Web3 Games: Why Polygon COO Left Electronic Arts

As one of Salesforce’s most visible products, Slack will be front and center at this year’s Dreamforce. The biggest Slack-related announcement at Dreamforce will be a feature called Slack canvas, built from Salesforce’s sharable document software Quip. It’s another step toward incorporating Slack into the broader Salesforce family of products, which is essential in a highly competitive communications software space.

Slack has stopped publishing its user numbers, but even with its latest daily active user count in 2020, 12 million, Microsoft Teams eats his lunch of 75 million. Teams reported 145 million users in 2021. Then there are challenges from Google, which has its own established workplace suite, and Zoom, which has recently put more emphasis on its chat function.

“I’m pretty scared if I am [Salesforce co-CEO Marc] Benioff with Slack, is entering a recession, Wing Venture Capital partner Zach DeWitt said. “I think Microsoft is going to be very aggressive on distribution and pricing in the next few years here.”

With Slack, Salesforce invested enormously in the area of ​​collaboration. But with stiff competition from Microsoft and others, is an underutilized tool that brought Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor into the company the missing link that can help the $27 billion effort pay off?

The Quip connection

Nate Botwick, former VP of Product at Quip, oversaw the process of building Quip’s software into Slack. The result of that project is the Slack canvas. Canvases will be collaborative documents within channels that compile files, checklists and other important information that previously could only be attached as messages by users. They will connect to workflows such as requesting a work phone and pulling data from the Salesforce Sales Cloud.

“It’s a more persistent space to organize around this existing organization of channels,” said Slack senior vice president of product Ali Rayl. “This is a powerful thing we get with channels, which is that the right people are already there.”

Quip-turned-canvas has its roots in the Salesforce-Slack acquisition. Taylor co-founded Quip in 2012, and Salesforce bought the product in 2016. Fast forward a few years, and according to Botwick, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield approached Salesforce with interest in buying Quip.

Incorporating collaborative documents into Slack had been part of Slack’s original pitch deck when it first started, Botwick said. But as we all know, those talks ended up with Salesforce buying Slack instead of Slack buying Quip.

“Both products independently had this vision that teams could work on both a canvas-like product and a messaging product together, but each product independently focused on different areas,” Botwick said. “Between Stewart and Brett, that was one of the things they were both most excited about in this acquisition.”

Quip moved into Slack’s domain after the deal closed. The rest of Salesforce’s products, such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, are still external to Slack, but integrated through “thin working,” as Rayl called it. For example, you can submit a quick Salesforce expense report without leaving Slack. “You don’t deliver people to a bunch of different systems just so they can access one chart or ticket,” Rayl said.

The connection to the broader Salesforce suite is an advantage for Slack, since that’s where employees already work. But it’s a game Microsoft also has, to an even greater extent.

Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research, said companies are certainly using both Salesforce and Microsoft products. The question is which ones they pay for, since Slack and Teams offer some features for free.

“There are a lot of companies that are Microsoft shops,” Rubin said. “Do they need both? Teams can be a more general platform, while Salesforce can build functionality into Slack that is, for example, heavily integrated into CRM.”

Futurum Research’s Kramer put it more bluntly: “Microsoft has pretty much won the collaboration wars,” she said.

Fits into Salesforce’s vision

Salesforce knows it has a long way to go if it wants to prove Kramer wrong in the collaboration space. Although co-CEOs Taylor and Benioff have called the company’s integration of Slack a key priority, not everything has been smooth sailing. During earnings calls, Benioff has alluded to integration challenges and changes in the Slack organization.

While there were a number of standard internal operational changes that come with any large merger, such as moving from Slack Workday to Salesforce Workday, Rayl was quick to point out that nothing has changed about the way Slack thinks about its product.

“We still have the same goals for Slack. We still build the product the same way,” Rayl said. Now the focus is: “How do we expose all of Salesforce’s products in the best possible way inside the Slack that we are already planning to build?”

However, the true measure of Salesforce’s strategy will depend on Slack’s ability to add new users and also convert free users to paid ones. But Slack is keen to disclose the number of users it has. The company declined to share this information with Protocol ahead of Dreamforce, although it’s a data point the company has shared in the past.

Since Slack doesn’t disclose its user numbers, it’s not clear how many Salesforce customers actually use Slack as opposed to, Microsoft Teams says. Lean managers are confident that the company is differentiated, but it is still expanding into the same areas as its competitors.

“I see Slack in the same boat as Zoom,” Kramer said. Both companies are in an uphill battle to build “true co-working hubs that you live in all day, rather than a place you drop in for a meeting or a message.”

Regardless, Salesforce executives seem pretty happy with Slack’s performance so far.

“This is the fourth consecutive quarter we’ve seen more than 40% growth,” Taylor said during Salesforce’s first-quarter earnings call. And going forward, Slack is expected to contribute about $1.5 billion to Salesforce’s full-year revenue guidance.

But if Salesforce customers aren’t actually using Slack for their work, the vision of becoming a digital headquarters that can compete with the likes of Teams and others begins to crumble. Without data on the number of users, it’s impossible to tell how close to shaky reality Slack is.