Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is well-known for not mincing his words, especially when criticizing Microsoft and throwing jabs at the company’s AI efforts. Over the past few months, the executive has referred to Copilot as the new Microsoft Clippy, claiming it doesn’t deliver value.
Benioff has also branded Microsoft as an “OpenAI reseller,” claiming the tech giant repackaged ChatGPT as Copilot and presented it to consumers as a different product. Recently, the executive appeared in a podcast interview with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin.
Marc Benioff claimed that Microsoft did “horrible things” to Slack before Salesforce acquired the platform between 2020 and 2021 for approximately $27 billion. Interestingly, Microsoft had also shown interest in acquiring Slack for $8 billion, but later pulled the plug in a bit to focus more on Skype (RIP) and the launch of Teams.
According to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff:
“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. And it’s all gotten written up in an EU complaint that Slack made before we bought them.”
Microsoft has a long-standing rivalry with Slack. The messaging platform accused Microsoft of using anti-competitive techniques to maintain its dominance across organizations, including bundling Teams into its Microsoft Office 365 suite.
However, Microsoft was forced to unbundle Teams from Office 365 globally after Slack filed a complaint with the EU Commission. Teams is now available for new customers as a standalone app for $5.25, whereas Office packages without Teams range between $7.75 and $54.75.
Marc Benioff further indicated that Microsoft’s treatment of Slack was “pretty nasty.” He claimed that the company often employs a similar playbook to gain a competitive advantage over its rivals while referencing “browser wars” with Netscape and Internet Explorer in the late 1990s.
“That playbook should get ripped up and thrown away,” continued Benioff.
Marc Benioff doesn’t think Microsoft will be in OpenAI’s future
Over the past few months, multiple reports and speculations have surfaced online suggesting that Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI might be fraying. It all started when OpenAI unveiled its $500 billion Stargate project alongside SoftBank, designed to facilitate the construction of data centers across the United States.
The ChatGPT maker had previously been spotted complaining that Microsoft doesn’t meet its cloud computing needs, shifting blame to the tech giant if one of its rivals hit the AGI benchmark first. Consequently, Microsoft lost its exclusive cloud provider status but retains the right of refusal to OpenAI’s projects.
At the same time, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff predicted that Microsoft won’t use OpenAI in the future. Interestingly, Microsoft has seemingly taken a back seat in its partnership with OpenAI and even started developing in-house AI models, emancipating itself from an overdependence and reliance on OpenAI.
That was extremely interesting and you can see how Microsoft is really starting to run a separate playbook against OpenAI. I think that’s now how Microsoft thinks. Microsoft is a company that wants to own it all, control it all, if they see a hot company or hot startup, they ask themselves: ‘Hey why is that not in our world’.
Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff
While speaking to IT Pro, Microsoft confirmed that OpenAI “continues to be our partner on frontier models.” It will be interesting to see how Microsoft and OpenAI’s partnership pans out, especially after the former officially listed the ChatGPT maker as a competitor in search and AI.
