On Salesforce Buying Slack

Salesforce buying Slack.  Is this Deeper collaboration? Can see some interesting things coming out of this when combined with Salesforces' work in AI. 

Salesforce + Slack mashup signals the rise of Deep Collaboration in Venturebeat

Jake Saper, Emergence Capital  @jakesaper

News this week that Salesforce is acquiring Slack has a lot of people opining on the pros and cons of such a merger. But one thing is clear: combining the collaboration functionality of Slack with the sales productivity tooling of Salesforce represents a monumental step forward in the history of enterprise software.

My team at Emergence Capital have been students of the cloud since we invested in Salesforce in 2002. Ever since, we’ve exclusively focused on enterprise software, partnering with productivity leaders like Box and Veeva as well as collaboration leaders like Yammer and Zoom.

However, an unfortunate truth has emerged as the cloud has matured: Collaboration software is increasingly at odds with productivity. As the number of apps in both categories has exploded, there’s been a huge uptick in data loss (and frustration) as workers pivot across apps to get their work done. It’s tough to stay in flow when you’re constantly forced out of it by your tools.

The solution: Deep Collaboration

Collaboration and productivity tooling evolved separately. The move to remote or hybrid work is the catalyst we’ve needed to fuse them. We used to rely on collaboration tools for lighter weight tasks — updates, check-ins, gif sharing, etc. — and reserve deeper, more substantive collaboration for in-person meetings. The old stack (mostly) worked for that approach.

In a world where deeper collaboration is being done remotely, we need a new stack. Collaboration tooling can’t be a destination. It must be embedded in the work itself.

My team calls this stack Deep Collaboration. The term refers to software that combines productivity and collaboration functionality in one place to get a specific job done. In a Deep Collaboration future, a person doing a specific task doesn’t have to leave a single piece of software to get that job done. All the productivity and collaboration (both internal and external) features they need to accomplish a task live in the same place. .... '