Hello, and welcome to this Wednesday's edition of the Insider Tech newsletter, where we break down the biggest news in tech.
$4
This week: The tech mega-deal that COVID brokered
The year of the pandemic is closing with what may be remembered as the era's signature deal. $4 — its largest acquisition ever — to buy
What a change a few months make: It was only in August that
- And Salesforce's recent pattern of $4, like Tableau and MuleSoft, are very clearly skewed towards assets involving data analytics and back-end cloud systems integration — not quite the same breed of product as a chatroom app.
- Salesforce's growing rivalry with Microsoft however, means it was likely to eventually find its way to Slack.
But what about the person on the other side of the table — Slack founder and CEO
This is the guy who sold his first startup Flickr to Yahoo $4. If anyone would be reluctant to sell out to a big company it would be him, right?
It's an interesting question amid $4. And it's not very difficult to make the argument Microsoft's anticompetitive tactics effectively forced Slack into a marriage with Salesforce, unable to compete on its own.
- Microsoft has overtly leveraged its installed base of Office 365 users to promote Teams, its Slack competitor. Butterfield accused Microsoft of trying to kill his company, and even filed an $4 earlier this year.
Don't count on this deal being scuttled by regulators though.
Butterfield himself may have also made the case for why its acquisition is a good outcome.
"We could sell it right now for a billion dollars" $4 "The thing is, those options aren't going to go away."
Butterfield was right. His options didn't go away. They increased by about 2,700%.
Read more of our coverage on the big Salesforce-Slack deal:
Showdown: $4
On Tuesday night President Trump took another shot at $4 — the decades-old law that shields internet companies from liability over content posted by users. In a series of late-night tweets, Trump $4 unless the bill also contained a provision to "completely terminate"
The backstory: Trump's obsession with Section 230 was probably stoked by a weekend of derision on Twitter in which $4 poked fun at the curiously small desk Trump sat behind during a press conference. (Tellingly, Trump's Tuesday night tweets made reference to the "very beautiful Resolute desk.")
There's no obvious connection between Section 230 and the defense bill. But $4 that Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican, had proposed slipping a provision limiting some of Section 230 into the defense bill as a compromise over a sticking point about renaming military bases.
With Trump's threat of a veto, this attempt at compromise has now become an ultimatum. But Trump's term ends in eight weeks, so it's not clear how much leverage he really has.
$4
"Candidly, some of those leaving have already found great wealth here in the Bay Area ecosystem, and so they have the privilege of leaving and declaring some other city 'the next big thing.'"
—