Q&A with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on competing with Microsoft, navigating the current surge in demand, and sticking with Electron for Slack's desktop app
It's hard to remember what remote work was like before Slack. The company was founded in 2009, exploded in popularity in 2014 …
Context & Ripple Effects
This Q&A is Butterfield's second extended interview of the pandemic quarter, following an earlier conversation on COVID-19's impact and the Microsoft rivalry. In the weeks between, Slack disclosed via Twitter that it had added roughly 9,000 net new customers almost overnight, sending the stock sharply higher (the customer surge announcement).
The interview matters because it addresses Slack's two structural questions at once: whether a focused messaging tool can beat Microsoft's suite-bundled Teams in the enterprise, and whether Slack's own infrastructure choices — like staying on Electron for desktop — can keep pace with surging usage. It follows years of enterprise groundwork, including Enterprise Grid's launch for large customers.
First-order effects
- Slack is absorbing a sudden influx of remote-work demand — thousands of net new customers added within weeks — which strains capacity while validating its product-led growth strategy.
- Butterfield publicly commits to Electron for the desktop app, signaling engineering resources stay pointed at feature velocity rather than a native rewrite.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft can answer Slack's momentum by deepening Teams' bundling with Office 365, forcing Slack to compete on product differentiation and enterprise features like Grid rather than price.
- Every new customer acquired during the surge raises switching costs later, but also hands Microsoft a ready-made migration target if those teams consolidate tooling.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise chat consolidates around whoever controls distribution — productivity suites with installed bases — leaving focused standalone tools to fight for the segment that values best-of-breed over bundles.
- Slack's trajectory becomes a test case for whether single-product companies can sustain independence against platform incumbents, a question that shadows its long-term strategic options.
The trend: Enterprise collaboration is consolidating around broad productivity platforms where distribution advantage increasingly outweighs product focus, squeezing standalone messaging vendors like Slack.