Cut some Slack: Salesforce acquires messaging app

Workplace messaging app Slack has been sold to cloud software giant Salesforce for £20.6 billion. 

The app, which has seen a near doubling of its market because of the surge in homeworking during the coronavirus pandemic, is a workplace communication platform offering chat rooms, direct messaging, an application programming interface, and content sharing as alternatives to email.

This is one of the biggest tech mergers in the past few years, and has come about as the coronavirus pandemic has increased the focus on remote working and tools, like Slack, which enable and facilitate it. Other Big Tech companies offering technologies such as live streaming, cloud computing and videoconferencing services, have also benefitted significantly because of the effects of the pandemic.

Despite the recent doubling of its user numbers, Slack has not had an easy ride over the past couple of years. One of the main reasons for Slack’s pairing with Salesforce has been to try to better take on the competition. Slack has had difficulty competing with tech giant Microsoft and its similar product Microsoft Teams. It is often tough for somewhat more modest sized tech companies like Slack to compete with companies as large, and with the level of market dominance, as Microsoft.

These difficulties led to Slack filing a competition complaint against Microsoft before the European Commission this summer. Slack accused Microsoft of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition by bundling Teams into its other products; thereby force installing it for millions.

Microsoft have meanwhile amassed more than 100 million users worldwide due to the huge shift towards homeworking. This is nearly 10 times as many users as Slack. The Company’s CEO remarked earlier this year that Microsoft had “seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months".

It remains to be seen whether this recent coupling will allow Salesforce and Slack to give the likes of Microsoft a run for its money. Salesforce’s CEO certainly thinks so; calling the acquisition a “match made in heaven.”