#Salesforce slack professional#

There are so many horror stories of businesses suffering from this monopolistic power disparity. In order to keep pace with Microsoft, Slack needed a bigger enterprise sales team, which they found in tech giant Salesforce, leading to an acquisition I’m quite sure was bittersweet. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal.” This practice landed the company in trouble with federal antitrust regulators in the 1990s, and Microsoft has deployed the same playbook here as well-leading to Slack’s antitrust complaint against Microsoft in the EU earlier this year.īut Slack’s leaders must have decided that the courts wouldn’t be able to act quickly enough, and instead planned to save the company another way. In those same four years where Slack’s user base tripled, Microsoft Teams claims it gained 115 million users, showing the world that product quality can’t save a startup when Big Tech wants a piece.Īs Matt Stoller notes in his newsletter “ BIG“, Microsoft has a track record of giving “away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and it with existing product lines.

#Salesforce slack professional#

In 2016, Microsoft, which already had the customer base and sales force to conquer the market, decided to essentially copy Slack and make it free by bundling it with the Microsoft professional suite. The simple “emoji react” options we see now on Facebook posts, Twitter DMs, and even Microsoft Teams can all trace their lineage to this impactful design change. By focusing on the user experience, and offering intuitive design, Slack helped change the paradigm of chat. Becoming a Slack user after the desert that was Microsoft Outlook was like a fresh drink of water after a long drought. How could Slack, as “just another messenger app,” raise hundreds of millions of dollars when its product had no real way to defend itself against Big Tech? But using Slack made me a believer. I’ll never forget the shock I felt reading fundraising headlines in the 2010s.

And if a company like Slack can’t stand up to the consolidation of corporate power, consumers’ ability to freely choose the best and most useful product is at risk. Even Slack, which built an incredibly powerful product and operated with notorious efficiency, could not stay independent in a match-up against Microsoft. These giants, armed with nearly limitless funds and extensive client relationships, frequently abuse their advantage and bully smaller upstarts into oblivion. Slack is but one of many stories in Silicon Valley of a “defensive” acquisition, where a company is no longer able to compete independently against the tech giants. But Slack’s decision to be acquired by Salesforce indicates that today, the exact opposite is true. partner Les Carnegie and on foreign direct investment matters by Hamburg counsel Jana Dammann de Chapto.Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative products will prevail over less effective ones released by entrenched firms like Microsoft. counsel Timothy McCarten on economic sanctions matters by Washington, D.C. counsel Kyle Jefcoat on FCPA matters by Washington, D.C. counsel Marissa Boynton on government contracts matters by Washington, D.C. Advice was also provided on corporate debt and derivatives matters by New York partners Gregory Rodgers and Reza Mojtabaee-Zamani, with New York associate Andrew Blumenthal on other corporate matters by Bay Area partner Sarah Axtell on benefits and compensation matters by Bay Area partner James Metz, with Bay Area associate Erik Ward on tax matters by Bay Area partner Grace Lee, with Los Angeles associate Abigail Friedman and Boston associate Jeremiah Cowen on technology transactions matters by Bay Area partner Anthony Klein with Bay Area associate Arielle Singh on data privacy matters by Washington, D.C. Latham & Watkins represents Slack in the transaction with a corporate deal team led by Bay Area partners Rick Kline, Tad Freese and Mark Bekheit, with Bay Area associates Michelle Lu, Natalie Robertson, and Melinda Vanderburg. “Executing a deal of this scale required great coordination across the Latham team and we were able to draw on our unrivaled experience to meet the needs of our client.” “We were excited to work with Slack on such a transformative transaction,” said Tad Freese, partner and co-leader of the deal team that is advising Slack.