Are Microsoft teams and Facebook Workplace winners?

Thursday, Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft 365, announced in a blog that Microsoft Teams (MSFT), the response of the technology giant based in Redmond Slack (WORK), had crossed 13 million daily users in June . Every week, 19 million people have used Microsoft's messaging and collaboration platform. This is a big step forward for the platform, which is barely two years old. This ramp-up also makes Team the fastest-growing application in the company's history.

Interestingly, Microsoft was looking to buy Slack back in 2016 before launching Teams. However, the agreement has been set aside to focus on Skype.

Is Slack in second place?

The jump could give teams a head start on Slack in terms of the number of active users. Slack had 10 million active users by the end of January. In May 2018, Slack crossed 8 million users. So, in nine months, Slack has added 2 million users to its metric of daily active users. The only way for Slack to be even ahead of Microsoft Teams is if he had almost doubled that number in half.

We already wonder if Slack could develop quickly enough to justify its wholesale price. Slack went public one month ago in a direct listing, opening $ 38.5 million worth $ 23 billion. The Company's revenue growth slowed in fiscal 2019 and the first quarter of fiscal year 2020. Microsoft is breaking the bar of the segment, making competition tougher.

Microsoft Teams for large companies

The competition for messaging and team collaboration is actually between the Microsoft, Slack and Facebook Workplace (FB) teams.

Microsoft Teams has the advantage of being part of the Microsoft family and its Office 365 suite. Its membership in the Microsoft family also helps it with integrations. Think of it as a tool integrating Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Skype. However, Slack paves the way for third-party integrations.

With 91 Fortune 100 companies using it, Microsoft is clearly the favorite of large companies, who often use other Microsoft Enterprise products. Microsoft Teams is about to gain momentum with a partner-initiated trial, with Microsoft partners offering free six-month trials to their Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 Professional customers. The vast customer bases of other Microsoft products allow the company to more easily market teams. Microsoft's free teams could also boost the business of its other products.

Startups prefer Slack

Startups running on Mac that are satisfied with Google Suite generally prefer Slack. Slack has even partnered with Google to offer advanced integration of Google products to its platform. With aggressive Microsoft marketing teams at a better price, it will be interesting to see how long Slack will hold. The free version of Microsoft Teams offers much more than the free version of Slack, and the paid version is cheaper than the paid version of Slack.

Workplace Facebook

Facebook is completing the trio of companies that are fighting for the supremacy of messaging and collaboration. Facebook has not disclosed the number of customers using Workplace for some time. In November 2017, it had 30,000 customers. Notable customers include Nestlé, Walmart and Starbucks. While Slack offers only one collaboration tool for teams, Facebook's product offering also includes the world's most popular social network and a discussion platform with 1.5 billion users.

Facebook therefore has the advantage of offering an integrated solution combining work and personal life. For some, however, this could be a disadvantage, as Facebook is generally perceived as a distraction at work. In addition, Facebook seems to have other priorities, including its cryptocurrency entry, which could allow Workplace to stay out of the way. Despite this, Workplace remains a formidable challenger for Slack, given the firepower of Facebook.