and the future of productivity and Office.

”It is so easy for people to look at the two, Slack and Teams, and compare them,” explains Spataro. “From my perspective, they’re just totally different approaches to the problem of being more productive.” That problem is pushing Microsoft toward making Teams the hub for collaboration, and it also means the company is leaning on what it does best to integrate Outlook, Office, Yammer, tasks, and much more into Teams.

Microsoft is also working on new software and services that will eventually make their way into Teams. That includes the company’s new Fluid Framework, which takes the idea of documents and turns them into a cloud app that multiple people can contribute to with graphs, tables, text, and more. Teams will be the “scaffolding” to combine old experiences like Word and new ones like Fluid into a single hub.

“That is a huge shift for us as Microsoft, it is a huge shift for our end users,” says Spataro. “It really does differentiate us vs. Slack, which has started with a very interesting innovation with chat-based workspaces, but we think will not have the breadth and depth that’s really required to reinvent what it looks like to work together.”

Microsoft and Slack’s strategies are different because, ultimately, the end product and customers are different. Slack has successfully targeted small- and medium-sized businesses who use a mix of software and services, while Microsoft has seen success in larger enterprises where the power of Office is key.

“Right now, we have more than a million active third-party apps connecting to Microsoft 365 on a monthly basis,” reveals Spataro. “For us, the contest isn’t a race between Teams and Slack, it really is a race to get to where customers want to be, which is the new way to work. While we love the citing of app statistics related to Slack, we have a much bigger view of what people are trying to accomplish, and that view encompasses all of the breadth and depth of Microsoft 365.”

That breadth and depth is the key battleground for Microsoft. It’s expensive and complex to bring together a combination of Zoom, Slack, Google, Dropbox, and more in a business, and it’s not clear whether Slack will be able to achieve that integration at a price that means businesses aren’t paying for each and every service separately.

Spataro believes we’re seeing “spiky integration,” with lots of competition to Office and Microsoft’s services. “I think we saw that with mobile, you saw ‘spiky integration’ with handheld PCs, and then you saw phone innovation, and then at some point it swings back as people realize, ‘Oh hang on, I’m kind of doing similar things,’ and I just need one thing that integrates all of these.”

Spataro seems confident that Microsoft will win this battle with its integrated approach, and that the company should ultimately be able to offer a better product at a better price. “I feel pretty excited about our ability to compete and win,” he says. There’s definitely an interesting battle going on between Microsoft, Slack, and others right now. “I do think you’re seeing the tension in the market, and the best thing about tension is that it’s great for customers,” explains Spataro. “It pushes us to make sure we’re best in class, and it offers people opportunities to get started small, and there’s nothing but goodness out there right now.”

Slack has been focused on integration points for its own service, but it’s also relying on its customers just loving the app more than Microsoft Teams. Slack claims it’s not worried about the reach of Office 365, but the success of either solution will come down to which product manages to truly change the way we work today and at what price. That battle has only just begun.