4, Salesforce buys Slack, but what happens next?
Salesforce completed its $27.7 billion acquisition of business collaboration tool Slack in July. Under new ownership, Slack continued to be run independently, but the hope was that the service would be deeply integrated into Salesforce, resulting in a “Digital HQ” initiative where it could serve as a conduit for 150,000 Salesforce customers.
Salesforce and Slack seemed like strange bedfellows, and many questioned how the CRM giant and the trendy instant messaging app would fit together.
- Slack currently has 156,000 paying customers, up 42% YoY, and had up to 12 million daily active users and 156,000 organizations in 2020.
- Its rivals—Microsoft Teams (145 million) and Google Workspace (2.6 billion)—have vastly more users and are also tied into monumental productivity ecosystems that give them access to a captive market of B2B users.
Slack users loved the service because of its simplicity and ease of use, but as popular as it was, Slack really needed to be acquired to hyperscale and be more competitive. Integrating Salesforce’s Customer 360 and its mix of marketing, commerce service, and IT features might have sounded good on paper, but it will be a massive multi-year undertaking.
Merging parts of disparate solutions like Salesforce and Slack is a delicate and risky task. Not only do integrations need to work seamlessly without affecting core features, the risk of alienating customers who are loyal to each product or service is high.
5. Microsoft continued to try making dual-screen phones
Microsoft’s history with smartphones is complicated, to say the least. The company was once an innovator with Windows Phone, bringing PC-connectivity and apps on mobile devices while BlackBerry was still making pagers.
Microsoft later bought Nokia for $7 billion in 2013, but its efforts to eke out a third platform to combat Apple and Android imploded, resulting in the firing of 7,000 employees.
The whole Windows Phone fiasco should have been enough to distance Microsoft from its mobile aspirations, but the temptation was too strong.
Microsoft’s Surface Duo 2, the successor to its poorly received dual-screen Android-powered device, remains an oddity in the smartphone market. The $1,500 device was positioned as a productivity tool for bringing together the best of Android and Microsoft, but even with the latest software updates, it’s still considered “multiple generations” away from being ready for the mainstream.
The biggest problem with the Surface Duo? It was a subset of an even smaller niche in dual-screen smartphones, a market that has been dominated by Samsung, which has multiple products in its second- and third-generation models.
Developers haven’t embraced dual-screen devices, which has led to few apps that can take advantage of the expensive hardware. So why is Microsoft persistently making the Surface Duo? Mostly because it can, which is a strange tech flex.