Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield contrasts Slack's Enterprise Grid architecture with technical limits in Microsoft Teams.
Opinion
Butterfield: Microsoft Teams competes primarily with Zoom rather than Slack
“Teams, which is the real alternative in some sense, although I think it's much more of a competitor to Zoom or other voice and video calling services than it is a Slack.”
Insight
Butterfield: Crises give executives cover to push through difficult organizational restructurings
“The backdrop of global pandemic change is so enormous that you can kind of sneak in anything you want. And we see I see that talking to other CEOs today, not my customers, just like, There's essentially a group therapy SAS CEO round table. And it's like, oh, t…”
Insight
Butterfield: Product comprehension and intent matter far more than removing UX friction
“Let's focus on people's comprehension. Let's focus on whether they want to do this thing or not, and less on the friction. You can make it trivially easy and remove every bit of friction from some process, adding an app to a channel in Slack. Let's say, but if…”
Insight
Butterfield: Slack's 80-cent daily per-user cost makes enterprise pricing haggling trivial
“Slack will come out to 80 cents per user per day or something like that, and if you're spending 50% of your time on internal communication and this has a real impact on that, who cares? Like set the thermostat half a degree warmer or cooler depending where you…”
Insight
Butterfield: Crisis accelerates enterprise digital transformation by months to years
“I do think for some customers, we're pushing them three or six months down the road. For others, it's like three or five years down the road of digital transformation.”
Insight
Butterfield: Slack's ongoing challenge is selling without an existing budget line item
“An ongoing challenge for us, maybe not right this quarter, but kind of historically and when things resume normalcy, that there is no line item that we're replacing in people's budgets. Typically there is no other, you know, like what I said in the, it's still…”