Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff slams Microsoft over “horrible things” it did to Slack, warns OpenAI could be next to suffer

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft‘s history with Slack, warning it may repeat its anticompetitive tactics used against the online collaboration platform in its partnership with OpenAI.

Benioff declared Microsoft had done “horrible things” to Slack before Salesforce acquired it in 2020, referring to a “playbook” of things it could reopen to the detriment of OpenAI.

Slack submitted a complaint against Microsoft for its bundling of Teams into the Microsoft 365 suite – which was undone in 2024 – but that clearly hasn’t stopped Benioff from wanting to get the last word.

Speaking to SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin in a recent video podcast, Benioff explained: “You can see the horrible things that Microsoft did to Slack before we bought it.”

“That was pretty bad and they were running their playbook and did a lot of dark stuff,” he added… “That playbook should get ripped up and thrown away.”

Benioff also drew parallel to Microsoft’s behavior during the 1990s browser wards with Netscape.

He described Microsoft as a “company that wants to own it all, control it all,” accusing Nadella’s company of snapping up startups and executing its own playbook.

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Microsoft’s billions of dollars in investment into OpenAI put it in a good place for a partnership to use its GPT models, but more recently, a change to the partnership saw reduced exclusivity rights for Microsoft, which has also allegedly been exploring using different models to power Microsoft 365 Copilot – an unconfirmed move at this stage.

“In the case of OpenAI, a partnership is gonna become a competition,” Benioff said.

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