For the first time, Microsoft have announced the number of people currently using their Teams software. According to their figures, they're seeing more than 13 million users a day, increasing to 19 million active users over a week.
For those unaware, Teams is Microsoft's take on a company-wide messaging app. The biggest competitor in this arena is Slack, whose latest figures suggest they see around 10 million users a day. This means that a couple of years after launch, Teams is now the more popular app.
We are among those 13 million daily users ourselves. A couple of months ago, we wrote a blog about why we switched to Microsoft Teams for messaging and file sharing.
Of course, Microsoft have a distinct advantage over Slack here. Teams is included as part of an Office 365 subscription (and they've recently made a free version available for smaller teams). Given how ubiquitous Office is in the business world, they're able to include all sorts of subtle and not so subtle pushes in their software to raise awareness of the app.
Microsoft is not resting on its laurels though - the app is still receiving frequent updates to add new features. For instance, this month, they are introducing the ability to create a priority notification. This will alert the receipient every two minutes that there's an urgent item for their attention until they respond.
This news comes during a good few years for Microsoft. The company's popularity was waning somewhat at the turn of the decade - probably due to their primary focus still being their Windows operating system. While Windows is obviously still very widely used, increasingly, people (especially home users) are using their mobiles and tablets more on a day-to-day basis - a market that Microsoft have never managed to gain much of a foothold in. Now, with its Surface laptop range and a move into providing cloud storage with their Azure service, Microsoft's value is back on the increase. This was emphasised back in April when their stock value hit $1 trillion, thereby overtaking Apple as the world's most valuable company.