{"id":30914,"date":"2020-12-03T16:14:57","date_gmt":"2020-12-03T21:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=30914"},"modified":"2020-12-16T16:31:45","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T21:31:45","slug":"salesforce-buys-slack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/03\/salesforce-buys-slack\/","title":{"rendered":"Salesforce Buys Slack"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

Salesforce<\/a>, the CRM powerhouse that recently surpassed $20 billion in annual revenue<\/a>, announced today it is wading deeper into enterprise social by acquiring Slack<\/a> in a $27.7 billion megadeal. Rumors of a pending deal surfaced last week, causing Slack’s stock price to spike<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Slack was ripe for the taking. Entering 2020 it had lost around 40% of its value since it went public. Consider that after its most recent earnings report<\/a>, the company lost 16% of its value, and before the Salesforce deal leaked<\/a>, the company was worth only a few dollars per share more than its direct listing reference price. Toss in net losses of $147.6 million during the two quarters ending July 31, 2020, Slack’s uninspiring public valuation and its winding path to profitability and it was a sitting target for a takeover like this one.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Slack was founded in 2013, but its origins go back <\/a>to an online multiplayer game company called Glitch that was founded in 2009. While the game was ultimately a failure, the startup developed an internal messaging system in the process of building that company that later evolved into Slack.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

mullingitover<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

They started out trying to make an MMO, ended up making Flickr instead.<\/p>\n

Then they tried making another MMO, but ended up making Slack instead.<\/p>\n

I really hope they get cracking on another MMO soon.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Allen Pike<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Salesforce acquiring Slack feels like another “End of the Beginning” moment. Startups used to overturn established tech giants on a regular basis. Increasingly that just isn’t happening anymore – or at least, not often. A new era is upon us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Matias Korhonen<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

If you can’t make money with a communication tool during a global pandemic that has forced almost everyone who possibly can work from home to work from home, what will it take?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Casey Newton<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Slack’s life as an underdog darling of Silicon Valley ended on November 2, 2016. That’s when the upstart communication startup published an open letter to Microsoft in the <\/a>New York Times<\/a><\/em>, offering the tech giant an insincere “welcome” to the world of workplace chat software. The occasion was Microsoft’s launch of Teams<\/a>, a Slack clone that would come bundled with the company’s popular Office 365 suite of products.<\/p>\n

In its letter, Slack warned Microsoft that “Slack is here to stay,” adding: “we’re just getting started.” But the 4 million users it had at the time would increase to just 12 million four years later, while Microsoft — which added Teams to its 365 bundle without increasing the price — took Teams from zero to 115 million users<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Slack, as a public company, has been under immense pressure to do whatever it takes to make its stock price go up in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Teams[…] Slack, it seems to me, has been pulled apart. What they ought to be entirely focused on is making Slack great in Slack-like ways. Perhaps Salesforce sees that Slack gives them an offering competitive to Teams, and if they just let Slack be Slack, their offering will be better — be designed for users, better integrated for developers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Om Malik<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

As an angel investor in the company, I felt compelled to write about why Slack mattered? Well, I never really published the piece. Thinking about it — it doesn’t matter: it is still relevant today, as it was then, for it is about why Slack mattered enough for Benioff to pony up more dollars than what Microsoft paid for LinkedIn.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

So, when I saw the early version of Slack, I was intrigued by its possibilities as a messaging platform that wasn’t really an email, but an API to carry notifications for different kinds of corporate applications.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2020-12-16): John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I do love me an annotated press release<\/a>. There’s well-warranted snark about some of the language, but also some astute analysis of why this deal makes sense for both companies[…]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm (Hacker News): 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. Rumors of a pending deal surfaced last week, causing Slack’s stock price to spike. […] Ultimately, Slack was ripe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-12-03T21:15:02Z","apple_news_api_id":"2ad182f2-dc48-4c9a-b3f7-3442d9cfc547","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-12-16T21:31:49Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AKtGC8txITJqz9zRC2c_FRw","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[66,101,37,2021,1500,96],"class_list":["post-30914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-acquisition","tag-business","tag-microsoft","tag-salesforce","tag-slack","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30914"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31048,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30914\/revisions\/31048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}