Over the past couple of months, Microsoft Teams has seen unprecedented growth, with more than 75 million daily active users reported last week. Although Microsoft Teams and Slack are thought of as rivals in the market, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield denied the fact that Microsoft Teams is even a competitor to Slack in a recent interview with CNBC (via The Verge).
According to Butterfield, Microsoft is yet to prove that customers want to use Microsoft Teams for remote communication. He believes that the Team’s growth in recent months is a result from the app being bundled with various Microsoft 365/Office 365 subscriptions.”
“What we’ve seen over the past couple of months is that Teams is not a competitor to Slack. They’ve got to be a little frustrated at this point,” said Butterfield. “They have 250 million-ish Office 365 users. They just announced this massive growth in Teams to a little under 30 percent. So after three years of bundling it, preinstalling it on people’s machines, insisting that administrators turn it on, forcing users from Skype for Business to switch to Teams — they still only have 29 percent, which means 71 percent of their users have said no thank you.”
Interestingly, The Verge pointed out a recent 10-Q filing where Slack listed Microsoft Corporation as its main competitor. On top of that, around three years ago, Slack also published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times acknowledging the dominance of the software giant.
That feeling when you think "we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter," and then you do. 💫 pic.twitter.com/BQiEawRA6d
— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) November 2, 2016
Apparently, Butterfield has used this interview to say that Slack and Teams are now in different leagues. However, Microsoft Teams slowly but surely turned out to be a more robust platform with the integration of Office 365 features. While there’s no clear winner as of yet, how do you think that the ongoing COVID-19 crises would play out for Slack in the near future? Let us know in the comments down below.
