Salesforce and Slack: Countering Microsoft
I had thought it would be Amazon, but Slack has to pair up with someone big
Salesforce is apparently talking to Slack about a plus $17 billion acquisition. The reason is simple: Salesforce is losing out on the tectonic shift toward work chat centered work technology platforms. The 500-pound gorilla in the room is Microsoft, where Teams is the fastest-growing product in the company’s history.
Slack has filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft in the European Union earlier this year, drawing attention to the Microsoft play of linking Teams to the Microsoft 365 suite. And, even during the pandemic that has driven adoption of minimum office (aka WFH) tools like videoconferencing, other players like Microsoft and Zoom are seeing the biggest growth, not Slack.
Until the announcement of discussions with Slack, Salesforce stock has done quite well, reflecting the company’s growth during the pandemic. However, Salesforce’s ‘enterprise social network’, Chatter, is more of a work media tool, like Yammer and Facebook Workplace, and is not a work chat tool. Like Microsoft, which pushed Yammer to one side and built Teams as a Slack competitor from scratch, now Salesforce is looking to sideline Chatter and buy into the big leagues with Slack.
