Salesforce buys Slack
by Volker Weber
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, and Slack Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: WORK), the most innovative enterprise communications platform, have entered into a definitive agreement under which Salesforce will acquire Slack. Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020.
Stewart Butterfield sold his first successful startup Flickr to Yahoo. The transition destroyed Flickr. If Butterfield is once again selling his company to a much larger enterprise, albeit a very different one, he has to. Slack should have boomed in the pandemic but it did not.
Comments
Left it behind because of limited video conferencing capabilities. Just my experience, may not apply to others.
Another important point is that if you have Microsoft 365, you already have teams. While Slack is, as a "written conversation" tool is better than Teams, it is not really cheap. And Teams is rapidly catching up, plus voice and video calls in Teams work very well.
So from my POV, if you can use Teams and you already have it for free with your Microsoft 365 plan, there are little incentives to switch to Slack and additionally you will need to explain it to your "bean counters" why you need to spend extra money on that.
A (good) reason for slack is the variety of integrations that exist with bots. So we use them to replace e.g. "mail notifications" for automated builds.
Might also work somehow with Teams, but is already there in/for Slack.
Besides that, Teams has already a feature richness that brings a certain complexity that needs to be explained and managed. However, Microsoft actively develops it and it looks like Teams could get a positive example for how to iterate over a product to make it work better for users.
Salesforce has a nice collaborative tool named Quip - best comparable to Google Docs. Integrate that with Slack and you're quite strong in the collaboration area.
MS is doling out Office365 to anyone who wants it, winning hearts and minds in the education sector for example. Anyone wanting to use something else will have a hard time persuading the finance department.
I see organisations everywhere adopting Teams and the other stuff from MS, regardless of the quality and features in competing products. For many organisations, cost savings and mind-share trump everything else; Microsoft has always understood this. It reminds me of the VHS vs. betamax argument in the 1980s!
Before there was Office, companies would compete on word processors (WordPerfect), spreadsheets (1-2-3) and presentation programs (Harvard Graphics). Then came Office.
Before there was Teams, companies would compete on video (Zoom), voice (Lync/Skype), chat (Slack), team collaboration (?). Then came Teams.
