Frenemies or all-out rivals? Meta (FB) and Microsoft (MSFT) just announced that they’ll both be partnering up together. The partnership is mainly set to integrate Meta’s Facebook Workplace software with Microsoft Teams, giving users the ability to see Workplace features in the Teams app and conduct Teams meetings through Workplace.
Workplace is an online collaborative software that Meta announced in 2016 and it’s basically a Slack/Teams rival but more for company-wide communications. The new cross-platform functionality will particularly benefit Meta, whose Workplace service only has 7 million subscribers compared to Microsoft’s 250 million monthly active users for Teams.
Why it matters
Microsoft’s announcement that it'll be venturing into the metaverse space a few weeks ago under the backdrop of this partnership makes it look like Meta isn’t letting competition in one arena affect its strategy in another. It’ll be interesting to see if the same camaraderie makes its way over to the metaverse too.
