My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.
I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS.
My dream is that Matrix can do for intra-org comms what Signal did for SMS.
I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money.
But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made.
Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams.
Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. UX is a problem that is almost immune to money. An extremely clear vision is almost always the bottleneck. Money can always help with adding features or performance or scaling, but I feel like it doesn’t usually fix UX. Hope I’m wrong.
But on the other hand, I think it's reasonable to hope that the "clear vision" for Matrix can largely be cribbed from all the other nigh-indistinguishable team chat apps like Slack, Discord, Mattermost, et al. In that case money to actually make the obvious fixes might be enough.
Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho).
What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just works and is mostly stable. Get off the treadmill of companies chasing ever more returns (which will never be enough) at the expense of their customer base. We have the technology.
I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone.
Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech).
I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.
Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.
I'm in several Slack teams for non profits and professional orgs, Teams for a client or two, IRC and Matrix servers for digital archiving ops, Signal/WhatsApp/GroupMe/Telegram groups, etc. I have been in tech for 25+ years, I am familiar with the extremes. You are right, things can be bad, that is the point of systems engineering: to drive directionally towards continual improvement. Success is never assured, but throwing our hands up and giving up is not reasonable. Make a plan, work the plan. Default to action. Work is hard.
I recommend "Thinking in Systems" by Donella H. Meadows (ISBN13 9781603580557) on this topic [1]. It's ~$10 on Amazon as of this comment, and the PDF is easy to find with a quick web search.
Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.
France donates to the Matrix Foundation (which helps the protocol retain its neutrality and independence, and is very much appreciated), but doesn't currently financially support Element's dev as their upstream. We're trying to fix that though!
I've always thought the really low bandwidth support they added a few years ago was to support the french subs. It matched all the requirements of VLF/ELF communications.
I’ve used matrix for years, ran my own federated server for a while.
I’ve been critical of the user experience and issues with how it’s handled by the matrix team before but I acknowledge that by and large these problems can be fixed with money.
Big players need to put their big boy pants on and throw a couple coins from their farcically large coin purse and they can drive a stake through the wretched heart that is Teams.
And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.
The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.
> Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”?
"In 2024, the EU spent €403 billion on research and development" [1]. In 2024, Microsoft spend $29.5bn on R&D [2]. So about 20 Microsofts makes up the entire EU's R&D expenditure.
Alphabet, meanwhile, spent $49.3bn on R&D in 2024 [3]. It earned $350bn that year. So it would be correct to say that Microsoft and Alphabet's revenues, alone, rival the total amount Europe spends on research and development. (Non-EU non-British spending is insignificant.)
I don't know anything about Matrix. What makes it "far from perfect"? First priority of every business chat should be to move the conversation to something designed for the business concern at hand, because a chat app is a terrible place for it to live.
> It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.
I think there are three main reasons it's not perfect yet:
1. Building both a decentralised open standard (Matrix) at the same time as a flagship implementation (Element) is playing on hard mode: everything has to be specified under an open governance process (https://spec.matrix.org/proposals) so that the broader ecosystem can benefit from it - while in the early years we could move fast and JFDI, the ecosystem grew much faster than we anticipated and very enthusiastically demanded a better spec process. While Matrix is built extensibly with protocol agility to let you experiment at basically every level of the stack (e.g. right now we're changing the format of user IDs in MSC4243, and the shape of room DAGs in MSC4242) in practice changes take at least ~10x longer to land than in a typical proprietary/centralised product. On the plus side, hopefully the end result ends up being more durable than some proprietary thing, but it's certainly a fun challenge.
2. As Matrix project lead, I took the "Element" use case pretty much for granted from 2019-2022: it felt like Matrix had critical mass and usage was exploding; COVID was highlighting the need for secure comms; it almost felt like we'd done most of the hard bits and finishing building out the app was a given. As a result, I started looking at the N-year horizon instead - spending Element's time working on P2P Matrix (arewep2pyet.com) as a long-term solution to Matrix's metadata footprint and to futureproof Matrix against Chat Control style dystopias... or projects like Third Room (https://thirdroom.io) to try to ensure that spatial collaboration apps didn't get centralised and vendorlocked to Meta, or bluesky on Matrix (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/, before Jay & Paul got the gig and did atproto).
