The founder of Slack, Stewart Butterfield, has taken a swipe at a rival, Teams after the former gained 2 million users in about two weeks, increasing its connected users to 12.5 million in March 2020.
Butterfield said that the Microsoft owned Teams is no threat to Slack in the team-messaging app market, citing its performance and customer base.
Butterfield said Microsoft had been pushing its rival, Teams, with free service for three years, despite this, no Slack enterprise customer has switched to Teams. “Microsoft has made a huge push the past three years with a free service, but can you find a single Slack enterprise customer who has switched to Teams?
“If Microsoft is such a competitive threat to Slack as it says, we would not have grown in sales and $1 million customers,” Butterfield told MarketWatch. He asserted that Slack’s wide breadth, with up to 25,000 channels and security features give it a competitive advantage in the market.
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It took Slack about four years to move from 1 million users base to 10 million on March 10. The team-messaging app later hit 12.5 million on March 25. “The week of March 9 was the most productive in our company’s history,” he said.
How both firms performed in March: Both Teams and Slack had an impressive performance in March following the lockdown. The work-from-home caused by the Coronavirus outbreak fueled the rise in Teams and Slack patronage.
Microsoft announced that Teams recorded 2.7 billion meeting minutes on March 31, a 200% increase from the 900 million recorded mid-March. Meanwhile, its total video calls saw a 1000% rise in same March.
Before March ending, Teams accounted for 32 million on March 11 2020, but now has 44 million people on a daily basis; a significant growth from the 20 million in November 2019. One of the biggest feats for Teams is Pentagon, which launched a Microsoft-based teleworking service for 4 million employees.
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Meanwhile, the cumulative number of minutes of active users of Slack during weekdays by all users globally now exceeds 1 billion. It was disclosed that the company added 9,000 new paid customers from February 1 to March 25, an 80% increase over the full quarterly total the preceding two quarters.
Slack also saw paid subscribers, which include the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, KPMG and TD Ameritrade AMTD, -4.99%, rose to 110,000. Slack experienced a surge in customers that spent more than $1 million annually on its product.
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This reflected in Slack’s share, which gained 10% this year, as its fiscal fourth-quarter revenue hit $181.9 million from $122 million a year ago; this is a 49% surged.
“I mean, 44 million is an impressive number, but that is out of 200 million Office 365 customers. That’s about a 20% adoption rate.” He added that, “The smaller startup has an advantage against the large, established company because its focus is narrowed on doing one thing better.”
