But it looks like Microsoft considered paying about $8 billion back in 2016[1].
Slack held out, Microsoft built their competitor and Slack are still around. And now Slack are going to sell for $24 billion or more.
I'm not sure that puts Slack in too bad a light.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/04/source-microsoft-mulled-an...
I still can't quite grasp these acquisition numbers. At that price you expect Slack to generate 1.5-2 billion in profit per year. That's 4 times their current revenue. When you factor in risk and time value of money it becomes more like 3+ billion per year. I just can't imagine a chat app driving that level of profit.
Salesforce is betting that Salesforce + Slack is worth more than the aquisition price. And more than the cost of letting a competitor acquire it.
IF your company is paying to preserve it. At my not-very-tiny employer we only pay for something like 1 year of retention. I have no idea if that's a legal or financial decision, but either way it seems like a dumb one.
As someone who pays for Slack, it would be VERY hard to make a switch. The impact of this in retention and opportunity to monetize the 'integrate workflows' increases the multiplier. Salesforce has probably calculated how this opens up revenue to their existing product line and Slack itself is growing.
I'm not saying this is science but is part of the rationale that goes into the price.
Combining all of these things into one offering is very difficult, and highly valued by both customers and the stock market.
For another perspective, from a WSJ article on Friday:
>"Zoom has grown to more than 300 million daily active participants—a broader measure than daily active users—from around 10 million before the pandemic. Microsoft’s Teams, which offers Zoom and Slack-like features and comes at no extra cost for users of its Office 365 suite, grew from 32 million daily active users at the beginning of the pandemic in March to more than 115 million last month. Slack stopped updating its daily active user number late last year when it reached 12 million." [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/slack-missed-out-on-the-pandemi...
The Zoom metric is totally incomparable (they’re definitely killing it, but that metric counts each user many times over), and Teams is included for free with O365 and the product boundaries are getting blurry - so who knows how much how much actual engagement those users have with the chat or video features.
Obviously public education couldn't use it because of a lack of hardware or internet connection on both sides so it was broadcast over TV.
Sure, it could be that they are lying, but considering how Zooming has become a synonym for video chat, I don't think it is that farfetched.
See: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/30/21242421/zoom-300-million...
(Of course this was all back in April, and especially with their adoption in education maybe they _do_ have 300m DAUs by now - I'm just responding to the metric in the original article.)
They've built a compelling competitor in Teams that is more capable of competing with Zoom than Slack can.