Microsoft announced that its enterprise chat platform ‘Teams’ has now reached 20 million daily active users (DAU) within two years of its launch. However, the messaging platform Slack disagrees with Teams’ metrics and state that the measure of DAU doesn’t essentially reflect user engagement.
According to Microsoft, the term DAU is defined as the following: maximum daily users performing an intentional action in the last 28-day period across the desktop client, mobile client, and web client.
While disagreeing with the fact that user engagement cannot be gauged by the DAU metric alone, Slack stated that its paid users actively used its messaging platform for 90 minutes per day and spent more than nine hours a day staying connected.
It is worth noting that Teams has unlocked 20 million daily users, which is roughly twice the size of Slack. When Microsoft stepped into the realm of enterprise chat, Slack released an ad in the New York Times saying that it was “genuinely excited to have some competition” and that the tech giant cannot create a service people love by making “a big list of Slack’s features and simply checking those boxes.”
Yesterday, Slack tweeted a video titled ‘ok boomer’ which was a subtle reference to the younger generations that felt ripped by the Baby Boomers, invariably hinting the similarities between its advertisement released in the Slack Frontiers conference in April and Microsoft’s ‘The Art of Teamwork’ advertisement released in November.
A brief overview of both the advertisements does reveal a few similarities.
Slack’s early investor and general partner of Spark Capital, Megan Quinn tweeted as a response to the daily active user (DAU) announcement by Microsoft Teams saying that “not all DAUs are created equal.” She also attached a picture that lists all the trending queries related to Microsoft Teams, and the search queries did not paint a pretty picture for the tech giant’s enterprise chat platform.
One cannot deny the fact that the massive user-base and success of ‘Teams’ might just be an outcome of it being offered as a part of Microsoft Office 365. With fierce competition amongst the realm of enterprise chat platforms, Slack has got much to lose when compared to Microsoft. While Teams is just one more offering in a bigger package, Slack is a standalone application.
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