Facebook's plan to break into the workplace is already used by 1,000 businesses
During Facebook's earnings on Wednesday, it had warned the Street that revenue growth would likely slow in 2017, and that it planned to increase spending to pursue new opportunities.
One of those new opportunities is software for business users.
During the quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeated the fact that it just launched Workplace, a new version of Facebook that's designed for business users and that's a direct threat to the popular Slack business messaging product. He also said that 1,000 companies were already using Facebook Workplace (emphasis ours).
We're starting to build communities around completely new apps. This quarter, we launched Workplace to help make organizations more connected and productive. Workplace is a communications platform that uses features that people know, like News Feed, groups, and messages to help them collaborate and share at work the same way that they do everywhere else. Already, more than 1,000 organizations are using Workplace, including Starbucks, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Danone, and we're adding more all the time.
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Facebook is trying to break into a competitive market. The brand new product from Microsoft, Teams, is Microsoft's second attempt to corner the work group chat market. Microsoft also has Yammer, the workgroup chat app that Microsoft bought for $1.2 billion in 2012 and embedded into Office 365, which seemed to go nowhere.
But Facebook's Workplace origins are more like Slack's. Slack was born out of a failed video game startup, when the startup team created their own chat app to help them work on the game. Slack has gone on to grab about 4 million users, and is on track to generate $100 million in revenue this year.
Similarly, Workplace was born because Facebook employees use Facebook as their main communication tool with their teams and co-workers rather than email. Facebook decided to turn that idea into an ad-free product. It charges $1-$3 per month per user, depending on how many users a company signs up for it.
Will Workplace steal away the people who would choose Slack? Or capture a good chunk of the millions of companies who use Office 365, who can now get Teams for free (not to mention Yammer)?
Maybe not. But Facebook is clearly looking at new ways it can start making money from businesses beyond selling ads.