- The CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, says that Microsoft has done “horrible things” to relax before its acquisition
- Benioff accused Microsoft of having directed his own game book
- The Openai partnership could become a competition
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff criticized Microsoft’s story with Slack, warning that he could repeat his anti-competitive tactics used against the online collaboration platform in his partnership with OpenAI.
Benioff said Microsoft had done “horrible things” to relax before Salesforce acquired it in 2020, referring to a “gaming book” that he could reopen at the detriment of Openai.
Slack submitted a complaint against Microsoft for its grouping of teams in the Microsoft 365 suite – which was canceled in 2024 – but that clearly did not prevent Benioff from wanting to obtain the last word.
Salesforce’s fight with Microsoft continues
Addressing the CEO of Saastr, Jason Lemkin, in a recent video podcast, Benioff explained: “You can see the horrible things that Microsoft did to release before buying it.”
“It was pretty bad and they directed their game book and did a lot of dark things,” he added … “This game book should be torn apart and throw away.”
Benioff also established itself parallel to Microsoft’s behavior during the 1990s browser services with Netscape.
He described Microsoft as a “company that wants to have everything, to control everything”, accusing Nadella’s company to take startups and run his own play book.
Billions of dollars of Microsoft’s investment in Openai put it in the right place for a partnership to use its GPT models, but more recently, a change in the partnership has seen reduced exclusivity rights for Microsoft, which would also have explored different models at this stage to feed Microsoft 365 COPILOT – An unconfirmed decision at this stage.
“In the case of Openai, a partnership will become a competition,” said Benioff.
