Slack CEO Says Microsoft Teams Isn't A Slack Rival
Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, feels Microsoft Teams isn't a Slack rival. Asked about the ongoing battle between Slack and Microsoft Teams for the corporate space, Butterfield again questioned Microsoft's approach to bundling Teams with Office.
“What we’ve seen over the past couple of months is that Teams is not a competitor to Slack,” Butterfield, in an interview with CNBC, said 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 may assert Microsoft Teams isn't a competitor, but in its SEC filings it says the opposite. The messages app [Slack] says in a new 10-Q filing, "Our primary competitor is currently Microsoft Corporation.”
Butterfield also said last year that Slack was not worried about the aggressive drive of Microsoft's Teams app, despite taking out a full-page ad in the "welcoming" Microsoft Teams in The New York Times more than three years earlier. The biggest complaint about Slack company's and Teams rivalry is that Microsoft is not as focused on customers and their experiences with the app. Butterfield is evidently irritated with the continuing parallels, given the fact that Slack app is increasing its company following the drive of Microsoft's Teams.
“I think there’s this perpetual question, which at this point is a little puzzling for us, that at some point Microsoft is going to kill us,” Butterfield said in a CNBC interview. “In another sense, they’ve got to be a little frustrated at this point. 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.”
Butterfield refers to the newest 75 million average active users in MS Teams. Microsoft now has 258 million paying seats for Office 365, including access to Microsoft Teams app, which means that fewer than 30 percent of Microsoft's Office business customers use Teams. It could be even less, as there is a free version of Microsoft Teams as well.
Slack is not alone in seeking to change the discussion with Teams around its rivalry for being one of the most popular messaging apps. In the past, Microsoft has downplayed some of the similarities between Slack and Teams, but also believed that Slack lacks the "breadth and depth" to reinvent work. Over the past year Microsoft has gradually increased its Team members, overtaking Slack[the messenger app] in the process. During the COVID-19 pandemic, daily users increased dramatically from 32 million daily users in early March to 75 million daily users at the end of April, up around 134 percent.
However, it is obvious there is no single winner here. The Slack project management has also seen new usage milestones for linked users concurrently, following a increase in March in demand for remote work. There are also several radically different solutions to the war between the two for various sets of companies. Microsoft uses Teams as a platform for Office and everything it can deliver, and Slack focuses on convergence of the app to put together the fragmented world of alternative collaboration software.