Salesforce's Acquisition of Slack: Maybe A Good Thing?

You might have heard that Slack is being acquired by Salesforce. This is big news in the collaboration space so I felt like I should comment upon it.

Pundits are making much of Slack's lower valuation since it went public as well as Salesforce's desire to take a bite out of Microsoft's corporate market share (via its similar tool Microsoft Teams).

I believe that there's considerably more nuance to the decision.

Slack as Rebel Hero

Slack has enjoyed an almost outlaw or rogue status as an easy-to-spin-up freemium collaboration tool. It's a powerful way to connect teams and allows for immediate communication. For these reasons it's something of a go-to platform for startups looking to connect their teams while keeping costs low. It's also strongly favored by remote teams and all kinds of small organizations.

But what happens when the Rebels join the Empire?

Will Salesforce seek to monetize Slack by changing the price structure? Will they incorporate it increasingly into their suite of products? You can bet that they will move this direction if not right away. The idea that Slack will continue to exist as a standalone product is a nice dream but one that's unlikely to last.

That will leave tools like Discord which is of similar gamer culture provenance as a free option along with a few newcomers to social intranet collaboration like Mighty Networks.

Ruling the Galaxy Together?

So Salesforce may seek to capitalize on the indie popularity of Slack in the short term, all while they incorporate it into their technology stack. I don't think that this is a bad thing, either. Microsoft has been particularly horrible about creating a cohesive work environment for collaboration. If you've ever worked for an organization using Office 365 you'll probably find that it is a confusing array of "deep use case" tools thrown at you in no particular order.

I have hopes that Salesforce's effort to create a cohesive enterprise collaboration environment will be less pell mell. Pulling Slack into to the mix along with the fairly recent Salesforce acquisition of Quip for cloud-based document collaboration could round out Salesforce's already well-integrated cloud offerings nicely.

But I don't think that it's just Microsoft they are going after. I think that the ultimate target is Google, whose suite is also reasonably competitive in the enterprise space and gaining ground. Google completely lack a coherent collaboration environment. And, no, I don't count Meet or Hangouts in this category because they are not persistent, searchable environments.

The Future of Workplace Collaboration

The future of workforce collaboration seems to me to increasingly hinge upon not only having a full range of intuitive, highly usable tools, but also upon having a central experience for group and team collaboration, a jumping-off point for workplace experiences that feel as modern as the latest build of your favorite social media platform and as useful and fast as you need it to be to get your work done.

What's better is that Slack has been somewhat notorious in my experience for how difficult it can be to find something you uploaded in one of the channels last week. Salesforce's community platform (now meaninglessly renamed Experience Cloud, I believe) could be married to the multi-channel collaboration elements in Slack to create something really powerful.

Time and imagination will tell, of course.

Conclusion

So, while I'm sad to see Slack being bought for the implication that it may no longer be the great, free tool for startups, small orgs, and ad hoc purposes it has been, I recognize that niche was probably not a great place for Slack to be financially. The sale makes sense and any vacuum Slack leaves in its wake is likely to be quickly filled.

The future for Salesforce looks to me a little brighter, assuming that they do not alienate Slack's existing paid user base too quickly by forcing them to begin subscribing to other Salesforce products. I think it's also healthy for Microsoft and Google to feel some pressure that they aren't going to be able to coast on their existing collaboration offerings.

So, welcome to the Dark Side of the Force, Slack. I hear they have cookies....

What do you think about the acquisition of Slack? We don't actually live in a world of good-or-bad, so where does this land in your estimation?

Finally, if you'd like to talk about your own digital workplace collaboration professionally, please send me a private message. I'll be happy to chat.