>Then it's entrenched and folks can't imagine doing things any other way.

It basically works the same as every competitor, I'm not really sure why you'd need to do things 'any other way'.

I can imagine my calendar working / not dealing with Teams issues. A chat interface that is better.

Granted plenty of office drones can't imagine / use much else at this point.

We had to start using it because all of our clients demanded it. Managers/Owners don't say no to big money.

But then you'd be onboarded (as a guest) on their Teams environment, right? You wouldn't need to have your own to make that work. In fact, when I had the need to switch between environments I found that experience to be extremely confusing, frustrating and buggy.

Yep. Companies sign up for O365 and then the bean-counters insist on killing any other products that can be replaced by that (if you squint hard enough) because they see it as cost savings.

It’s not about bean counting, though. As a small startup, should you really spend like $15/user/month on a chat app that you get included with your office suite? Try to explain these expenses to your investors.

Is it common for startups to provide all of their employees with Office nowadays?

Google Workspace isn’t really popular here, most non-technical folks need office tools, and you’ll definitely need email, cloud storage, and communications, so yeah—I’m not quite sure how we would be able to do business without O365 or an equivalent platform.

Yeah, that's the whole point of M365. If you are all in on the stack it's great. If you use 5 different products instead, it doesn't make any sense.