According to Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, Microsoft Teams is not a competitor to Slack. He feels that the larger corporation has not proven that customers want to use Teams. He cites the app’s bundling with Office 365 as evidence of this.
“What we’ve seen over the past couple of months is that Teams is not a competitor to Slack,” said Butterfield in an interview with CNBC this week. “When they [Microsoft] talk about the 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.”
Slack’s CEO might claim Microsoft Teams isn’t a competitor, but it says the opposite in its SEC filings. “Our primary competitor is currently Microsoft Corporation,” says Slack in a recent 10-Q filing.
Butterfield also said last year that Slack wasn’t worried about Microsoft’s aggressive Teams push, despite taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times “welcoming” Microsoft Teams more than three years ago. Slack’s main argument about its Teams competition is that Microsoft is not as focused on users and their interactions with the app. Butterfield is clearly frustrated with the ongoing comparisons, despite Slack growing its enterprise business amid Microsoft’s Teams push.
Teams saw a surge of growth late last year as Microsoft pushed it on its customers, eventually surpassing Slack’s count by 8 million with over 20 million active users. At that time, Slack accused its rival of fudging the numbers.
More recently, Microsoft revealed in an investors call that its latest user count was over 75 million a 275-percent increase over its November 2019 numbers and 134 percent over its March count of 32 million.
Slack isn’t alone in trying to shift the conversation around its competition with Teams. Microsoft has also downplayed some of the comparisons between Slack and Teams in the past, but also claimed Slack doesn’t have the “breadth and depth” to reinvent work. Microsoft has been growing its Teams users steadily over the past year, overtaking Slack in the process. Daily users have jumped significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, up 134 percent from 32 million daily users in early March to 75 million daily users in late April.
It’s clear there’s no single winner here, though. Slack has also seen new user records for simultaneously connected users, after demand for remote working surged in March. The battle between the two also includes some fundamentally different approaches for different sets of businesses. Microsoft is using Teams as a hub for Office and everything it can offer, and Slack is focusing on app integrations to bring the fragmented world of alternative productivity apps together.
