Oh, the humanity! Microsoft congratulates itself for Teams inflicted on 115m daily users

No Slack in the system amid the irresistible rise of Redmond's collaboration platform

Microsoft broke out the collaborative backslappery during its Q1 FY21 earnings call and revealed some actual usage numbers for one of its platforms: Teams has more than 115 million Daily Active Users (DAU).

The news came amid general whoopery for some impressive revenue figures for Q1 of Microsoft's fiscal 2021.

That is quite a jump for the Slack-for-suits platform, which claimed 44 million DAUs back in March before cresting the 75 million mark by June.

While impressive, Microsoft did not specify exactly where those 115 million users were coming from. Indeed, one might consider it perhaps on the low side considering just how many Microsoft 365 users are likely are out there and how hard the company has been pushing Teams as part of the platform. The current pandemic forcing remote work has also played a key role in the rise of collaboration services.

Back in April, Microsoft said it had 258 million "paid seats" on Office 365, as it was known back then.

In the same conference call last night, the company told analysts that Azure Active Directory had nearly 400 million monthly active users.

Teams competitor Slack currently reports 12 million daily active users, although has been known to question what "daily active users" actually means in an apples-to-apples comparison. It has also lobbed a sueball Microsoft's way over the company's bundling of Teams with the near-ubiquitous Office suite.

For its part, Microsoft also pointed to videoconferencing support as a factor in Slack's slippage in the collaboration charts.

Pretty much all of the Teams business came from, er, business despite a few tentative steps into the consumer world. On last night's conference call, analysts were told 45.3 million consumers have now signed up to Office 365 (27 per cent up on the previous year).

A more personal version of Teams will doubtless be along shortly to scoop up a share of those users in the not-too-distant future.

The Register asked Microsoft to break down its Teams stats but the company refused. ®