
Marc Benioff, boss of the business software. “Salesforce and Slack are uniquely positioned to lead this historic shift to a digital-first world. Salesforce has agreed to buy workplace messaging app Slack for 27.7bn (£20bn) in what would be one of the biggest tech mergers in recent years. Salesforce has agreed to buy workplace messaging app Slack for 27.7bn (20bn) in what would be one of the biggest tech mergers in recent years. “We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink and reshape how and where we work,” said Slack cofounder and CEO Stewart Butterfield, who will continue to lead Slack post-acquisition. Perhaps more importantly, given the digital transformation that has engulfed the industry over the past 16 months, Salesforce and Slack could together play a big part in powering the future of work. It’s not clear how - or even if - that complaint will proceed now that Slack is essentially an operating unit inside Salesforce.Īt any rate, with Slack under its wing, Salesforce now has an even more powerful collaboration artery directly into the enterprise, enabling it to create deeper social integrations across its product suite. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn to bolster their sales and marketing software business. Slack argues that Microsoft is using Office’s market dominance to force millions of people to install Teams through this bundle. The last few months have seen a lot of interesting M&A activity. The crux of Slack’s complaint is that while Slack is available as a standalone service and application with various pricing tiers, Microsoft Teams largely comes as part of an Office 365 subscription.


It’s worth noting that Slack has a pending antitrust complaint against Microsoft in the EU.