I maintain that if things had continued on the 2019-2022 trajectory then we would have been able to ship a polished Element and do the various "scifi" long-term projects too. But in practice that didn't happen, and I kinda wish that we'd spent the time focusing on polishing the core Element use case instead. Still, better late than never, in 2023 we did the necessary handbrake turn focusing exclusively on the core Element apps (Element X, Web, Call) and Element Server Suite as an excellent helm-based distro. Hopefully the results speak for themselves now (although Element Web is still being upgraded to use the same engine as Element X).
3. Finally, the thing which went wrong in 2022/2023 was not just the impact of the end of ZIPR, but the horrible realisation that the more successful Matrix got... the more incentive there would be for 3rd parties to commercialise the Apache-licensed code that Element had built (e.g. Synapse) without routing any funds to us as the upstream project. We obviously knew this would happen to some extent - we'd deliberately picked Apache to try to get as much uptake as possible. However, I hadn't realised that the % of projects willing to fund the upstream would reduce as the project got more successful - and the larger the available funds (e.g. governments offering million-dollar deals to deploy Matrix for healthcare, education etc) then you were pretty much guaranteed the % of upstream funding would go to zero.
So, we addressed this in 2023 by having to switch Element's work to AGPL, massively shrinking the company, and then doing an open-core distribution in the form of ESS Pro (https://element.io/server-suite/pro) which puts scalability (but not performance), HA, and enterprise features like antivirus, onboarding/offboarding, audit, border gateways etc behind the paywall. The rule of thumb is that if a feature empowers the end-user it goes FOSS; if it empowers the enterprise over the end-user it goes Pro. Thankfully the model seems to be working - e.g. EC is using ESS for this deployment. There's a lot more gory detail in last year's FOSDEM main-stage talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk
Eitherway, the good news is that we think we've figured out how to make this work, things are going cautiously well, and these days all of Element is laser-focused on making the Element apps & servers as good as we possibly can - while also continuing to also improve Matrix, both because we believe the world needs Matrix more than ever, and because without Matrix Element is just another boring silo'd chat app.
The bad news is that it took us a while to figure it all out (and there are still some things still to solve - e.g. abuse on the public Matrix network, finishing Hydra (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keu8aE8t08), finishing the Element Web rework, and cough custom emoji). I'm hopeful we'll get here in the end :)
yes, Element is venture-funded, which is where much of the money came to build all this in the first place - see the bottom of https://element.io/en/about.
I've been running a Matrix homeserver for a couple of years now and I've never had any issues with it. Not saying Matrix is perfect, but it is not as bad as you are making it out to be either.
Have you never run into any issues with encrypted chats not syncing properly between different clients, or messages not getting transferred correctly between users on different homeservers because of federation issues? Or matrix clients attempting to do some action, spinning for a bit, and then failing with an error message with no details? Or searching for rooms not working correctly and the UI not being able to clearly tell you what is actually going on with the search? I set up a Matrix server relatively recently and these were all issues that came up pretty much immediately.
It's been more than a year, and Element X does honestly look a lot better. But it's been mobile-only for years. And if I'm correct, the desktop/web clients still require you to use embedded Jitsi. And what about non-Element clients?
As a user, I just need stuff like this to be standard, and work for every participant regardless of what client they use.
Element Desktop/Web (and Element X) use Element Call for proper encrypted group VoIP/Video these days rather than Jitsi - since Sept 2024. Meanwhile we're busy upgrading Element Web to use the same rust-sdk engine as Element X (although this will take a year or so).
In terms of non-Element clients... I can't really speak for them, but I hear really good things about Cinny for folks who want a more Discord-like experience on desktop, and we livecoded an Element Call integration for it at the Matrix Conference in October (hopefully it merged). I think FluffyChat also may support the new MatrixRTC calling too.
Element X is in some cases still a downgrade from Element. For instance there doesn't seem to be a way to create local key backups anymore. Also, that calls between Element and Element X are incompatible means both apps need to be installed in order to receive calls from all contacts.
