Survey of 900 IT companies in US and Europe finds that Microsoft Teams' marketshare grew from 3% in 2016 to 21% in 2018, while Slack grew just 2% to 15% in 2018
Matthew Hughes / The Next Web :
Context & Ripple Effects
This survey lands a year after Microsoft reported that Teams, barely twelve months out of launch, was already used by 200K organizations — evidence that its distribution through Office 365 was converting fast. The new numbers make that conversion measurable: among 900 US and European IT companies, Teams went from 3% to 21% adoption between 2016 and 2018, while Slack moved from 2% to 15%.
Slack is still growing, but it is now growing slower than a rival that launched two years later — and the subsequent record confirms the gap only widened, from an ETR survey showing 59% enterprise adoption intent for Teams versus 35% for Slack to Microsoft's claim of 20M Teams DAUs against Slack's 12M, which knocked Slack's stock down over 8%.
First-order effects
- IT buyers at the surveyed firms face a de facto default shift: Teams' 21% versus Slack's 15% means the bundled option has become the majority choice, and procurement conversations start from Microsoft's stack rather than Slack's pitch.
- Slack enters 2019 as the clear number two in mindshare despite being the category definer, putting pressure on its standalone pricing model just as it scales.
Second-order effects
- Slack's valuation becomes hostage to Microsoft's disclosure cadence — each Teams DAU announcement (13M in July 2019, 20M by November) triggered single-day stock drops of 7-8%, forcing Slack to compete on engagement metrics it publishes quarterly against a rival embedded in every Office 365 renewal.
- Competitive pressure pushes Slack up the value chain beyond chat — toward paid workflow features like project management inside the app and agent integrations — because matching Teams on bundle economics alone is unwinnable.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise collaboration consolidates around suite vendors whose chat product is a feature of a broader cloud contract, leaving standalone tools to survive only by owning workflows the suites don't — the split Ben Thompson later framed as Microsoft building an OS for the cloud while Slack builds an enterprise social network.
- The bundling dynamic sets up a regulatory and buyer-power question: when one vendor's productivity suite carries the default chat client, switching costs across email, docs, and messaging compound, entrenching Microsoft's position in ways individual product comparisons understate.
The trend: Enterprise software categories are being absorbed into cloud-suite bundles, where distribution through an existing platform beats best-of-breed point products on adoption speed.