In a recent CBNC interview, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said he did not consider Microsoft Teams to be a competitor. Yet in the financial report presented to the SEC last October it said exactly the opposite
Try to ask any computer enthusiast who Slack’s main competitor is. Most likely the answer will always be the same: Microsoft Teams. It is not the same idea Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, who interviewed by CNBC said in no uncertain terms ” from what we have seen in recent months, Teams is not a Slack competitor “. Butterfield specifies that ” When he talks about Teams [Microsoft] he never mentions the fundamentals of Slack. They have been blending him with Office for 3 years, offering it for free, and citing us all the time.”
slack” Microsoft has 250 million Office users, they are talking about this enormous growth of Teams, which however is below 30% ” – specified the CEO of Slack – ” They have been bundling it for three years, prompting administrators to switch to Teams but for now only 29% of Office users use it. In practice, it is as if 71% of their users had said “No, thank you” “.
As reported by The Verge, however, it is not what he thought only a few months ago. In the report sent to the SEC on October 31, in fact, it is well specified that ” Our primary competitor is currently Microsoft Corporation “, our main opponent at the moment is Microsoft.
It is not the first time that Butterfield has fired arrows at Microsoft, as we reported recently when Slack’s CEO said that “44 million [daily active users on Teams] is an impressive number, but it should be compared to 200 millions of Office 365 users. It’s an adoption rate of 20%. “
In short, according to Butterfield, the growth of Teams is so remarkable, but considering the efforts put in place by Microsoft, which can count on its enormous firepower and on Office 365 as a trojan horse, the numbers must be framed in the right context which, according to Slack’s CEO, it is precisely that most Office 365 users still don’t use Teams.
What is certain is that both corporate communication services have seen a significant increase in users in recent months, a request inevitably driven by the pandemic that has forced many to work nimbly, from home.
