Despite Microsoft's present-day sales power, a wave of product-focused enterprise companies inspired by Slack and its peers will ultimately disrupt the giant
A quick rebuttal on the Slackforce Slacklash — Look, it's late. And everyone is happy enough so there's no pressing need to weigh in here. Tweets: @davidsacks , @gavinsbaker , @caseynewton , @dannosaur7 , @harrymccracken , @davidsacks , and @davidsacks Tweets: David Sacks / @davidsacks : 1/ Ok since you asked, here are my reactions to the Slack deal and @levie comments to the effect that “the idea that workers would someday choose all their own tools was always a fantasy... Best product doesn't always win, you also need the biggest sales force.” My thoughts: https://twitter.com/... Gavin Baker / @gavinsbaker : “The best user experience often dies in the hands of the enterprise buyer.” So good via @mgsiegler Will be interesting to see how Slack vs. Teams adoption trends in the 18 months after this deal closes. https://500ish.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Good pushback from @mgsiegler on my Slack column yesterday. Like him, I want to believe in the power of great product over great sales. Something I'm thinking about: what would Slack look like if it were 10x better than it is today? Thoughts welcome. https://twitter.com/... Dan / @dannosaur7 : @SlackHQ @salesforce I mean, for $27b I'd sell out too. But there was something about Slack that was different to the other garbage — Hipchat, MS Teams, etc. I guess now Slack is just gonna be another piece of enterprise garbage. Harry McCracken / @harrymccracken : This @CaseyNewton piece helps explain why I'm sad about Slack's fate (even if it thrives within Salesforce) and also why the deal reminds me so much of when I covered productivity in the 1990s and Microsoft Office was sucking the wind out of the category. https://www.platformer.news/ ... David Sacks / @davidsacks : 2/ Bottom-up is still the best way into enterprises for startups. If Slack had to sell top-down, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere. Especially true for products whose advantage is usability, rather than checkboxes. “Show, not tell”. Proof of the pudding is in the eating of it. David Sacks / @davidsacks : 9/ This is a brilliant acquisition for Salesforce, not just because it gives them a new cloud and an application hub, but because it gives them a way onto every seat in the enterprise. Slack justifies a true wall-to-wall license. This has been Benioff's dream since Chatter.
Context & Ripple Effects
Written days after Salesforce's talks to acquire Slack hardened into a reported $27B deal, this piece is M.G. Siegler's entry into the 'Slacklash' debate: David Sacks arguing against Aaron Levie's claim that 'best product doesn't always win, you also need the biggest sales force.' Siegler sides with the product-led camp, betting that worker-chosen tools inspired by Slack will eventually crack Microsoft's distribution advantage.
The corpus gives the debate a long tail: Slack had already signaled fear once with its New York Times ad responding to Teams, and Ben Thompson framed the fight as Teams-as-cloud-OS versus Slack's enterprise social network. Two years on, analysts found Salesforce customers largely unmoved by Slack, with its growth decelerating from 11.7% to 6.9% across 2022.
First-order effects
- Sacks and Levie are staking out the two live theories of the just-announced Slackforce deal: bottom-up product adoption versus top-down salesforce distribution, with Salesforce's $27B bet as the test case.
Second-order effects
- If Siegler's thesis holds, Microsoft's bundling advantage becomes the thing to route around; if Levie's holds, Salesforce inherits a growth problem — which is what the 2023 deceleration data later suggested.
Third-order effects
- Enterprise software splits structurally between suite vendors that sell through procurement and product-led companies that sell through end users; the Slack outcome so far favors the suites, but the agentic-work wave could reopen the door for tool-level choice.
The trend: Enterprise collaboration is being consolidated into platform suites, forcing product-led upstarts to prove that user-chosen tools can still beat distribution muscle.