Salesforce's acquisition of Slack could have been from a combination of fear of Microsoft and a desire to add enterprise-scale abilities to the platform. Though the acquisition leaves the future of the platform's execution unknown, Salesforce may have created a bid as a solution to solve Slack's ability to cross-sell and up-sell products at an enterprise level.
Salesforce's ability to cross-sell and upsell effectively is crucial to overcoming challenges in enterprise scale, as seen in their possible acquisition of LinkedIn. However, they also faced the obstacle of not having a product that was useful to every individual in an enterprise.
The speaker ponders why Microsoft was so obsessed with Slack, given that its team's product was more competitive with Zoom, and expresses regret that we won't see the terminal value if they were left alone to execute. Despite the slack product team's slower innovation, their ability to innovate was still unique.