In an interview with CNBC, Slack CEO, Stewart Butterfield, said once more, Microsoft Teams is not a Slack competitor. In what feels like a never-ending saga between the two, with Slack mostly acting as the aggressor, Butterfield told CNBC:
“What we’ve seen over the past couple of months is that Teams is not a competitor to Slack. When Microsoft talks about its product, they never mention the fundamentals that Slack does, and it’s been 3+ years at this point that they’ve been bundling it, giving it away for free, and talking about us”
Last year, I covered quite a few of these kerfuffles, most of which, are still primarily one-sided. Microsoft has responded occasionally, and one time, in particular I’d like to point out – when Microsoft claimed Slack did not have the ‘breadth and depth’ to reinvent work, in an interview with the Verge. Petty disputes aside, Slack’s CEO has some valid points, and he should be heard.
Butterfield is attempting to make a point by calling out one of the largest collaboration companies in the world. His basic argument is that Microsoft Teams is not competition because the collaboration company does not consider user interactions within its mobile app. Slack, on the other hand, places a heavy emphasis on mobile usage. Back in November, Slack reported, 76 percent of those with the workplace collaboration app use it on their mobile devices. The company also reported five billion actions performed in an average workweek, with more than one billion of said actions occurring on a mobile device.
Butterfield often makes light of Teams’ daily active user count, which just hit 75 million. He also talks about Microsoft Teams padding its user count because the company has 258 million paid users on Office 365. With a subscription, they gain access to Microsoft Teams. This could mean that 30 percent (or less) of Microsoft’s Office enterprise customers actually use Teams each day.
Still, Slack’s rhetoric starkly contrasts it’s own SEC filings, which highlight Microsoft as its ‘primary competitor.’ So, where does this cognitive dissonance stem from? My guess, an attempt at stirring the pot and establishing itself as an edgy Silicon Valley company that can make a media splash. What none of the back-and-forth does impact is the reality – both Slack and Microsoft are doing exceptionally well because of the novel Coronavirus.
In April, a Slack spokesperson told me they’d seen a 350 percent growth in calls made and received via Slack, including native Slack calls, BlueJeans, Webex, Zoom, etc. In March, we reported Teams reached 44 million daily active users, and two months later, in May, Microsoft reported its popular Teams app had gained 31 million new users, skyrocketing to 75 million daily active users. Slack last reported its daily active user count in 2019, and at the time, the collaboration company had 13 million.
Most of the world’s flocked to these previously obscure enterprise technologies to now fuel work-from-home lifestyles. That translates into higher profit for all the companies in this sphere fortunate enough to have seen (and ones that are still seeing) major upticks in usage. And Slack’s got even more planned for its mobile users, recently announcing it’s testing a ‘major redesign’ of its Android app with new navigation bar. The update is freshly available in beta for Slack Android users, the company said last week.
