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Benioff: Microsoft Used 'Dark' and 'Horrible' Tactics to Attack Slack

Marc Benioff · AI, M&A, and the Future of SaaS: Lessons from Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, Co-Founder and Chair · May 2, 2025 · at 7:55

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, reflects on historical enterprise competition between Microsoft Teams and Slack prior to Salesforce's acquisition of Slack.

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“You can see the horrible things that Microsoft did to Slack before we bought it. And yeah, that was pretty bad and they were running their playbook and did a lot of dark stuff. And it's all got in a written up in an EU complaint, but Slack made before we bought them. And you never really know what Microsoft is going to do, but that was pretty nasty. And I really am not, I don't, I'm not an I don't really admire what Microsoft did with Slack and how they used a lot of their assets to really try to attack them when Slack wasn't really going up against Microsoft. So to do these things, I was, did not find them to be on the up and up, I would say.”

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