In mid November 2019, Slack’s stock price took a hit because of a Microsoft announcement touting the number of Teams downloads. 

Wall Street reacted with the thought that if Teams is winning then Slack is losing. However, I don’t think this number is as much of the scoreboard the wall street reaction indicates. 

Yes, the Microsoft Teams has the downloads but they didn’t get invited to the party. They snuck in on their big brother’s coat tails (office 365). And we all know the difference of getting invited to the party vs. knowing someone who got invited. 

Slack’s penetration is hard fought, self made with a good product. The MS Team’s features are strong replications of Slack or other competitors and/or adaptations of features Teams already had but others had perfected(cough-google docs-cough). 

To relate this to something we have been seeing playout recently, let’s compare these moves to Facebook’s copy-cat activity to deploy features similar to the hot app of the day(Snapchat, Tik-tok, etc.).

Facebook has been making a habit out of copying the features of competitors and deploying them into “big blue”a.k.a. Facebook with relative lack luster results. 

“Relative” because we compare the usage stats of these features to the competitive apps FULL feature set. These features are additive to Facebook and objectives are to keep users in the app long enough to see just one more ad; one more minute.

So yes, these features don’t have the rave success that they amassed in their respective apps but the question is... is Facebook actually losing?  No. Their revenue is never better. Their are questions about their user base but using revenue or share of the total time using social media apps as the metrics, they aren’t losing. 

Bringing it back to Microsoft and Teams, is the goal of the app to stop corporate accounts from churning or defending their “share of wallet”? 

So is Slack winning when compared to MICOSOFT, no. Versus Teams, maybe. 

I’d love talk with an impassioned Teams user and get their thoughts on feature set.