Salesforce Buys Slack in a $27.7B Megadeal (techcrunch.com) 78
Salesforce, the CRM powerhouse that recently surpassed $20 billion in annual revenue, announced today it is wading deeper into enterprise social by acquiring Slack in a $27.7 billion megadeal. From a report: Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff didn't mince words on his latest purchase. "This is a match made in heaven. Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world," Benioff said in a statement. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield was no less effusive than his future boss. "As software plays a more and more critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility. Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can't wait to get going," Butterfield said in a statement.
Yet more tech monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is already at $2T... (Score:1)
Forcing everybody to bend over and take it like a man really is a winning business strategy after all...
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I don't know that I would call stupid Salesforce a monopoly. Slack saw the writing on the wall - they're a dumb chat app and can't compete with Microsoft or Google's full business suites. The real threats are Google and Apple. Apple is actively taking away computing freedoms and eroding the concept of ownership. Google is destroying the web. The DOJ needs to break up both companies.
Honestly, Microsoft is just as guilty as Apple when it comes to eroding the concept of ownership. They are the most transparent with their attempts to claim ownership of your computer, your files, and anything created with the computer.
It's a tiring trend, but one I don't see reversing anytime soon since our government basically gives a nod to regulating large companies, then pockets a large paycheck to pat them on the back and send them on their way.
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The real threats are Google and Apple. Apple is actively taking away computing freedoms and eroding the concept of ownership. Google is destroying the web.
The DOJ needs to break up both companies.
Honestly, Microsoft is just as guilty as Apple when it comes to eroding the concept of ownership. They are the most transparent with their attempts to claim ownership of your computer, your files, and anything created with the computer.
It's a tiring trend, but one I don't see reversing anytime soon since our government basically gives a nod to regulating large companies, then pockets a large paycheck to pat them on the back and send them on their way.
This is almost inevitably true of any proprietary system. I've been guilty of spreading some myself, including slack, so I'm not trying to claim perfection here, but I've almost never regretted introducing an open source software and several of the proprietary things I have had to use I have really regretted. Think for example of some issue tracking system where the company keeps trying to expand to cover everything in your workflow and keeps expanding their billing to cover all of your revenue - most of
Re: Yet more tech monopolies (Score:4, Insightful)
Slack was already circling the drain. While I think it is crazy to spend anything close to this amount for what was going to be the runt of the litter for collaboration tools, I guess it's not that much crazier than IBM paying $34 billion for RedHat (which they'll run into the ground over the course of another couple of years).
There's a lot of money on the street looking for a play (ANY play) to get into a tech deal.
*shrug*
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What is the calculation (Score:4, Insightful)
Slack is obviously a significant player, worth millions of dollars. But $27,700,000,000? Surely that is a misprint.
I presume there are no hard assets, not huge pile of cash. And Salesforce could write a *lot* of software for a fraction of that, and have it properly integrated with there main systems.
I would love to see the spreadsheet which valued Slack at $27,700,000,000.
I wonder how many real users Slack has. Say 27 million. That would be paying $1000 per user. You can get a lot of users by paying them $1000 each.
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WORK's market cap is $25 billion. This is what the market perceives as the net present value of the company. Simple as that.
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You'd think Benioff could have afforded better advice. What an incredible waste of capital for a product that was already a victim of natural selection.
Kudos to Slack "leadership" for cutting such a fat deal though. Slack shareholders made out like bandits.
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Salesforce is not in the same market as Google and Apple.
Salesforce competes with Microsoft, SAP, ServiceNow, Oracle, IBM, and through their acquisition strategy with the various cloud analytics, billing and other business application providers.
Slack gives them a plug-in upgrade on their existing collaboration tools, and through integration with their existing contact management capabilities and data analytics could lead to some interesting and useful options that take Slack into the mainstream of business
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Rocko's Modern Life was prescient...
https://i.redd.it/8xqfih8d47h31.jpg [i.redd.it]
Re:Yet more tech monopolies (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think Salesforce is going to be it.
I hear that salesforce is getting eaten alive by Microsoft Dynamics 365 (because of the Office 365 integrations).
Just like an Office 365 shop starts dropping slack quickly when Microsoft convinces the procurement people that Teams is included and thus your company doesn't need to give slack any money.
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Accounting can often be penny-wise, pound foolish.
And when you have a workforce that numbers about 65 thousand people and accounting sees $6 million a year going to slack when they are already paying a bunch to Microsoft... It may be nothing next to the payroll but $6 million is a ripe feather in the cap of the person that takes credit for cost reduction by making a company like us shut that down.
