I am sure it was not a coincidence that this announcement happened in the middle of Microsoft’s annual partner conference in Las Vegas. Still, it is not as if all of those Teams users started using the program because they were inspired by Slack: Microsoft has a huge sales team with relationships that go back years, and a massive partner network that serves companies that are too small to sell to directly I wrote about the latter when Teams passed Slack: And, in that case, it doesn’t matter how much “love” Slack put into its product: said love was not simply unrequited, but unexperienced. Moreover, while Slack concluded its advertisement by talking about how difficult it would be for Microsoft to convince Slack users to “switch” to Teams, switching was never the goal: just as Facebook created Instagram Stories to remove the impetus for new users to even try Snapchat, Teams is particularly effective as a way to prevent a Microsoft customer from even trying Slack. In other words, the effective choice is exactly what I stated: “free” versus paid. Well, technically, Teams requires a n Office Microsoft 365 subscription (although yes, there are free versions of both Teams and Slack), but as Slack itself notes, a good portion of its addressable market has exactly that. The obvious reason for Teams’ success relative to Slack is the oldest tactic in the book: Teams is free, and Slack isn’t. Microsoft is out-of-sight and out-of-mind.Īnd then something mysterious occurs an enterprise SaaS company will grow like a weed, getting buzz amongst investors and the press that covers them, raise rounds for growth, perhaps even IPO, and then, well, Teams versus Slack happens: And even when it comes to the cloud, the choice for startups is usually between AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Moreover, just as Twitter is the social network of choice within the tech ecosystem, the vast majority of Silicon Valley companies host their email with Google and use Google’s productivity software, or one of the myriad of offerings seeking to usurp documents or spreadsheets or presentations. Ergo, if those businesses are surely doomed, then so is Microsoft. You can say the same thing about Microsoft: while the company was once the disruptive upstart, for decades it has been the default for all of those businesses that Silicon Valley is seeking to disrupt. I have long quipped that most of Silicon Valley has serially underestimated Facebook because it is the social network of friends and family, and many people in tech are trying to escape said friends and family. And while Slack’s ad may have welcomed Microsoft as a competitor, now CEO Stewart Butterfield is saying that Teams isn’t a competitor after all.įortunately for Slack, that is increasingly true. On the company’s last earnings call CEO Satya Nadella revealed that Teams had 75 million daily active users Slack hasn’t provided a post-pandemic-onset DAU number, but had 12 million last October (Microsoft’s pre-pandemic number was 32 million in early March). Two-and-a-half years later Teams passed Slack in daily active users (DAUs). If you want customers to switch to your product, you’re going to have to match our commitment to their success and take the same amount of delight in their happiness. We love our work, and when we say our mission is to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, we’re not simply mouthing the words. The advertisement added under that last point: Slack’s “advice” was, naturally, self-serving, at least in terms of how the startup saw their advantages relative to Microsoft to quote the ad: So, as you set out to build “something just like it,” we want to give you some friendly advice. However, all this is harder than it looks. And even though - being honest here - it’s a little scary, we know it will bring a better future forward faster. It’s validating to see you’ve come around to the same way of thinking. We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. The text of the ad was condescension cloaked in congratulations: That feeling when you think "we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter," and then you do.
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