an enterprise product or something else).Īn open-source alternative didn't win. It will be interesting to see whether or not Discord can convert its large userbase to revenue (e.g. Enterprise slack channels quickly became 'uncool' compared to their Discord alternatives. While Microsoft cannibalized Slack's enterprise growth, Discord found product-market fit with gamers, crypto, and now, startups. Squeezed from both sides: enterprise and consumer GTM. Even Discord has made some Twitter-like missteps with its API ( see discord.py support). While Discord users embraced bots, the enterprise user never became a power user of bots (save some alerting bots). Slack's big bet was the Slack app economy. How much of Teams growth was due to its video chat? Are there natural benefits to grouping video, voice, and text?Ĭhat bots never materialized. Even post-pandemic, it will continue to be an essential tool for remote collaboration. In hindsight, video chat was an essential feature that Slack lacked. First-class integrations with Sharepoint and Outlook make for features that Slack can't compete against without building a significantly larger product. But distribution through the Microsoft Office bundle makes enterprise penetration nearly trivial.

MS Teams (anecdotally) continues to be a 'worse' product than Slack. Slack had a great exit ($27b) to Salesforce, but could it have captured more value? Now that we are far enough past the emergence of enterprise chat applications, some hypotheses, and observations.įree distribution is hard to compete against. Let's look at the DAU estimates today across Teams, Slack, and Discord, gathered from any public data I could find:Ģ017: Teams (2mm) / Slack (6mm) / Discord (9mm)Ģ018: Teams (8mm) / Slack (8mm) / Discord (19mm)Ģ019: Teams (20mm) / Slack (12mm) / Discord (?)Ģ020: Teams (75mm) / Slack (14mm) / Discord (?)Ģ022: Teams (270mm) / Slack (18mm) / Discord (?) There's a chart that's been floating around comparing daily active users (DAU) between Microsoft Teams and Slack (2020). Now that the company is over a decade old, a retrospective of how the market unfolded. Slack created a new enterprise product category and modernized an old technology (IRC). Four years later, Salesforce acquired Slack. Slack, the market leader at the time, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times titled 'Dear Microsoft.' It ended with a phrase nearly copied from the Apple to IBM ad, 'So welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution.' Three years later, Teams would pass Slack in Daily Active Users (DAUs). In 2016, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams.

Slack v discord