Slack thinks Microsoft Teams is not its competition, but wait...

[Cal Jeffrey]

In context: Teleconferencing apps have seen huge growth in recent months. With schools and enterprises continuing to keep their brick-and-mortar offices closed, apps like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams have prospered as companies and organizations turn to them to keep the gears of commerce turning. The competition is fierce with productivity providers at each other's throats, particularly Slack and Microsoft.

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. They've got to be a little frustrated at this point," Butterfield told CNBC. "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."

While this may be Butterfield's public opinion, SEC records show a contrary view. In a recent 10-Q filing, Slack lists Microsoft Corporation as its "primary competitor." The company also took out a full-page "open-letter" ad in the New York Times three years ago pointed directly at the Redmond-based tech powerhouse.

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

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.

Meanwhile, Slack has not released any updated daily active user counts since November, though it has boasted about breaking concurrent user records. Last month it said simultaneous connections reached 10 million on March 10 then bumped up to 10.5 million less than a week later. Concurrent users peaked on March 25, with 12.5 million connecting through the app at the same time. This number was higher than Slack's November 2019 total user count. So clearly, it has seen a surge in growth as well.

Image credit: Sundry Photography

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/85069-slack-thinks-microsoft-teams-not-competition.html

 

[Lew Zealand]

"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..."

Yep, MS has been a right bastard about forcing Teams onto people and in an Office365 managed computer situation, you can't even use group policy to prevent Teams auto-starting when a user logs in. You have to do it manually for each user. When helping someone out, I usually ask if Teams bugs them on login and then turn it off, for 100% of them so far.

 

[Danny101]

Microsoft is too embedded and have too much control as it is. Big tech has too much control. We need much more competition and user control. The monoliths are threats to personal freedoms and have been for too many years. Diversify.

 

[bviktor]

I still don't understand why this guy thinks he can actually compete with Google and Microsoft in the long term. Email is not optional for any serious company, therefore they _are_ going to purchase G Suite or O365. Which already includes the collab solution too. And costs the same as Slack. Or less.

Selling another collab solution for companies who already paid for email + collab will be getting tougher and tougher. Obviously this statement is just the same old bullish PR stunt, but the writing is on the wall: they don't release usage numbers anymore. Next they're going to cut prices, and rightfully so, because Slack is ridiculously overpriced right now.

Too bad they can't live off of free users. Having a lot of free users is actually worse than it sounds, as they require infrastructure, which costs a lot of money. And since they don't have other products, they can't afford to sell the product at a loss either. Which Google and MS _can_ do.

Anyway, after the price cuts and most likely lay-offs, the final stage is when they finally sell the company for a fraction of what offers they had previously - by the looks of it, most likely to Atlassian.

The guy also pretends to not understand how enterprise rollouts and migrations work. It doesn't happen overnight. Teams only appeared in 2017, 4 years later than Slack. A huge number of companies still use Skype for Business. Not because they actually _hate_ Teams, but because migrating potentially tens of thousands of users to a new application is a ginormous task. My ex' company is doing the SfB-Teams migration right now btw. For our little company with 200-ish employees it took like a year to finish the switch. It's not easy and it's not cheap. Another example: Ubuntu 20.04 has just been released, but we're still in the middle of migrating all our Linux users and appliances to 18.04 (from 16.04). Not becase "we said no thank you" to 20.04, but because it takes a lot of time and effort to do it, and migrations are usually not top priority. In fact, they're usually a headache, a necessary evil, a distraction from actually getting work done.

Not to mention that 29% percent is still way more than the complete customer base of Slack, so the whole statement just blows my mind anyway.

 

[Danny101]

Yeah. You kind of need a comprehensive product line. Free as great as it is, isn't always tenable to have good products.

 

[bviktor]

Yeah. You kind of need a comprehensive product line. Free as great as it is, isn't always tenable to have good products.

Yeah, and I forgot to mention that this has absolutely nothing to do with the qualities of either Slack or Teams or Google Chat/Meet. It's just a financial decision. I actually prefer Slack's UI in most regards, but neither is extremely good or bad. They're just tools. And I'd never pay for Slack either as an individual or as a company. It'd be just impossible to justify.

 

[ruddevil]

Ha for a while I thought I read Xbox 360 in the subtitle line. Turns out it's a typo. Office 360 never existed I believe....

 

[Eldritch]

It's the same problem as Chrome on Android. Sure, the Firefox is better browser but Chrome is also good, comes preinstalled and has better integration with its own ecosystem.

Slack will lose this war and losing means being a much smaller player in this market segment. Omae wa mou shindeiru.

 

[Hexic]

My company uses Skype for Business like many others, and the [infinitely] slow migration to MS Teams is happening just because it's easier, and there's not very much we're missing out on compared to Slack.

Now personally, I began a Slack beta test for a division of our workforce, and everyone MUCH prefers Slack over MS Teams, because in our honest opinion it's a far better service... And it integrates with O365 (among many other apps) flawlessly.

But unfortunately, since our global organization of many tens of thousands uses MS products daily... We're inevitably going to move to Teams. It's a shame because Slack is a brilliant and flawless solution for what it's intended to be, but as large as we are the inferior MS integration is cheaper and easier.

 

[candle_86]

My company uses Skype for Business like many others, and the [infinitely] slow migration to MS Teams is happening just because it's easier, and there's not very much we're missing out on compared to Slack.

Now personally, I began a Slack beta test for a division of our workforce, and everyone MUCH prefers Slack over MS Teams, because in our honest opinion it's a far better service... And it integrates with O365 (among many other apps) flawlessly.

But unfortunately, since our global organization of many tens of thousands uses MS products daily... We're inevitably going to move to Teams. It's a shame because Slack is a brilliant and flawless solution for what it's intended to be, but as large as we are the inferior MS integration is cheaper and easier.

It also uses your domain login which is far and beyond easier to manage than 2 separate services. It's going to win simply because it's easier to manage and for all intents and purposes it's all you actually need.

 

[fps4ever]

We use Teams...we just started with the COVID issues. I know several companies that have as well. Good or bad I believe the numbers.

 

[Cal Jeffrey]

Ha for a while I thought I read Xbox 360 in the subtitle line. Turns out it's a typo. Office 360 never existed I believe....

Thanks for pointing out the typo. I guess my muscle memory kicked in after the 6. I guess we can tell which of the two M$ products I have written about more.

 

[bviktor]

It also uses your domain login which is far and beyond easier to manage than 2 separate services. It's going to win simply because it's easier to manage and for all intents and purposes it's all you actually need.

To be fair, Slack _does_ support SSO, but you gotta pay up: it's only in the Plus tier, $12.5 / user.

In comparison, O365 E1 is $8, and you get Exchange + Outlook, the web/mobile versions of Office, Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, 1 TB OneDrive, Stream, Planner, ... go figure.

Compared to E1, even the standard Slack plan for $6.67 looks horrible.