Analysts say Salesforce's customers do not seem to be swayed by Slack; the messaging service's revenue growth declined from 11.7% in Q1 2022 to 6.9% in Q3 2022
Carhartt's CIO says the addition of the messaging app hasn't made Salesforce's products more appealing Tweets: @tomgara , @kazanjy , @carnage4life , @katherinemiller , and @bluecoyote Tweets: Tom Gara / @tomgara : I wonder if all the stories of employee Slack rebellions damaged the brand among big companies looking for a workplace chat system, you never read stories about how outrage built up among employees on Microsoft Teams https://www.wsj.com/... Peter Kazanjy / @kazanjy : Salesforce should have bought Chorus instead and had an option on the future of CRM. https://www.techmeme.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : There are typically 3 things you're buying during a tech company acquisition 1. The Customers 2. The Technology or Product 3. The Talent None of these seems to have applied when Salesforce bought Slack. No wonder Benioff feels like he was finessed. https://www.wsj.com/... Katherine Miller / @katherinemiller : “We don't really see, when it comes to Slack, any pent up demand from Salesforce's base for a tool like that” https://www.wsj.com/... @bluecoyote : Microsoft Teams: The surefire way to know your IT department sucks. https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs from Salesforce's talks about acquiring Slack in late 2020 — a deal pitched as wiring workplace chat into CRM — to today's verdict: analysts say customers aren't swayed, Carhartt's CIO says the messaging app hasn't made Salesforce's products more appealing, and Slack's growth rate has roughly halved across 2022.
The competitive framing was set years earlier: Stratechery argued Teams is part of Microsoft building an OS for the cloud while Slack pursued an enterprise social network via Connect, and Slack's 2016 New York Times ad already read as fear of Teams. Tom Gara's tweet revives that thread, wondering whether employee-rebellion stories damaged Slack with the big companies it sells to.
First-order effects
- Salesforce's cross-sell thesis takes a direct hit: a named customer (Carhartt) says Slack didn't make the bundle more appealing, and Slack's deceleration from 11.7% to 6.9% growth undermines the acquisition's revenue justification.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft Teams benefits without doing anything new — its position as part of Microsoft's cloud-OS bundle means buyers defaulting away from Slack-as-differentiator consolidate around the incumbent platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large SaaS acquisitions get judged on attach economics rather than strategic narrative, and standalone workplace chat loses its last credible path as an independent category inside a rival's suite.
The trend: Enterprise software M&A justified by cross-sell synergy is losing to platform bundles, with Slack's slowdown under Salesforce as the clearest data point yet.