Still, I love Matrix and hope that these issues will be resolved in time.
Manually importing/exporting keybackups is on the todo list (albeit towards the bottom). Supporting legacy calls is not (unless someone contributes it); the intention is to converge asap on native Matrix group calls.
Zulip is phenomenal. Cool and unique concept, clean and snappy UI. I have no idea why it's not more popular. (Network effects and an unfamiliar layout, I suppose.)
I see the comments that say Matrix has improved a lot, so maybe it's fine now, but yeah, when I tried it previously it sucked. Weird UI was my chief complaint, but more importantly it didn't seem like there was a proper concept of organizations, in the sense of Discord or Slack servers? With roles, channels, even silly things like custom emojis. Matrix at the time seemed like just an SMS group chat replacement, I have no idea why people recommended it for organizational use. Maybe it's improved since.
Personally I've found Matrix significantly more user friendly than Threema work. Zulip I haven't used in anger so I can't comment on that but I've seen a few places that even open source they charge per user for things like notifications. Not ideal IMHO. There should be an option to replace notifications with a separate service.
It's hard to find a decent service that ticks all the boxes but I do sincerely hope that the EU can support Matrix to bring it up to the standard that we all deserve.
yeah, it's fine for me - probably as good as an electron app can get (def not good as a true native app but it's def better than having to use my phone...)
> Mobile notifications for organizations with up to 10 users
Why does the self-hosted edition have this restriction? If the software is truly OSS, the limit could be trivially patched. But this kind of restriction just does not inspire much confidence in the project to be honest.
Mobile notifications do not require outside operators. UnifiedPush / ntfy is FLOSS, and allows for a single background connection for multiple apps / notification channels. It can also be self-hosted (and I do!)
This puts the operational costs (number of devices and notifications) on whomever is running the server - and because of how valuable metadata is, I expect them to be run in-house by governments
zulip seems to me like it would be a better solution to me (open source, self hostible, familiar paradigm, etc), but then again, I think _anything_ would be better than teams... so more power to them!
I'm not sure if it ended up being used this way, but if I recall correctly, when that was being initially implemented, federation was actually a core feature: different agencies / municipalities / etc could have their own servers and control their own data and accounts, but inter-agency conversations and rooms would be well-supported, along with each agency retaining a copy of the rooms on their own servers.
Someone once said to me, be very careful about negotiating with leverage… when you twist someone’s arm, they’ll say, “I’ll remember that. You may have won this one, but I’m gonna win the next one.”
Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.
It’s not clear that patchwork EU government back offices migrating off Teams will hurt US tech, but long term, in aggregate, this is going to be a headache for American tech.
EU can’t out innovate US tech, but they can make it harder to dominate their markets.
I hope you're right! I mean, at the level of personal relationships I fully agree[0]. However, institutions tend to be forgetful.
[0]: Someone once said to me something very similar to what you quoted: "Be nice to people. People will remember you. And they will gossip if they don't like you and you have wronged them. It's much easier to ruin your reputation with a single action done to a single person than to build up a good one."
If so, I think the onus would be on you to prove it, not me.
Or, more importantly, if you really think the EU will be a tech powerhouse, shouldn’t you be writing checks to their startups left and right?
Because I think that would be the revealed preference here. I’m guessing you’re not heavily invested in EU tech companies, right? Because that would say a lot about your true beliefs.
> Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.
No it's not. This is theater to give the impression that they are "getting the orange buffoon". They'll be back in short order, and even if they aren't, it'll just be an insignificant blip on a financial chart somewhere, not even big enough to warrant someone's attention. They did similar things in Trump's first term, and came back groveling.
Maybe, and you might be right. These might be one-off posturing things from the EU.
Sure, a few back office shifts to OpenOffice aren’t a big deal today, but I’m worried about where we are in 10, 20 years. There is no EU tech competition to us today, but who knows… tomorrow is a new day.
I don’t know how Teams even got the approval to be released. It must be so embarrassing to be Satya and be forced to use this shitty piece of software.
