What's the future of corporate communications? Email? Corporate messaging? The battle for corporate messaging in 2023 was stacking up as a fight between Slack, which had been recently acquired by Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams. This case explores a classic judo strategy problem: how to compete against a giant competitor? Slack's new CEO, Lidiane Jones, had to devise a strategy against Microsoft, which bundles Teams with Office, and gives it away for free. Should Salesforce promote Slack as a standalone, superior product? Bundle Salesforce and Slack together? And, should Slack price its SaaS as a premium product or give it away to build scale and account control?

In 2021, Slack was acquired by Salesforce. While widely viewed as the best corporate collaboration and messaging software, Slack was being challenged by Microsoft, which was giving away its competitive product, Microsoft Teams, for free with a subscription to Microsoft's Office software suite. The purpose of this case is explore how to compete with "free." The case examines the advantages and disadvantages of bundling and how to build an enterprise software platform.