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Stewart Butterfield says Microsoft sees Slack as existential threat – TechCrunch
In a wide ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal’s global technology editor Jason Dean yesterday, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield had some strong words regarding Microsoft, saying the software giant saw his company as an existential threat.
The interview took place at the WSJ Tech Live event. When Butterfield was asked about a chart Microsoft released in July during the Slack quiet period, which showed Microsoft Teams had 13 million daily active users compared to 12 million for Slack, Butterfield appeared taken aback by the chart.
“The bigger point is that’s kind of crazy for Microsoft to do, especially during the quiet period. I had someone say it was unprecedented since the [Steve] Ballmer era. I think it’s more like unprecedented since the Gates’ 98-99 era. I think they feel like we’re an existential threat,” he told Dean.
It’s worth noting, that as Dean pointed out, you could flip that existential threat statement. Microsoft is a much bigger business with a trillion-dollar market cap versus Slack’s $400 million. It also has the benefit of linking Microsoft Teams to Office 365 subscriptions, but Butterfield says the smaller company with the better idea has often won in the past.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday October 26 2019, @06:43AM
Slack is just like Microsoft Teams, but isn't made by Microsoft.
They are both chat programs, aimed at office workers for inter-office communication. Besides just instant messaging, they support group chats, calling with soft phones, video calls and conferences, screen sharing, and stuff like that. They are also both Electron apps so they are bloated as all hell and chew up memory and CPU like crazy, though on a newer PC you'll hardly notice it.
I can only assume that Microsoft managed to get their numbers so high by including Teams with some (all?) versions of Microsoft Office. That's how I got it on my work computer, and that's how people at work started using it. We also have Cisco Jabber on our computers too which has been around a while and does most of the same things, though it's not quite as "cool" as Teams which has a modern UI (not saying it's better), tons of emoticons, built-in memes, and stuff like that.