Slack CEO Takes a Jab at Microsoft, States Teams Is Not Their Competitor

Microsoft mentioned their Teams service a whopping 42 times during their recent conference call. Apparently, the global lockdown caused by COVID-19 and the dynamic growth of digitalization efforts corporations are experiencing right now is enough to overshadow even the software giant’s flagship – Azure.

What’s even more curious is that Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield doesn’t feel intimidated by the looming shadow of the behemoth. Moreover, despite the latest record of 75 million daily active Teams users, he doesn’t see the app as a competitor to their teamwork collaboration platform.

If this story catches your eye, feel free to learn more about it and similar news such as Google postponing Hangouts shut down.

If you are anything like me, you’d be asking yourself a very simple question right about now, that question being “What gives?”

Here’s the thing though. There are more than 250 million active Office 365 users out there who have free access to Microsoft Teams. Despite that, even during the traitorous times of a global pandemic, less than 30% of these people choose to use the collaboration service. 71% simply don’t show an interest in it whatsoever.

And Mr. Butterfield knows it. That’s why he can say that “Teams is not a competitor to Slack,” in an interview with CNBC. And that’s why he can continue with jabs like “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.”

How about you though? Are you using Teams? Would you prefer it to Slack? Why?