According to Microsoft, Microsoft Teams gained up to 12 million extra users in a week because the number of homeworkers is drastically increasing due to the coronavirus. Slack, the main competitor, reported that some 7,000 additional paying customers were added in the period from February 1.
Teams had 44 million users as of March 18, according to Microsoft, more than doubling the 20 million daily active users reported in November. The number of users grew from 32 million to 44 million in the period between 11 and 18 March; 12 million additional users in a week. This is due to the number of U.S. companies that asked employees to work from home, Microsoft says.
There were no comparable recent figures for Slack, Teams’ biggest competitor. In October, however, Slack stated that they had 12 million daily active users. In addition, Slack states that four of the five possible big deals in the last quarter were won at the expense of Teams. Furthermore, Slack claimed to have won 7,000 new paying customers between 1 February and 18 March. That would mean an increase of approximately 40 percent compared to the previous six months. At that time, there were approximately 5,000 new paid customers per quarter.
Additional features
Microsoft has also rolled out a number of features in Teams, which are used for remote medical care and work from home. Among other things, a tool for hospitals to manage bookings was added.
“Now that organisations around the world are changing their way of working in response to the situation, we are going to learn a lot,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in a virtual press conference. Microsoft also announced that it is working on a number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) features that can make working from home easier for users of Teams.
Microsoft Teams is a paid service for companies, as they use the full version of Teams, but there is also a free version that can be used by consumers.