Meta’s shutting down its Teams competitor, Workplace, after spreading itself too thin

Ending the chat… Meta’s giving up on Workplace, its office-communications platform. Launched in 2016, the Slack rival had 7M paying subscribers by 2021 (when it last shared the metric). This summer, Workplace users will be migrated to Zoom-owned Workvivo and Workplace will be OOO as of summer 2026. Meta’s reportedly deprioritized Workplace for a while as it shifted focus to buzzier endeavors. Yesterday, Meta said it was ditching Workplace to lean into AI and the metaverse, tech that it said would “fundamentally reshape the way we work.”

• Meta’s still keeping a foot in the office door with its Horizon Workrooms VR platform, which lets coworkers join meetings virtually as avatars (now with legs!).

• Looking for the normal search bar: Meta recently rolled out an AI-assistant chatbot (“ask Meta AI anything”) on its apps. It could have a role in the workplace.

Competing for your pings… Slack’s success inspired Microsoft to launch Teams and Google to Slackify its workplace-chat function (removing SMS, adding Spaces for group chats). The pandemic caused workplace tools to surge in popularity as everybody went WFC (#WorkFromCouch): Salesforce acquired Slack for $28B in 2021, while Zoom revenues doubled for five straight quarters. Postpandemic, Zoom’s sales tightened to single digits as the # of couch-based workers stabilized. Meantime, Meta reportedly saw growth of its Workplaces service slow. As work tools get squeezed, there’s less room for competition.