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Making sense of the $28 billion Salesforce-Slack deal

02 December 2020
Dan Ackermann

As with most big deals in tech, the key question to ask about Salesforce's $28 billion purchase of Slack isn't whether the price is too high or low, but whether the combination makes sense.

Between the lines: Big Tech companies have plenty of their own cash and can easily borrow more, but only a finite amount of time to innovate before rivals capture their turf.

  • In explaining the deal to investors on a previously scheduled conference call, CEO Marc Benioff characterized the move as a bet that the pandemic-driven shift to remote work isn't a temporary blip but rather a permanent transformation.

The big picture: Benioff has long considered acquiring widely used business tools as a means to expand Salesforce's footprint beyond the sales and marketing teams and into the broader workforce.

  • Salesforce kicked the tires on Twitter and lost out to Microsoft in a bidding war for LinkedIn.

Slack has the lead in its still-nascent space, but was facing a challenge of its own — namely that Microsoft's rival Teams was bundled into Office subscriptions.

  • As a standalone company, Slack couldn't easily manage such a move, nor could it afford to get into a price war.

What they're saying: Box CEO Aaron Levie praised the deal, noting how Salesforce has grown beyond its initial goals of taking on Oracle and SAP.

  • "This isn't just about the future of 'collaboration,'" he wrote in a blog post. "This is a new 'operating system' for how knowledge workers will interact in the future, connecting the front office, back office, and customers all together in a single platform."

Yes, but: The death of a standalone Slack isn't just sad for customers who liked the upstart, but also a blow to those who held up the company as proof that small companies could still take on the Big Tech giants.

What's next: The deal still needs regulatory approvals and also a formal go-ahead from shareholders — although 55% of Slack's voting power is already committed to supporting the sale.

Go deeper: Salesforce's Slack deal resets the tech antitrust debate

Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times

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Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.

Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.

The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.

  • The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.

What the transcripts say:

  • Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
  • The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
  • Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."

Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.