Salesforce gets some Slack

MARC BENIOFF got the idea for the “ohana” corporate culture on a sabbatical in Hawaii. The term refers to a network of families bound together. He likes to think of Salesforce, the world’s third-biggest software firm, which he founded and runs, as just such a network. On December 1st Mr Benioff welcomed Slack, an instant-messaging tool, to his ohana. The $27.7bn deal is one of the biggest ever in the software industry.

Like many family alliances the tie-up is partly about power and feuds. Slack’s product has a cultlike following, which Salesforce wants to harness to build a tech platform that sells digital tools that no firm can do without. Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s co-founder, hailed it (hyperbolically) as “the most strategic combination in the history of software”. The feud is with Microsoft, whose advances Slack spurned four years ago. The deal makes Salesforce a far more formidable challenger to the giant.

Mr Benioff may be best known to the public for championing corporate “purpose” (and owning Time magazine). But in his own industry he wins kudos for disruptive innovation. In the 2000s the young Salesforce basically invented software-as-a-service (SaaS)—accessing programs remotely rather than installing them on office computers—particularly for managing customer relationships. Microsoft...