Meanwhile Salesforce this year saw a massive shift in its customer base as in-person sales suddenly became largely impossible and everyone became an internal sales person, except that they had to do it from their home office (or kitchen table). Sales has gone virtual and isn't going back In playing the long game, Slack wasn't in the right place to capitalize on this year's sudden shifts in behavior. But you don't achieve maturity over a weekend. We have some sympathy at diginomica for Slack's stance, since we have a whole maturity model for enterprise digital teamwork in which Slack performs well. While there were some successful rapid roll-outs, these were typically organizations that were already familiar with Slack. But that didn't lend itself to the kind of overnight switch that the sudden lockdowns of the pandemic demanded. It never aspired to be a quick substitute, it wanted to be a whole new way of working. Slack became a victim of its own ambition. I wish that whole cultures could change overnight. You can't move from e-mail to channel-based messaging in that short amount of time. Here's how he framed it in comments on the company's Q1 earnings call back in June: A frequent lament of Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield back in the spring was that his product was too hard to just pick up. Their success came because swapping in-person collaboration for video meetings is pretty straightforward, even though fatiguing - whereas learning how to use Slack is something people have to work at. Investors had been disappointed with Slack's performance during the pandemic, when the world switched en masse to remote working, and the likes of Zoom and Microsoft Teams saw adoption soar. Its stock has rocketed on the news, while Salesforce's has dipped. The market's reaction to the rumored deal is that Slack is doing well to sell up while it can. Slack's ambition has held it back this year Still, here's why the deal could make sense. But Salesforce was also once in talks to buy LinkedIn, and then Twitter, so don't hold your breath just yet. With Salesforce due to report quarterly numbers next Tuesday and its annual Dreamforce event a day later - albeit virtual this year - it makes sense that Salesforce would want to spend Thanksgiving weekend closing this rumored $17 billion deal.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, CRM giant Salesforce is in advanced talks to buy enterprise messaging platform Slack.

Slack acquisition