Salesforce buys Microsoft Teams rival Slack for 28 billion dollars

Slack has been a little late to jump onto the Coronavirus pandemic video conferencing train this year, whilst Microsoft and Zoom have proven to be the absolute winners. On the other hand, Salesforce’s shares have risen by more than 50% during the pandemic, and this has given them the financial firepower for takeovers.

So far, this acquisition is the largest in Salesforce’s 21 year history and both sides plan to benefit from it as a win-win victory. As Slack filed a complaint in the European Union accusing Microsoft of illegally bunding Teams with Office 365 in a way that blocks its removal by customers who may prefer Slack, they can now dry their tears as their tool will be deeply integrated in every Salesforce Cloud. 

In previous years, Salesforce also made several attempts to become an enterprise platform company with its own Chatter product (which sadly ended in 2013) and in 2016, with the acquisition of Quip, they may now finally have a chance to compete with Microsoft, Goole and Oracle.

It is always good to have healthy competition – especially when we are talking about enterprise platforms. That’s why we are looking forward to seeing if this move will help Salesforce and Slack to finally be recognised as an important strategic player, and one which could have an effect on the future of Microsoft.