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Interestingly (just my anecdote) where I work (one of the biggest companies) we're a top to bottom Microsoft shop. But Salesforce is one thing we adopted in parallel and seem to have gone all in on even during the migration to Office365 for everything else.
I'm not entirely sure on the appeal because I don't use it, but I did find it interesting none the less.
Where's the pun? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Where's the pun? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, I guess that means one less company sponging off our data, right?
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Re:Where's the pun? (Score:4, Informative)
One thing I would like them to do better is how they handle being in multiple organization's Teams. I might be a corner case on this since I have multiple corporate clients I work with, with the upshot that I'm currently in six different companies Teams and need to switch between them continually to pick up chat messages, etc.. This does seem to be a fairly common feature request though, so maybe not that much of a corner? Even with Federated AD logins, etc. that switching is still a chore, especially since some accounts keep insisting on using 2FA almost every single switch and it can't be done mid-call if you need to do something like grab a link posted on another org's chat. It's also far too easy to forget to switch orgs, inadvertantly join a call as a Guest from another domain, then find that you can't access some necessary chat/conference functionality for a presentation and have to drop off a call, switch orgs, and re-join.
Re: Where's the pun? (Score:2)
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You could try to have more than one account on your machine and use "fast user switching" to access the other account, or RDP into another machine that uses an different office/teams account, or try VMs. Obviously that might mess things up with microphone usage and is perhaps not really a viable solution.
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The teams native client is a worse than usual electron app. The web interface under chrome is serviceable under various operating systems.
However, the biggest factor is with the procurement. An Office 365 shop is paying for Teams whether they use it or not. So procurement is going to push getting off a redundant competitor product regardless of opinions about relative merit.
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No.
Procurement do not choose systems. Procurement negotiate contracts.
The CFO (and their team) will challenge the CIO (and their team) regarding the cost of Slack, and between them will agree whether to continue that relationship. Procurement act on that decision, they don't make it.
That is my worry also... (Score:2)
Almost everyone prefers Slack for chat, but from the management level it's been looking dicey for a while. Salesforce's all-but-inevitable increase to prices to pay off their purchase more quickly
Same here, every place I've worked for or with has greatly preferred Slack, but if costs go up will more companies drop back to one of the suckier options?
You wouldn't think it would be hard to make a chat application that was usable but Slack is one of the few I've every actually liked.
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Or something along the lines of "Hiring a bunch of slackers".
Screw Slack, it's for Normals... get Slack! (Score:5, Funny)
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There is an irony the Slack(tm) application; of getting interrupted multiple times a day with more meaningless drudgery from Pinks and Glorps. As long as you are logged into Slack(tm), you will never have slack. Log out and PRAISE "BOB" !!!
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Great timing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean (Score:4, Insightful)
Does this mean that Slack is going to remove all their useful features and expect every customer to implement all their own features costing them millions to implement stuff that should be part of the basic package?
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Perhaps I shouldn't be complaining that they've maintained both ("Lightning" vs "Classic) for as long as they have, but it does lead to minor annoyance any time I need to hunt for information to assist our salesfolk.
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It's a good thing they've maintained the classic interface. There's a few things that I still find a lot easier to do in the classic interface. Although I have to admit I only use sales force from time to time to help out clients who are using it. I don't use it for my day-to-day activities.
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Hand it to them (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I have to hand it to the slack people. They took IRC and wrapped a GUI around it and sold it to Enterprises. Now they can really retire, but seems most people who make a payday like this tends to move on to another startup.
But why would Salesforce but Slack ?
Re:Hand it to them (Score:5, Insightful)
I know at least one big salesforce client moved onto Microsoft ecosystem (Dynamics and Office), in part on the promise of how all the stuff plays together and how the company was already feeling compelled to give Microsoft so much money for all sorts of subscriptions already making the incremental cost rather low.
Salesforce probably needs some means to compete against that.
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It's going to take a lot of work to actually integrate the two product stacks though. It would almost be easier to just start from scratch and build the Slack featureset into Salesforce.
Re:Hand it to them (Score:4, Insightful)
From a technology standpoint, you are probably right. Technology wise making a new slack isn't a challenge.
Sadly, this would be about branding more than it is about technology.
Just imagine if there were some federated multi-vendor capable instant communications technology. Like chat, relayed by the internet or something. Wouldn't that be something...
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You can use Discord ... ... if you want to refer to that. Did not use it since 15 years.
