Slack's ad in The New York Times made the company look afraid of Microsoft Teams, undermining its message and echoing past sentiments from companies like Rdio
a cool app you can use” Josh Constine / @joshconstine : Slack's smarmy letter makes it look uncharacteristically disingenuous while posing Microsoft Teams as a scrappy underdog on equal footing http://twitter.com/... Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : I like Slack, but this NYT ad was not a good idea — they have always tried to be humble, and this was not that at all. Arrogant and smarmyhttps://twitter.com/treehcapital/ status/794167597348421632 ... Tom Moor / @tommoor : “For a company that brags about how thoughtful it is about language, the letter is a regrettable unforced error” http://bit.ly/2eihz9N Brian Fung / @b_fung : Digital historians will look back on this letter as the moment Slack's bubble finally popped. http://www.theverge.com/... Holly Brockwell / @holly : Slack here doing the equivalent of sending your ex's new partner a message saying you're “totally happy for them” http://www.theverge.com/... Spencer Chen / @spencerchen : Slack's brand today. http://www.theverge.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2016, Microsoft shipped Teams and Slack answered with a full-page New York Times open letter welcoming the rival to work chat. The reception went badly: TechCrunch's Josh Constine called the letter smarmy and disingenuous for casting a giant like Microsoft as a scrappy underdog, while Mathew Ingram and former Slack designer Tom Moor flagged it as an unforced error from a company whose brand was built on humility and careful language.
The episode reads differently with hindsight. The rivalry the ad legitimized became the defining fight of Slack's public life — [[a:955483|Stratechery later framed Teams as part of Microsoft's cloud-OS strategy against Slack's enterprise social network]] — and after a $20B direct listing in 2019, Slack ended up inside Salesforce, where analysts note customers aren't swayed by it and growth has cooled.
First-order effects
- Slack took immediate brand damage from its own base: tech commentators who normally championed the company read the ad as fear, undercutting the humble, thoughtful voice that had been its marketing edge.
- Microsoft got the better of the exchange without spending anything — by answering Teams publicly, Slack conferred underdog status on a competitor with vastly larger distribution.
Second-order effects
- The ad set the terms of a rivalry Slack had to keep fighting on narrative while Microsoft competed on bundling, a gap that showed up years later when [[a:833444|analysts found Salesforce customers largely unmoved by Slack and its revenue growth sliding from 11.7% to 6.9% across 2022]].
- Every subsequent Slack move — the IPO pitch, the Connect strategy, even its role letting newsroom staff organize against management per Digiday's reporting — was measured against whether it could hold cultural relevance against Teams' default installation.
Third-order effects
- The pattern the ad accidentally admitted — that a bundled incumbent suite can threaten a beloved standalone product — is the structural story of enterprise software consolidation, ending with Slack absorbed into Salesforce rather than standing alone.
- It also hardened a lesson in founder-brand management: companies whose identity rests on tone and community goodwill pay an outsized price for defensive advertising, a dynamic echoed by Rdio's earlier perceived panic against bigger rivals.
The trend: Enterprise collaboration is consolidating around platform giants whose bundled distribution beats best-of-breed products, forcing independents into acquisitions or niches.