Amid the massive drop in its stock price on Thursday, the largest single day loss for a company in stock market history, Facebook announced a deal that it struck for Redkix. The move on the Israeli email and messaging platform, reported to be worth around $100 million, represents a bid to boost Facebook’s Workplace offering as competitors increase market share in the enterprise communications and workplace collaboration sector.
Later that day, rival chat platform Slack announced its agreement to acquire Atlassian‘s Hipchat and Stride messaging products in a partnership between the two collaboration companies.
Can’t beat ’em? Have you tried joining ’em?
The deals dial up the heat on the war brewing for how we chat, collaborate and circulate documents alongside clever little memes and gifs. Consider for a moment the stakes involved.
By some estimates, enterprise communications represents a roughly $70 billion industry. As people’s social media use evolves from a grab bag of cat videos, conspiracy theories and links to news stories, many of us have moved into much smaller, more private groups predicated on shared work and interests.
Facebook has recognized that with the launch of various community-building efforts on its platform meant to stitch people together out in the wider world. But workplace groups, built around teams collaborating on projects, represent an organic community of sorts already in place. And Facebook and Slack have joined a pitched battle for larger slices of our attention on that front.
They’re not alone in recognizing this fact about contemporary workflow and communications habits. Indeed, in a deal mooted and then eclipsed the following day by its game-changing acquisition of Whole foods, Amazon emerged for a hot second as a potential suitor for Slack last June.
The battle brewing between Facebook and Slack should also be seen in the context of two important deals struck in recent years by Microsoft in the collaboration and communications space. It purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016, handing the tech giant control of the world’s largest network of working professionals. And Microsoft’s $7.5 billion deal for GitHub earlier this summer signaled that Microsoft could also deploy its valuable stock to elbow its way into an influential community of millions of coders.
Full Article and Article Credits – https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/the-battle-over-workplace-collaboration-just-went-from-cold-war-to-giphy-hot