From The Verge: Microsoft revealed last week that it now has more than 13 million people using its Microsoft Teams chat software, a milestone that means the app has overtaken Slack. While the news is significant, active user numbers don’t tell the whole story. Microsoft has been leveraging its popular Office 365 service to bundle Microsoft Teams into its offering to businesses, and the strategy is paying off.
Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield took out a full page ad in the New York Times more than two years ago, welcoming the Microsoft competition and showing that Slack was more than a little nervous about the software giant. Now that Microsoft has caught up and overtaken Slack in terms of raw user numbers, Butterfield says he’s not worried about the rapid growth of Microsoft Teams. “If it’s based on the bigger distribution [Office 365], I don’t think that’s really a threat,” said Butterfield at a business conference on Monday, reports CNBC.
Butterfield dismissed Microsoft’s push and compared it to the company’s failed attempts with Bing to compete with Google’s massive search engine dominance. “Tens of billions of dollars into that [search engine] and I don’t know what their market share is now — 9 percent or something like that,” said Butterfield. In a further comparison, Butterfield noted that Google+ failed despite Google’s attempts to bundle it with all of its services.
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