Salesforce.com is buying work-chatting service Slack for $27.7 billion

The Slack acquisition announced on Tuesday is by far the largest in the 21-year history of Salesforce.com. Business software pioneer Salesforce.com is buying work-chatting service Slack for $27.7 billion in a deal aimed at giving the two companies a better shot at competing against longtime industry powerhouse Microsoft. Before news reports of a potential deal with Salesforce surfaced last week, Slack’s stock was still hovering around its initial listing price of $26 when the company went public nearly 18 months ago. “Microsoft Teams is eating Slack’s lunch.” Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield will be hoping this sale works out better than when another company he started, photo-sharing service Flickr, was sold to Yahoo 15 years ago. A few years later, he shifted to the instant messaging service whose name was an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.” Leggett predicted Salesforce would benefit from owning Slack because it will add a popular collaboration tool to its own software suite, which is focused on managing customer relationships for businesses and government agencies.