- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claims Microsoft did “horrible things” to relax before its acquisition
- Benioff accused Microsoft of running his own Playbook
- Openai partnership could turn into a competition
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s story with Slack and warned that it can repeat its competitive tactics used against the online collaboration platform in its partnership with Openai.
Benioff declared that Microsoft had done “horrible things” to relax before Salesforce acquired it in 2020, referring to a “Playbook” of things it could open again to the detriment of Openai.
Slack filed a complaint about Microsoft for his bundling of teams in Microsoft 365 Suite – which was undone in 2024 – but it clearly has not prevented Benioff from getting the last word.
Salesforce’s match with Microsoft continues
In a speech with Saastr CEO Jason Lemkin in a recent Videopodcast, Benioff explained: “You can see the horrible things that Microsoft did to relax before we bought it.”
“It was pretty bad and they drove their playbook and did a lot of dark things,” he added … “That Playbook should be ripped and thrown away.”
Benioff also drew parallel to Microsoft’s behavior in the 1990s browser departments with Netscape.
He described Microsoft as a “company that wants to own it all, control it all,” Nadella’s company accuses of looking up startups and performing his own playbook.
Microsoft’s billions of dollars in Openai investment put it in a good place for a partnership to use its GPT models, but recently saw a change of partnership reduced exclusivity rights for Microsoft, which has also allegedly investigated using different models for Power Microsoft 365 Copilot – an unconfigured feature at this time.
“In the event of Openai, a partnership becomes a competition,” Benioff said.
