Marc Benioff Sets His Sights on Microsoft

“Marc has come full circle. From considering a sale to Microsoft, he is now becoming the next Microsoft,” said Venky Ganesan, a managing director at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures who specializes in software. Mr. Ganesan, who said he only knows Mr. Benioff as a business acquaintance, saluted his ability “to visualize a certain future and then make it happen.”

Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research, has been critical of Salesforce in the past but said the Slack deal had a reasonable chance of success.

“You have a product in Slack that people love but which hasn’t been marketed well,” Mr. Newman said. “Salesforce and Benioff can give it faster growth and extract untapped potential. Excuse the buzzword, but maybe this is really one of those synergy moments.”

Except for the question of Microsoft.

Mr. Benioff came of age in Silicon Valley when Microsoft was decidedly the bad guy. His early employer, Oracle, was run by Larry Ellison, who had a long-running and often bitter feud with the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. As Salesforce grew, it had its own scrapes with Microsoft over employees and patents.

After Satya Nadella became Microsoft’s chief executive in 2014, he and Mr. Benioff met and tried to work together. Mr. Benioff offered unsuccessfully to buy Microsoft’s Dynamics software line, which Salesforce competed with. When that idea foundered, he offered to sell Salesforce to Microsoft for $70 billion, about $22 billion over its market value. A second attempt at a deal a few months later did not work out either.

The companies became that Silicon Valley perennial: “frenemies” that competed but also did deals. In 2016, both wanted to acquire the social networking site LinkedIn, whose millions of employment histories offered a rich data trove. They bid against each other. Microsoft, with its deep pockets, won with an offer of $26.2 billion. Mr. Benioff tweeted that it was “anticompetitive.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/technology/marc-benioff-salesforce-slack-microsoft.html