Slack CEO, Stewart Butterfield is of the opinion that Microsoft Teams isn’t a competitor to his Slack. He says his company’s top customers use parts of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite which is bundled with Teams, but they still choose Slack anyways.
Butterfield told analysts that his company now has more than 50 customers paying at least $1 million a year. This is an increase from 30 in the first quarter of 2019.
“What we’ve seen over the past couple of months is that Teams is not a competitor to Slack. 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,” Butterfield said in an interview with CNBC.
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He added that about 70% of those who use Office 365 have actually rejected 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. 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,” says Butterfield in the interview.
Microsoft had previously claimed Slack doesn’t have the “breadth and depth” to reinvent work. The company has also seen Teams usage grow steadily in the last year and surging significantly amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The service recorded an increase of 134% from 32 million daily users in March 2020 to 75 million in April.
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