Oversize #14: With Slack, Salesforce gets a shot at nailing collaboration game

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Editor's note: “May the (Sales)force be with you!” Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack, definitely likes the sound of that.  Slack, since launching in 2013, has done well to establish a new paradigm in workspace collaboration and become the fastest-growing enterprise software tool of all time. But the company has been struggling in the face of the onslaught mounted by Microsoft Teams—as I wrote in the last edition of Oversize—and also failed to cash in on the opportunity that the remote working necessitated by the pandemic has offered. A deep-pocketed owner like Salesforce, with well-established sales and distribution channels inside enterprises, will help Slack overcome those challenges. But what’s in it for Salesforce? After all, at $27.7 billion, it is its biggest acquisition yet. SaaS force Founded in 1999, Salesforce can be credited with pioneering the software-as-a-service industry, focusing on sales and marketing and customer success offerings—CRM (customer relationship management), to use the industry term. As one of the fast-growing cloud software companies, Salesforce went public in 2004 and despite not having much of a mindshare due to the absence of …