I can’t believe that software of this quality is used so widely. Market competitive forces are not able to do their thing unfortunately.
It's because of the licenses mostly. If you buy e.g. business standard or business premium or whatever you want to make the most of it. Hey, there is a free chat app included, and it integrates so well with the rest of m365!
(Also most people don't know that you can still use a KMS with/for office 2024. You don't need M365.)
errr market monopoly forces are doing their thing … the point is that only a govt can force eg an OS + APP anticompetitive monopoly provider to split up into multiple companies
I think Mattermost lost a lot of instance admins' trust when they recently decided to update the server to limit access to old messages without good reason. On self-hosted instances!
That's a shame, I interviewed there once, decided not to take it but it was one of the few places I could have seen myself working at, they seemed like decent folks trying to build something worthwhile.
If you work with lots of other entities who want full control over their own comms (e.g. other governments, other departments, other EU entities like European Parliament and Council, the UN, NATO, etc) then decentralisation or federation is a big deal.
In the public sector it's basically a requirement: it's bananas if your country's critical infrastructure ends up dependent on some a product effectively controlled by another country (e.g. Teams) - and you obviously want to be able to communicate with other govt entities rather than being stuck in an island.
Then it's a natural extension to the private sector - although for now, it feels more folks are on the "nobody got sacked for using Teams" train.
Well there's always Matterbridge. If you don't have complicated workflows to replicate (and even then) you can just replicate to XMPP, Nextcloud or whatever.
Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted.
Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.
I'm sure you could do some of Zulip's features on top of Matrix.
But for what it's worth, as Zulip's lead developer, every time I'm looked at whether we could have built Zulip on top of Matrix, it just feels impossible to me. And a big part of it is the architectural decisions Matrix made to support a decentralized E2EE social network, which are not required for a self-contained chat system like Zulip or Slack (which can still be bridged with other chat systems). Permissions enforcement, performance, and lots of other details really benefit from the more focused goal, where we've explicitly decided we're not building a generic distributed network architecture and are not competing with WhatsApp.
That said, I think it's great that we have multiple OSS chat systems with different strategies that are targeting different collections of niches!
I will never understand why so many organizations entrusted the communications fabric of their organization to Microsoft and SalesForce Cloud services over the last decade. If an organization can succeed in escaping Teams or Slack to Element/Matrix, that's great, even if it's a use case where Zulip would be a better end-user experience for their requirements.
Federation can feel like "just a feature" but the E2E encryption (also in group chats) is a reason for Matrix to exist and a big reason why it's so slow.
"Slow" in what sense? Development? Because I self host a Conduit server and I don't ever notice messages being slow. It would be hard to notice anyway, as in a group chat people usually take some time to type in their responses.
The sync between large groups used to be slow because of amount of data, but Element X and "sliding windows" were rolled out to help with it.
AFAIK, the public Matrix server used to be slow because of a heavy load (I think), but on my self-hosted instance that's not a problem at all.
The experience of using Matrix involves a lot of sluggishness at various points in the client - waiting to decrypt messages or properly sync keys, waiting to join a room or for room search to load - these are the things that have been salient to me using multiple matrix clients with a freshly-spun-up server within the past month.
I hope that at some point a focus of the Matrix project will become why this isn’t being done. A better developer experience would supercharge the ecosystem, IMO.
Matrix should be the default for anyone building a chat app, but for some reason it’s not.
Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK).
That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
Meanwhile, Element Web is lagging behind Element X - but we're now in the middle of an incremental in-place upgrade (not a big-bang rewrite, thank goodness) to use matrix-rust-sdk - see our talk from FOSDEM last Sunday for the details: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DZJVTS-an-element-web...
> That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
This isn't users not getting the memo yet, this is users being faced with an unfortunate choice between a buggy, slow client and a new client that doesn't implement important functionality like Spaces and Threads.
Can i ask why is Element Classic even available on the Google Play Store? If you want people to move away from this?
I've only started my Matrix journey, in the form of writing bots using the matrix Python library. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, as the Matrix protocol could be really impactful.
