Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Businesses

Salesforce Has Recently Been in Talks To Buy Slack, Dow Jones Reports (twitter.com) 41

Slack may have found a way to keep its fight on with Microsoft. The business communication app has engaged in conversations to sell the business to Salesforce, Dow Jones reported moments ago. Business Insider adds: There is no indication that the preliminary talks will lead to an acquisition, according to the report, but a deal would signal the cloud giant's foray into office communication. It would represent Salesforce's largest acquisition in its history, as Slack's market capitalization sits at $17 billion.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Salesforce Has Recently Been in Talks To Buy Slack, Dow Jones Reports

Comments Filter:
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @12:58PM (#60765288)
    Well, if the combination happens, it would mean the San Francisco's employees of the combined company could walk through the $2 billion dollar bus terminal to get to the other building.
  • This is a merger that actually makes a lot of sense.

    • It would have made more sense a year ago before MS ate Slack's lunch, but hopefully Salesforce is getting a good price.

      • by dmay34 ( 6770232 )

        But that's exactly why it makes sense. Slack itself isn't as powerful as it used to be, so it can benefit from tighter integration with a MS competitor in another sector. Meanwhile, Salesforce gets their installed base at a 2020 discount and then can use it to further lock in existing and new customers.

  • during the economic downturn. Every time the economy collapses the folks at the top consolidate their power by buying things up while they're undervalued. It's been happening every 10 years like clockwork since I was a lad and I'm old enough to use the phrase "when I was a lad".

    What's frustrating is we know exactly how to stop these economic crashes, we just don't want to do it.
    • You know how to stop economic crashes? I've heard a lot of conflicting magic bullets. What's yours?

      • by dmay34 ( 6770232 )

        Well, *this* economic crash was absolutely caused by incompetence of the current (and fired) Executive administration and it's comical inability to respond to this crisis. But, historically speaking, THIS crisis is the exception.

        On the other hand, most "economic crisis" are really caused by rich people over leveraging in their investments. Which is fine. Opposed to common believe, it's actually okay for rich people to lose money. The problem is that there is an out-sized economic consequence for the not-ric

    • Every time the economy collapses the folks at the top consolidate their power by buying things up while they're undervalued

      Dumb ass, this is the same class of rich people on both sides of these stock trades.

      And the stock market is up, that means mergers are more expensive than normal right now. My goodness.

      Rich people effectively buying your pension out from under you was in March when the stock market crashed. Then it went back up, and that is no longer happening. But 8 months later, you still think that is happening. You must have read an article, maybe in April or May. But perhaps only one, once.

      It's been happening every 10 years like clockwork since I was a lad and I'm old enough to use the phrase "when I was a lad".

      Look, Sprout, if you don't

      • If mergers are in stock, they're more expensive if the acquiring companies value when down relative to the acquisition's value recently, and cheaper if the converse is true. The absolute value of the two doesn't matter at all.

        • If mergers are in stock

          There is no ownership other than the stock. You can't buy a publicly traded company other than by buying the stock.

          they're more expensive if

          The stock prices are public, and the market totals are published widely in media. Spoiler: record highs. Even a crap stock like WORK (Slack) was already up 50% from a year ago and S&P Global Market Intelligence (provided by Fidelity) rates their financial health at 8 out of 100, Quality (a metric based on earnings compared to industry) also 8. Today it is up another 50% and the valuation r

          • A merger (or really acquisition in this case) in stock is when A acquires B, and each share of B turns into X shares of A as a result. It can cost 0 dollars (excluding lawyers and other overhead). This is different from is A just hands the shareholders of B a pile of cash.

            As you point out, Slack is up 50%, Salesforce is up 60% (pre-merger news, since that's always going to happen as it's announced). So the acquisition, assuming they only pay in stock, is now cheaper. Because Salesforce will make up a la

    • by Shmoe ( 17051 )

      If we stopped them there'd be no fire sales!

  • by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <[slashdot] [at] [keirstead.org]> on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @01:32PM (#60765400)

    Slack is not in trouble at all... and is years ahead of Teams in terms of use cases. Teams is hot garbage compared to Slack.

    Not sure where on earth this comment is coming from.

    • by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @01:53PM (#60765466)

      Teams is hot garbage compared to Slack.

      Not sure where on earth this comment is coming from.

      Right, please allow me to clarify this for you.

      Teams being [pejorative] is your personal opinion. Nobody cares. Slack is failing in the business market, it is rapidly losing market share to Teams.

      Teams is more popular than Slack. And they're businesses, so that matters. A lot.

      Compare, for example, Windows being more popular than Linux; Microsoft is a company, Linux isn't. Microsoft needs to be more popular than Linux, but Linux doesn't care. As a Linux user, when I say "Windows is hot garbage," that is substantive, because open source doesn't need to be more popular to survive; it only needs to have some remaining users. I use it, and if it is more or less popular, it doesn't matter.

      Whereas if Slack is a startup that has users but not profits, then it might go out of business if it loses market share. Salesforce is not a startup, and does have profits, and won't go out of business if they buy Slack and it loses market share.

      • Do you have data to back up your claim that Slack is losing customers to teams? Because it is not bore out by their financials, nor stock price. Their customer growth in 2020 is up 30% YoY.

      • The troublesome part then of course is why is it more popular. And again, I see it all over the IT business market, MS is gaining too much control. With Azure and o365 its crushing competition in many areas of business IT where others are left to pickup to crumbs. It is happening again, we are going back to MS domination.
  • I've used both (Score:4, Insightful)

    by swm ( 171547 ) <swmcd@world.std.com> on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @02:33PM (#60765636) Homepage

    I've used both Slack and Salesforce.
    Slack is serviceable.
    My primary goal when using Salesforce is to not use Salesforce.
    Salesforce buying Slack seems unlikely to make the world a better place.

    • by AmazingRuss ( 555076 ) on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @03:03PM (#60765754)
      I expect Slack to start grabbing 3GB of ram instead of 1GB.
    • The primary use case I've seen for SalesForce (at the enterprise level) is enabling sales management to "inspect" sales reps' performance. That, and making sure that there is a good audit trail of customers and actions when a sales rep leaves.

      SalesForce simplifies sales management by quantifying rep activities which may or may not translate into revenue or profit. It does suffer a little bit for equaliting things like "number of calls" or look ups with productive sales behavior.

      Generally, average and poor s

  • by Sadsfae ( 242195 ) on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @03:13PM (#60765798) Homepage

    Patrick Volkerding must be excited to have so much renewed interest in his distribution.

"More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_

Working...