IRC is dead
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Yeah, Microsoft's iron grip and ability to say 'oh, this 'slack' thing is taking the world by storm? We'll just toss a competitor in the Office 365 bucket so all our customers have to buy it no matter what and therefore slack represents incremental cost and Teams has zero incremental cost, that should fix it'
The 'boil the frog' approach has gotten a ton more money out of my compony than MS used to get (oh, you want to re-up your perpetual license, but you could go month to month and it's so much cheaper to
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Yeah, and while Slack is a potential ingredient, they are still so far off from something that can compete with the Microsoft 365 bundling that it barely makes a difference.
Ostensibly someone paying for the bundle gets chat, cloud storage, online and offline office applications, email, calander, directory services, CRM software, operating system, video conferencing, telephony, and various other random things that matter to someone or another.
It's damn near impossible to consider joining into the market if y
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Wonder if I can use BitchX as a client?
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My workplace uses Slack, but I connect to it via IRC using matterircd [github.com], a Mattermost + Slack to IRC proxy. It was a bit fiddly to set up, but it works very well and it's such a pleasure to use my IRC client of choice rather than Slack's bloated interface.
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But why would Salesforce but Slack ?
I worked for Salesforce (I still have flashbacks.) but they do use Slack internally a lot. So considering what they probably spent a year, it could even make sense.
Of course, I am going to start looking around for replacements.
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They're not buying Slack's technology. They're buying their name and userbase. Salesforce could wrap IRC (or build a feature complete Slack competitor) in little time with billions left over.
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But why would Salesforce but Slack ?
Gotta wash their money somehow
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But why would Salesforce but Slack ?
And why do you think Slack has anything to do with IRC?
As a former Slack shareholder... (Score:2)
I find it very telling that now Salesforce is already taking some losses and sharing in what probably most of us have experienced from trying to make money on Slack.
Salesforce isn't too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's hard to get excited by web-based chat as a technology. Especially when ancient technology like IRC had network redundancy and scalability built-in. This is a big deal in terms of scooping up Slack's customer base though. And the kind of customers that would pay every month for web-chat would probably buy just about anything.
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There are newer, better alternatives available. Check out https://matrix.org/ [matrix.org] - federating (like email or irc), first-class bridging (access irc, slack, telegram, signal, whatsapp, ...), open, ...
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agree. We have matrix running on ec2 nano and it works beautifully for our team. The Element app is really slick and is just great to use on mobile or desktop.
I've never used slack so I'm sure there are important features it has that users would miss (?). But for the cost of an ec2 instance (whatever size you need depending on your team and where they are) you'd still be saving a lot of money and supporting a really great open source project.
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Especially when ancient technology like IRC had network redundancy and scalability built-in.
Comparing modern web based chat used in groupware applications to IRC is like comparing a car to walking with a goat, no not even riding a frigging horse applies here. It's like comparing the Ryzen 9 to a bell labs transistor. They share a single tiny thing in common, but the car, and the microprocessors are far larger, more capable, and with an insanely larger feature set when you compare modern communication systems to ancient IRC.
IRC? (Score:1)
Will everyone migrate back to IRC?
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IRC is just multiplayer Notepad [bash.org]
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Hopefully not, as there are newer, better alternatives available. Check out https://matrix.org/ [matrix.org] - federating (like email or irc), first-class bridging (access irc, slack, telegram, signal, whatsapp, ...), open, ...
A fool and their money... (Score:1)
Leveraging their Monopoly Powers? (Score:3)
As I recall, Salesforce has a pretty restrictive license on who can use their products. Namely, companies that sell or manufacture firearms or their accessories. I wonder how long it'll be until they leverage that for Slack as well.
$27.7B Suchadeal! (Score:1)
Holiday season is upon us
Quantitative Easing is a miracle! Need more...
Best of luck... (Score:2)
I had a few people say that the Salesforce work environment isn't insanely bad and maybe Slack was the same, so hopefully this works out okay.
I don't see the real point tough. Maybe this is a ploy to pick up programmers (I know Salesforce picked up Mulesoft a while ago).
But, Salesforce is just the default CRM that everybody uses but nobody really likes. Not that Dynamics or NetSuite or PeopleSoft is any better, mind you. And Slack, to be honest, was a novelty that gets ignored (if you are lucky) or is foste
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Native client (Score:2)
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I'm ready, let's go (Score:2)
The merging of two turds (Score:1)
Bubble? (Score:2)
Teams footprint on the system (Score:1)
Your move, Larry. (Score:1)
Now I see why Oracle was interested in purchasing TikTok. Why chat when you can exchange floss dances with your coworkers??
Bonus: Walmart is now your primary procurement partner.