I’m excited to watch the talk. I’m generally critical of Matrix, but that’s because I want it to succeed. Lately I find you’ve been doing a lot of things right, so I hope you keep going!
I assumed it was because people here are constantly telling Arathorn that Element (not ElementX) is slow and buggy, and that when they last tried the default server (circa 2019 or so) is was buggy and full of rough edges
He's (in my mind) always positive, open, and willing to admit the shortcomings of the platform he shephards... but damn does he deal with a lot of undeserved criticism (and deserved criticism, where applicable)
They are different, and the biggest reason is (I suspect) that a Zulip workspace is self-contained while a Matrix server is able to federate with other Matrix servers.
Other European institutions are also adopting Matrix, so federation may turn out to be an important feature.
Matrix has threads. So does discord, but discords UI around them basically renders them functionally useless.
Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle.
Given the (lack of) speed of European bureaucracy, this is likely more a reaction to the US sanctioning the ICC than the more recent Greenland saber rattling, but you'll probably see more of this in the future.
I wouldn't say Discord threads are useless - I do wish the UI made them more obvious, but I'm in many discord chats that use threads all the time.
Matrix has threads in a sense, but in this very thread the project lead is talking about how the new, ostensibly less buggy and more performant flagship client does not yet fully support them.
Element Software SARL and Element Software GmbH however are not. In practice I believe it's Element Software GmbH providing the European Commission deployment of ESS. (Both are owned by the UK topco, but at the current rate we might flip one of them to be the topco instead).
The Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty defined digital sovereignty as the EU and its Member States' ability to act autonomously and to freely choose their own solutions, while reaping the benefits of collaboration with global partners, when possible. The UK is not the EU or a member state.
Part of Russia is in Europe. Do you believe Russian products were considered?
The EU's definition of digital sovereignty included collaboration with global partners. It is obvious why UK companies could be considered more reliable global partners than US or Russian companies. A muddled concept of European was not needed to explain it. If where an open source solution was developed mattered even.
As I've said before, Matrix really is the only viable open source solution for in-company communication.
Every other solution (Zulip / Mattermost / whatever) is too risky, they could easily bait-and-switch you like Gitlab did, by moving important features to different tiers, or engage in other shenanigans afforded by the open core model.
Matrix has a bad reputation because it used to be downright terrible (first time I tried it, in like 2018-2019), but is a lot better now.
Correction: Zulip is 100% open-source software, and has been for a decade now. (I lead the Zulip project). Zulip's protocol, which is used for client/server communication by all major clients, has extensive documentation including the complete change history for the last several years on https://zulip.com/api/ and https://zulip.com/api/changelog.
As far as I know, there is no mechanism through which Zulip could bait-and-switch a customer that Element could not also do. And I think that as a practical matter, it would be a lot easier for a new team to pick up developing Zulip if the Kandra Labs team were to disappear than the similar question for Matrix/Element.
The core reason is that Matrix is far less simple and self-contained than Zulip. I've talked to multiple groups who tried to build apps on top of Matrix and found it too difficult. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg... may be a useful third-party reference.
This isn't to say Matrix is bad. It's just targeting a different niche. Matrix was designed around the requirements of a global social network, where you want to be able to keep writing in channels even in event of a network partition. As a result, Matrix is far more complex and less self-contained than a Zulip server is. If you are doing internal communications with some external guests, you are far safer from technical risk with a robust self-contained system like Zulip than something like Matrix that is also a social network.
Zulip's goal is to be the best way to do complex work, focused on replacing tools like Slack, Teams, and Discord, without the ambition to support a social network, and that changes a lot about the architecture and what we can do in terms of performance and focus on the human experience.
I think the intention was never to get their communication audited (potentially via poor security), but ours. You know, to protect the children and all that.
I don't really care if it's good or bad for the US as a whole; I care whether or not it's good for free software communication apps. I'm an American citizen and I own MSFT in my index funds just like lots of other people do; but I'd also rather run a free software chat app than Microsoft Teams.
