Slack CEO: Microsoft Teams is not a competitor to Slack

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield thinks Microsoft Teams is not a competitor to Slack. Asked about the ongoing battle between Slack and Microsoft Teams for the business space, Butterfield once again challenged Microsoft’s approach to grouping Teams with Office.

“What we’ve seen in the past few months is that Teams is not a competitor to Slack,” Butterfield said in an interview with CNBC this week. “When they [Microsoft] They talk about the product, they never mention the fundamentals that Slack does, and it’s been over 3 years at this point that they’ve been bundling it up, giving it away and talking about us. “

The Slack CEO could claim that Microsoft Teams is not a competitor, but says otherwise in his filings with the SEC. “Our main competitor is currently Microsoft Corporation,” says Slack in a recent 10-Q presentation.

Butterfield also said last year that Slack was not concerned about the aggressive push from Microsoft teams, despite pulling out a full-page ad in the New York Times Microsoft teams “welcoming” more than three years ago. Slack’s main argument about his Teams competition is that Microsoft is not as focused on users and their interactions with the application. Butterfield is clearly frustrated with the ongoing comparisons, despite the fact that Slack is growing its business business amid the momentum of the Microsoft teams.

Stewart Butterfield, Slack

“I think there is this perpetual question, which at the moment is a little puzzling to us, that at some point Microsoft is going to kill us,” Butterfield says in the CNBC interview. “In another sense, they should be a little frustrated at this point. They have 250 million Office 365 users, they just announced this massive growth in teams at just under 30 percent. So after three years of bundling it, pre-install it On people’s machines, insisting that administrators turn it on and forcing Skype for Business users to switch to Teams, they still only have 29 percent, meaning that 71 percent of their users have said that no thanks . “

Butterfield refers to Microsoft’s last 75 million daily active computer users. Microsoft also has 258 million paid seats for Office 365, which includes access to Microsoft Teams, meaning less than 30 percent of Microsoft Office business customers are using Teams. It could be even less, since there is also a free version of Microsoft Teams.

Slack is not alone in trying to change the conversation around his competition with teams. Microsoft has also downplayed some of the comparisons between Slack and Teams in the past, but also claimed that Slack doesn’t have the “breadth and depth” to reinvent work. Microsoft has been steadily increasing its Teams users for the past year, outperforming Slack in the process. Daily users have increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, 134 percent from 32 million daily users in early March to 75 million daily users in late April.

However, it is clear that there is no single winner here. Slack has also seen new user registrations for simultaneously connected users, after demand for remote work increased in March. The battle between the two also includes some fundamentally different approaches for different sets of companies. Microsoft is using Teams as a hub for Office and all it can offer, and Slack is focusing on app integrations to bridge the fragmented world of alternative productivity apps.

Update, May 1, 2:25 p.m. ET: Updated article with details from Slack’s recent 10-Q presentation.