Salesforce CEO Criticizes Microsoft, Predicts Split with OpenAI
May 20, 2025
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is very unhappy with Microsoft. Windows Central reports, “Salesforce CEO Says Microsoft Did ‘Pretty Nasty’ Things to Slack and Its OpenAI Partnership May Be a Recipe for Disaster.” Writer Kevin Okemwa reminds us Benioff recently dubbed Microsoft an “OpenAI reseller” and labeled Copilot the new Clippy. Harsh words. Then Okemwa heard Benioff criticizing Microsoft on a recent SaaStr podcast. He tells us:
“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.”
But, as readers may have noticed, Teams is no longer bundled into Office 365. Score one for Salesforce. The write-up continues:
“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.”
How did that one work out? Not well for the once-dominant Netscape. Benioff is likely referring to Microsoft’s dirty trick of making IE 1.0 free with Windows. This does seem to be a pattern for the software giant. In the same podcast, the CEO predicts a split between Microsoft and ChatGPT. It is a recent theme of his. Okemwa writes:
“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.”
Who knows how long that right of refusal will last. Microsoft itself seems to be preparing for a future without its frenemy. Will Benioff crow when the partnership is completely destroyed? What will he do if OpenAI buys Chrome and pushes forward with his “everything” app?
Cynthia Murrell, May 20, 2025
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
