The success of companies like Slack, Zoom, and Atlassian in challenging the dominance of Microsoft and Google’s productivity suites accounts for part of this interest, but the rise of remote and distributed teams is the most important secular shift driving the trend.

You can join a Zoom with a link, but a company basically needs to onboard all of its employees if it wants to use Slack to communicate. Plus, Slack is mainly a B2B product, while Zoom serves (and counts in its 300 million figure) both B2B and B2C. As a result, Slack’s growth has been excellent but not as eye-popping as Zoom’s.