
Wednesday's news that Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor is stepping down appears to have been so sudden that even the CEO of Salesforce-owned Slack, and his circle of lieutenants, were taken by surprise.
Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of the professional chat service Slack, described Taylor's departure as a negative and unforeseen development in an internal message to employees viewed by Fortune. "I'm sad about the news of Bret's departure from Salesforce," Butterfield wrote. "No way to spin this as a good thing, so I'm not going to try that."