Thinking Forward about Enterprise Collaboration

Have followed the question of efficieint collaboration, and finding the resources to collaborate for some time.  We even discussed it with Bill Gates during the announcements of the earliest versions of Windows.   Now with Microsoft's acquiring Linkedin, there is even more opportunity to think about an architecture of collaboration.  And AI points us to some means of improving the process and measurement of collaboration.  Some good opinion thoughts below, but does it have to be won by a vendor, or is that inevitable?

How Microsoft can win the upcoming collaboration wars
Its product lineup is confusing at best, but it could still come to dominate this emerging market.       By Preston Gralla in ComputerWorld

 It’s the perennial question: What’s the next big thing in the enterprise? Plenty of people and companies are betting that it’s collaboration tools that improve workers’ productivity by letting them easily work together, whether they’re across the hall or around the world from each other. The research firm Market and Markets, for example, estimates that the enterprise collaboration market will grow from $26.69 billion in 2016 to $49.51 billion by 2021 — a compound annual growth rate of 13.2%.  .... "