[ponker]

The cost of sales for Slack will be very low for Salesforce, because they’re already selling a ton of stuff to large customers. Their guys are already flying out to the customer, taking them out to dinner, getting their commission checks, etc. they’ll just ask “you want any Slack with that?” Imagine the economics of trying to sell lip balm door to door vs. just putting it in a pharmacy for people to buy when they’re buying other stuff.

This is how Microsoft makes so much money.

[forgotAgain]

It's also why I don't trust sales figures on individual products from companies with a portfolio. Sales tend to get credited to products that the company wants to show as gaining traction while really the favored product was an add-on to a bundle of established products that had their license renewed.

[ponker]

absolutely. One thing that does temper this is that companies want to disproportionately reward the strategic businesses, so Microsoft will likely give higher commissions for selling Microsoft Teams than SQL Server. They have controls to prevent gaming that internally, although obviously not 100% effective.