Cut us some Slack: $27bn+ later, collab tool officially belongs to Salesforce
- Reference: 1626953348
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/07/22/salesforce_slack_acquisition_closes/
- Source link:
The intention to buy was made public back in [1]December 2020 , when the business run by Marc Benioff said: "Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud."
The CRM firm said Slack, which at the time had listed just [2]18 months before on the NYSE with a valuation of $16bn+ , would also become the interface to Salesforce's CRM platform.
[3]
But in February 2021, the US Department of Justice [4]wrote to Salesforce and Slack to further investigate the merger.
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[6]
After all, the hipster chat app was no slouch in terms of users (12 million according to the latest public figures), nor of top lines (though like others in the sector, it has been keen as beans that no one looks too closely at the bottom ones). For its [7]fiscal year 2021 ended 31 January , for example, revenue was $902.6m, up from $630.4m and $400.6m in 2020 and 2019, respectively. It also reported a loss for fy2021 of $300.4m, albeit better than the net loss of $571m in its 2020 financial year. The company also spent significantly less on R&D and clipped general and admin overheads.
The app runs on a freemium model, with free tier users outnumbering those on the paid version. As of 31 January, 2021, it had 156,000 orgs coughing up to have three or more users on a paid subscription plan, up from 110,000 in 2020 and 88,000 in 2019 (rounded down to the nearest thousand). Over 1,000 of those customers - including IBM, [8]which The Reg understands has been using a fair amount of the chat app lately - paid over $100,000. In its latest annual report, the firm said that as well as attracting new users, the company had been hoping to "convert users of and organizations on our free version into paid customers."
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Slack has [10]said it has 12 million+ daily active users, and chomps through tens of billions of daily database queries. The firm has not recently provided data on the breakdown of free and paid users - although during its 2019 listing, it filed an [11]S-1 with the SEC showing 600,000 orgs had accounts with more than three users, and 88,000 of those were paid customers (14.6 per cent of the total). In its last filing, for Q1 ended April 30, 2021
[12]PDF
, Slack noted "a $5.6m increase in third-party hosting costs for users on a Free subscription plan of Slack, primarily due to continuing growth in our user base, and a $0.7 million increase in facility- and IT-related overhead costs to support our headcount growth."Regulators were eventually satisfied the deal would not unduly distort markets, leading to last night's announcement that the last of the lawyering has been done – and so, formally, has the deal.
[13]Salesforce's Patterson blazes a trail for humble-braggers everywhere
[14]Stob treks back across the decades to review the greatest TV sci-fi in the light of recent experience
[15]In-person Dreamforce returns: Real people, real lanyards, real sandwich platters... and no James Corden
[16]Windows 11 gets chatty as Teams integration turns up
[17]That Salesforce outage: Global DNS downfall started by one engineer trying a quick fix
A promo video described what to expect at a very high level, alluding to collaboration and e-commerce enablement while inserting a cameo from Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield with exactly zero subtlety.
[18]Youtube Video
Overall, the new Franken-work tool is supposed to help employees and teams as they march into a post-pandemic work-from-anywhere-and-at-all-hours world.
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"We've learned over the past year that the workplace isn't snapping back to the way it was," said Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor in a [20]canned statement .
The statement continued:
Headquarters are no longer on Madison Avenue or Main Street – they are in the cloud. Every business – in every industry – has to optimize for a digital-first customer, employee, and partner experience.
This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink and reshape everything about how and where we work.
Slack is expected to continue seeking and serving customers that have nothing to do with Salesforce. The Slack brand will persist and remain free to expand beyond Salesforce, and will continue to operate under the Slack brand led by Butterfield.
Microsoft has, over the years, pointedly remarked that its Teams collaboration environment has many more users than Slack. The subtext to those jibes is that Redmond is the outfit really driving the future of work and Slack is an upstart afterthought.
That argument is far harder to sustain now that Slack will be delivered to Salesforce's 150,000 customers and their many millions of individual users. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/01/salesforce_buys_slack/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2019/06/20/slack_lists_nyse_38_50/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YPmWIN60OKsrY-yTSogQZwAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/17/doj_salesforce_slack//
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YPmWIN60OKsrY-yTSogQZwAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YPmWIN60OKsrY-yTSogQZwAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1764925/000176492521000050/work-20210131.htm
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/01/ibm_email_disruption_sales/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YPmWIN60OKsrY-yTSogQZwAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://slack.com/intl/en-de/blog/news/work-is-fueled-by-true-engagement
[11] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1764925/000162828019004786/slacks-1.htm
[12] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001764925/5422fae8-0919-49f5-b243-09a874f35900.pdf
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/08/salesforces_patterson_blazes_a_trail/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/17/verity_stob_tv_scifi_column/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/28/benioff_boasts_big_boost_for/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/21/windows_11_teams/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/salesforce_root_cause/
[18] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDQ05KurxsE
[19] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YPmWIN60OKsrY-yTSogQZwAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[20] https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/07/21/salesforce-slack-deal-close/
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Teams, bringing the user experience of an Amstrad emailer to a desktop near you
Teams is "free"
The full version of Teams is "free". Because MS Office is effectively a monopoly, so we have to subscribe to Office 365, which includes Teams.
