BigTech No Longer Operates in Free-Market Capitalism

When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, you knew things would be different. A few people became a lot richer, but with M&A in an age of a Pandemic, a few companies are becoming too powerful again.

BigTech consolidation does not look pretty in 2020. With Microsoft Teams able to use their enterprise network to out sell Slack, Slack has little choice but to explore a sale. Still in Slack worth $17 Billion? Salesforce's stock was down on the rumor.

The acquisition would be Salesforce’s largest to date if a deal goes through. In a world of increasing wealth inequality, a lack of antitrust regulation is fueling a dangerous centralization of American BigTech and even the best startups cannot hold out for much longer.

The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the situation, reported on Wednesday that any deal would likely value Slack at more than its current market capitalization of $17 billion. It's all very absurd but Slack was always going to be acquired by somebody.

It could have been Google, but Salesforce is on an acquisition binge. Google Cloud could have used Slack. As popular as Slack is among startups and smaller mid size companies, Slack is worth $36.95 per share as of the time of writing, valuing it at around $20.8 billion. That doesn't really make much sense.

Following the publication of the WSJ’s report, shares of Slack rose more than 29%, now down to 22% rise on the day. It's just preliminary talks but is there really synergy between Slack's audience and that of Salesforce? Probably, kinda?

Salesforce is a great company but its stock has not been as great this year as Microsoft or any of the other monopolies. How do you compete with a Cloud and enterprise giant as well diversified as Microsoft? You cannot really and that's Slack's problem in a nutshell. American technology companies are just those big-five that have so much free cash and so much of a stranglehold on very big total addressable markets, American tech is like a dystopian corporate scenario.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook put on a good show that they are good corporate citizens. But they aren't taxed properly, aren't regulated properly and certainly aren't good citizens towards American innovation. They suck (buy, eat) up all the talent, while buying out the good startups. They talent acquire AI companies, they basically do whatever they please.

Slack is just a small fish in a winner-takes all version of Capitalism that American has unfortunately become. Silicon Valley's death spiral, if you will. While Restaurants, small businesses and retailers collapse during the pandemic, these GAMFA companies are thriving. It isn't good business for the American ecosystem to have a "might is right rule" of the technology and business economy. Consolidation at this magnitude just means 80% of the world's best new companies will be coming out of China now. And where will that leave North America in 20 years?

Salesforce is good for it. Salesforce acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in 2018, the company’s biggest deal ever at the time, to help connect cloud applications. The following year it spent more than twice that amount on Tableau, acquiring the data visualization company for $15.3 billion. Slack would be one of the biggest software deals ever for the industry. That's quite a shopping spree. It's now or never for the future of Salesforce. The Cloud is not a place you want to be competing in against Amazon, Alibaba and Microsoft or Adobe, Google and company.

To survive you have to grow or be acquired and Slack was and is a great indie startup. But if it gets acquired it will be the end of an age. Slack grew up in a world where American tech startups could still exist. Slack was founded in 2009 in Vancouver. It's a Canadian born startup. The only Canadian born startup that won't be acquired is Shopify and maybe Lightspeed, though I wouldn't hold out on that. What kind of a world are we creating?

Let's just say what we are all too embarrassed to even admit. America is a bloated anti-trust violation of all business norms of fair competition and free market capitalism. Just as America's democratic system is in jeopardy of all semblance of social justice, it's technological state has gone astray. It's a deeply mired problem of wealth inequality that will spiral the country to its downfall. Is anybody listening? No, I didn't think so. 

This article will be shadow-banned, because that's what American has come to in an age of BigTech censorship. Algorithms down-voting any real opinions that don't boost sentiment impressions. Microsoft is likely to disrupt Salesforce's unique value proposition in five years, and nobody will care.

This publication Newsletter is banned in America, why do suppose that is? Real innovation is not winning in America, technological centralization is. That's a very dangerous path Silicon Valley has put us on.