Q&A with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on COVID-19 and its impact on the company, competing with Microsoft and Zoom, and Slack's new redesign
Tom Krazit / Protocol :
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview lands in the first week of lockdowns, when Slack is suddenly onboarding waves of remote workers while its two biggest rivals — Microsoft with Teams and Zoom with video — are absorbing the same surge. Days later, Butterfield would quantify it publicly, citing roughly 9K net new customers added in a matter of weeks and a double-digit stock jump.
The piece also previews the product side of that moment: a redesign Butterfield defends here, and a competitive posture against Microsoft he elaborates on in a follow-up Q&A two months later. The through-line matters because this demand spike is what ultimately reshaped the company — by late 2023, CTO Cal Henderson was framing the pandemic era as the pivot point that ended in Salesforce's acquisition of Slack.
First-order effects
- Slack absorbs an immediate influx of new teams and usage during lockdowns — the customer surge Butterfield quantified within days of this interview — straining onboarding and support while validating the paid collaboration model.
- The redesign ships directly into this surge, making first impressions for thousands of brand-new users a live competitive issue against Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft can bundle Teams with Office 365 at no marginal cost, forcing Slack to compete on product quality and workflow depth rather than distribution — the rivalry Butterfield returns to repeatedly across 2020 interviews.
- Zoom's video-first growth pressures Slack to treat video as table stakes inside chat rather than a separate purchase, tightening integration expectations across the collaboration stack.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, workplace chat stops being a tool category and becomes core infrastructure — which is exactly the arc the corpus shows ending in Salesforce acquiring Slack, with the next battleground shifting toward AI-native work surfaces.
The trend: The pandemic converted workplace chat from a productivity add-on into mission-critical infrastructure, setting off the competitive and consolidation dynamics that ended with Slack inside Salesforce.