Microsoft says Teams passed 44M DAUs, up from 32M earlier this month, unveils new features like real-time noise suppression that are coming later this year
Teams' growth curve has been steepening all year: Microsoft reported 13M+ daily active users last July, then 20M in November — a milestone that knocked Slack's stock down double digits the same week Slack claimed just 12M users. The new number is a different order of acceleration: 44M DAUs, up from 32M 'earlier this month,' a jump that tracks the sudden shift to work-from-home rather than normal sales cadence.
The feature announcements bundled with the number — real-time noise suppression among them — are aimed squarely at home working conditions, and the later coverage shows the spike was not a blip: Teams went on to 115M DAUs by October and 145M by April 2021.
First-order effects
Slack, which reported 12M DAUs against Teams' 20M back in November, now trails a rival that more than doubled in four months — and its stock has already shown it trades on these Microsoft user disclosures.
Microsoft's noise-suppression and other coming features directly address the audio-quality problems of home video calls, making Teams stickier for the millions of users who arrived involuntarily this month.
Second-order effects
Enterprise buyers weighing standalone chat tools against Office 365 bundles face a starker price-quality gap: Teams arrives effectively free inside licenses they already pay for, pressuring Slack's per-seat model at renewal time.
Competitors in video and voice tooling must match the noise-suppression bar quickly, since Microsoft is shipping it into an installed base that grew 37% in weeks.
Third-order effects
If crisis-driven adoption converts to retained seats, workplace chat consolidates around productivity-suite incumbents, leaving point-solution vendors to compete on depth of integration rather than breadth of distribution.
DAU disclosures themselves become a competitive weapon — each Microsoft milestone moves markets and shapes procurement narratives, formalizing usage metrics as the scoreboard for the collaboration-software category.
The trend: Workplace communication is consolidating around productivity-suite incumbents, whose bundled apps scale fastest whenever work abruptly goes remote.
In these last 3 years, I'm so proud to see the way @MicrosoftTeams has helped enable #collaboration & creativity for the 44 million people who rely on it to stay connected. In times like these, it's important to enable work, distance learning and a sense of community. #RemoteWork…
Raise of 🤚🏼🖐🏾s who is using #microsoftteams? Check it out. They are adding hand raises into their systems. So very helpful with students being remote and eager to answer - even Dash could use it. ☺️ https://www.microsoft.com/...
Impressive scale by MS Teams. Every collaboration platform we talk to is up in usage significantly. Which was expected. However, they are all revealing their cracks as well. No perfect tool yet, if ever. https://twitter.com/...
Microsoft Teams usage up by 12 million in the past week, hitting 44 million daily active users. Plus a bunch of new Teams features are coming. More info: https://www.zdnet.com/...
COMING SOON: “Hand Raise” ✋ for @MicrosoftTeams meetings! Great for #RemoteLearning scenarios, check out the video 👇 Details in the 3 year Teams Anniversary blog link #DistanceLearning #MIEExpert #MicrosoftEDU Blog 👉 https://www.microsoft.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Accenture stood up a client on Microsoft Teams to 61K workers from 0 in 5 days https://www.zdnet.com/... and COVID-19 appears to be a Teams accelerator. https://www.zdnet.com/...
Some numbers for context - Slack: 12 million DAUs as of October - Microsoft Teams: 32 million DAUs on March 11 - Microsoft Teams: 44 million DAUs on March 18 COVID-19 added one Slack to Microsoft Teams' DAUs in just a week. https://venturebeat.com/...
Microsoft thinks the coronavirus pandemic is a turning point for remote working. “We're going to look back and realize this is where it all changed. We're never going to go back to working the way that we did.” https://www.theverge.com/...