Was Salesforce's Acquisition of Slack a Bust?

Here’s how much bloat I experienced with Slack recently.

My company’s renewal came up. We are one tier below the overly priced Enterprise Grid functionality. Our sales rep insisted we meet for a check in before our renewal. I asked why, we’re happy with the service. They insisted we meet (real pushy in email, even with my associate at work who was on the thread agreed) to discuss how we’re using the product and making sure we get the most out of it.

I responded that the service is set up fine, integrated with our SSO provider and our employees are using it to its design for our tier. Still pushing us for a meeting.

My teammate and I got on the zoom and four or five other sales people were on the call with us.

Sales rep starting going over our account and best practices for how we’re using it.

It was a waste of 45 minutes for my teammate and I. I’m sure we could have also had our sales rep and one other person on the phone.

The call was pointless even after insisting two times in email that the call was not needed. Yet 6 people wasted 45 minutes going over pointless info.

If Slack would carve out features and drop the price and let us do a la carte, then getting on the phone with us annually would be a great upsell opportunity. However Slack is like a utility for us at this point in our use. Is it on at the moment? Yes. Then we’re good.

This is true in the sense of people are using different chat/networks as a way of isolation from different groups. I would never want to have my (most) work colleages part of my WhatsApp (or Signal). A broad section of population has deviced

1. facebook for family

2. WhatsApp for immediate connection

3. Email (mostly Gmail) for all documentation stuff

4. TikTok for just be yourself (add discord etc for the appropriate group)

5. Instagram - for show off - display the best of your life.

6. LinkedIn for I hate but have to like this manager's posts!

7. slack or teams (as dictated by the workplace)

(In some ways I love that common people have eventually segregated and some how trying to bring some sort of privacy/isolation (the way they think is acceptable without FOMO)

Yeah, this is one of the biggest ripoffs of the post-2008 bullmarket. Reminder that the valuation was 24 times Slack's estimated 2021 revenue. 24 times. At the time Slack had about 140,000 paying customers IIRC, so one other way to look at it is that Benioff paid about 200k per paying customer.

Salesforce buying Slack made absolutely no sense, but I find the comparison to Teams strange. IME orgs use Teams when they're already in the Microsoft ecosystem since there isn't a great argument for purchasing Slack when you already have Teams included in the package you are paying for. If I'm in the market for a Slack-like product I don't look at Teams unless I'm already paying Microsoft.

The real threat to Slack is less from Microsoft and more from Google if they ever launch a Slack-competitor inside of Google Workspaces. I know for my organization even if there wasn't feature parity, we would probably switch just for ease of billing and access control.

This is a tiny part of the wider picture, but Slack's social media has completely lost any personality it once had. Advertising irrelevant Salesforce conferences (to zero likes), not really interacting with people past the minimum... it's a shame. That's part of what made Slack fun to use.

I always forget that Salesforce has bought Slack. I don't use any Salesforce products so I don't know how could/should Slack fit into that.