The U.S. government has long looked out for U.S. companies, even to the point of staging coups (e.g. United Fruit Company). The Trump administration has been threatening direct invasions while also levying tariff's and other actions when other countries try to enact taxation or legislation of American tech companies operating in their jurisdictions. U.S. tech execs have applauded and lined up to bend the knee. Now they're finding out that their products are replaceable.
The replacements aren't perfect, but an injection of new users and funding could allow them to improve rapidly. Meanwhile, American companies like MS and Google seem determined to enshitify their products and force AI adoption because they're financially entangled with OpenAI.
Is this bad for the U.S.? It depends on how fast Americans smarten up. MS needs to start putting their products first again. Meta needs to stop relying on their government links to coerce other jurisdictions into accepting utterly irresponsible products that cause social harm while producing no tax revenue to mitigate that harm. All Americans need to stand up to their government and force it to back down from imperialist aggression.
The U.S. and U.S. software have lost international trust and are now losing out to competitors because of it. Those competitors no longer need to be better or cheaper. Just trustworthy. It is possible to mitigate this loss of trust with prompt action, but every delay causes permanent harm. The world is watching.
The real issue is that there is no easy-to-self-host complete enough solution. We do not have something go install-able, pio-able, without a gazillion of deps web-app who offer:
- a direct call UI
- a chat UI, with optional group chats
- a simple web site to be used as a wiki-like tool to share textual stuff + common media, storage internally managed
We have anything to do all of the above, but all very complex, spread across many different projects, fragile, hyper tedious to set up etc.
Even if those don’t work SAP, Dassault, etc… make massively complex software and services across multiple verticals and could trivially ship a competitor
Element’s topco may be UK based for now, but the vast majority of our business and footprint is in the EU - https://element.io/en/about. All but one of our mobile app team is in the EU for instance (and when we started, the UK was too :|)
In the Netherlands, a lot of government systems aren't procured from the Microsofts of this world. There are a lot of middle men (consultancy agencies) involved that over the years have helped build a strong ecosystem with lots of expertise around Microsoft and related suppliers.
So indeed, it's not like you can just replace a software product (or service) by some EU or open alternative. And there are huge vested interests.
Installing another app, such as Signal, on your personal computer is one thing. On 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 computers, installing it, configuring it, changing settings, updating it, backing it up, locking down settings from user changes (such as retention) - all that requires special tools to do it efficiently at scale. Without the management tools, no way that bit of IT can be used.
The most common tool by far is Microsoft's Active Directory and Group Policy, which has the best compatibility with Windows and with Microsoft applications, including Office. If AD/GP is already deployed, imagine the burden of deploying a second tool to your 1K/10K/100K computers, setting up the server, learning to use it ... you're not doing that for one application unless it's very valuable. The exception is a tool bundled with the application for its own management, but that's going to have to be efficient to deploy, learn, and use to be worthwhile.
Therefore, for many organizations, any application must be effectively managed by AD/GP, which requires the application's developer to create AD/GP management components.
Do Matrix, Signal, or any other application have system management tools?
Zoom came along with a securre video/voice chat, sure it's American, but it was by far the world leader
Microsoft then used its monopoly in office tools to push Teams to everyone
You can't compete with a trillion dollar company offering your product as a bundle your clients already pay for, even if your product is better. Even VC money runs out eventually
To be fair, Microsoft already had Skype (for Business) and NetMeeting before that. It's not like they were new to that market. NetMeeting existed for more than a decade before Zoom even came into existence.
Zoom had COVID-19 play in it's favor, that's about it.
Skype for Business is the VoIP component for Teams, now. Sharepoint is the file service for Teams, too.
Basically, Teams is a front end for a bunch of old Mircosoft cloud services... plus chat. Actually more than one chat as teams channels chat is a separate tech stack from private chat. It used to be much more monlothic and then the Sharepoint people got their hooks into it.
If nothing else this puts the spotlight on alternatives to Teams/Slack, which will increase adoption, and should increase pressure to improve (as far as that goes...)
I've not liked Slack for FOSS projects (it's not IRC, it has problems with moderation enforcement), and NOBODY likes Teams.
I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS.
My dream is that Matrix can do for intra-org comms what Signal did for SMS.
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