That bundling has not been good for Slack. We used free Slack and it's limits were getting very annoying, but then Teams became available and we switched. If Teams hadn't been bundled then we would have considered paying for Slack instead.
(Note: I know lots of people are going to bring up OpenOffice/LibreOffice. But it's not 100% compatible with the MS Office that our customers/suppliers/partners use. And - like it or not - the man-hours and frustration and support effort and risks of dealing with that are perceived to be worse than just paying Microsoft for Office 365).
Re: Teams is "free"
The full version of Teams is "free".
If you assume personal data, behavioural data and privacy is not a currency.
Re: Teams is "free"
I'm not sure office doc compatibility is much of an issue any more for inter-company use. Most IT Security policies frown on such sharing.
MS Office is better than LibreOffice. They question is whether the cost is worth it, and that will depend on your use-cases.
My inclination would be to put LibreOffice everywhere and then offer MSOffice if people can make a business case for it.
I will say this though - the LibreOffice interface style looks horrific - random font sizes and colours in the icons - its a mess - but again, how much do you want to spend to fix it?
Ah Sharepoint. Turning perfectly good desktop applications like Excel into latency-bound crud.
I think its just a psyop to make web-based excel look like a viable alternative.
Mockery
This is where current iteration of capitalism is wrong.
Companies should not be allowed to buy other companies and grow too big to fail.
Re: Mockery
But reaching the point of never being able to fail _IS_ a possible conclusion of capitalism, it's just that no one ever envisioned it becoming a reality.
If I remove the corruption/greed/etc. from capitalism and look at its simple blueprint in its purest form, it shows a very strange path that becomes cloudier and less responsible the more one "succeeds" and seemingly will be allowed to eat itself (regardless of greed or giving). Eating itself is where "too big to fail" comes into play. I think for a long time (1000's of years) nobody really considered things that were "too big to fail" as capitalism, these things certainly existed, but back then they were thought of as requirements of society regardless of who succeeds or starves (i.e. military, society, governments, health). Today for the 1st world, things just aren't volatile like that anymore, they just aren't and now there's too many idle hands. We're witnessing what happens to capitalism once it goes beyond what anyone thought it would ever become when it was designed, when it made a lot of sense.
Capitalism for 1st worlders is all we know, but I feel we're starting to know it very differently and that it may be time for it to be replaced, devolved or evolved... just certainly not leaving it how it is. Well, how about at least modified, as one should never become so "blessed" that they "can't fail", this just doesn't make sense in any way even though capitalism permits it. Sadly, capitalism doesn't even stop "at too big to fail"... keep reading its blueprint... it will become scary.
Re: Mockery
This text neatly describes the current situation. I'd call the current iteration "neo-feudalism".
[1]Nobody wants to be a serf anymore
[1] https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/nobody-wants-to-be-a-serf-anymore
Re: Mockery
By "too big to fail", do you mean "so important to society that governments will be forced to bail them out" (like banks)? Or "so cash-rich that they can always buy up any upstarts that try to displace them?"
I don't think Salesforce/Slack or even Microsoft fall into the first category. If they fail, it will be because they cease to innovate and their customers move to something which meets their needs better. The only requirement to stop this being catastrophic is to ensure that all customers have the right to export their data in full.
Twenty years ago, everyone had a Nokia phone. It could have been argued at the time that they were "too big to fail". They failed - and the world moved on.
More mediocre software
What baffles me is how much software these days is arguably just not very good. Slack is a case in point. I think that any user can see a dozen ways it could be dramatically improved. Microsoft products too. I can't imagine going back to Windows or MS Office, if for no other reason that periodically they just change everything with no warning, and no obvious reason.
Say what you want about Open/LibreOffice, it's the same year in and year out, which makes it a lot more productive. I am a couple of decades beyond finding "novelty" appealing in work products.
And don't get me started on phone apps; one-third poorly thought out interface and two-thirds intrusive ads. From a Google store that makes it all so difficult to find the one gem in dozens of pieces of utter garbage.
The really crazy thing though is that I'd be happy to pay for the really good stuff, especially ad-laden services like Twitter. A few bucks a month to get an ad-free version would be wonderful. Or a Play Store that actually limits itself to products that are good .
I guess we just need to hope that when Windows 11 becomes a monthly subscription service we'll see people abandon it.
Goodbye to Slack
this will be a death knell to the users and i predict this will drive away users in drove. also predict free Slack has a high likelihood of being a paid for app.
Microsoft has, over the years, pointedly remarked that its Teams collaboration environment has many more users than Slack. The subtext to those jibes is that Redmond is the outfit really driving the future of work and Slack is an upstart afterthought.
I use both (paid) Slack and Teams. Teams is a qualitatively worse user experience in almost every way. Other opinions are available of course.
This should count for something, though of course it often doesn't when it comes to workplace software (oh hi Oracle HR, SharePoint).