Salesforce cements its B2B strategy with a possible (pricey) Slack-quisition

Set your status back to "Active"... Just before Thanksgiving break, news broke that Salesforce is in advanced talks to buy Slack — according to WSJ's infamous "people familiar with the matter" (#PFWTM). Slack is the office messaging app that rules your life. Salesforce is the cloud software company obsessed with Customer relationship management (CRM). Think: salespeople compulsively logging interactions with leads — "sent 808th cold email to CFO."

• Slack stock soared 39% for the week. The deal would likely value it at more than $17B, making it Salesforce's biggest acquisition. Slack hasn't been doing as well as Zoom in the WFH boom.
• Salesforce stock dipped 4% on the possibility of another pricey acquisition. Over its 21-year history, Salesforce has leapfrogged by buying 60+ companies.

Joining #baby-yoda-memes channel... Salesforce and Slack have two things in common: they're both business-facing subscription cloud companies and they're both Microsoft rivals. Lately, Microsoft has been aggressively expanding its Teams suite, offering Slack-like collaboration features. It also has a cloud CRM competitor called Dynamics.

• Over the years, Salesforce has moved towards becoming an "all-in-one" business software provider, offering services like data analytics.
• This Slack-quisition would give it 130K+ paying Slack customers to further that goal — and gain an edge on Microsoft.