Salesforce adds Slack, while Uber focuses on its core business

There are two big strategies companies should employ all the time: growth and focus. Growth is about exploring new capabilities, new markets and new customers. We’re seeing this with some recent news about Salesforce buying Slack.

Focus is about doing away all of the extras and doubling down on what you see as your core business. Today, this is Uber’s approach.

These are two great recent examples I can explore below.

Salesforce customers can start Slacking now

SalesForce just acquired Slack for $27.7 billion. Sorry, let me rephrase that: Slack is being rescued by Salesforce from Microsoft's jaws of death (which I recently discussed elsewhere. The momentum that Microsoft already has thanks to email, combined with the integration of Office 365 and a free license to Teams, makes it very difficult for any competitor to displace Microsoft).

I’ve watched closely over the years as Slack has kept building a well-architected, easy-to-use product. And SalesForce - the behemoth known best for its CRM, sees the value in Slack. It wants to give its users better online collaboration and workflow capabilities. Removing as much dependency on Microsoft is the objective here.

Longer term, this kind of synergy, enabling communication among teams within the same ecosystem, will create possibilities for something that not everyone sees.

It’s a bit of an open secret that it will become a source of information for powerful technology built with machine learning.

However, as I explained earlier, Microsoft will remain a strong nemesis for Salesforce for years to come.

Not only is Microsoft heavily investing in Dynamics 365 (ERP and CRM in one package), It also owns LinkedIn, the ever growing source for intelligence gathering about individuals, companies and their buying signals. Since Microsoft bought LinkedIn, there has been very little appearance of integration into the MS universe, but that will come.

For now, Slack is safe.


Uber is getting focused on their core business

Companies need to do their own R&D to innovate their current offer or products, to remain relevant in the market and build for the future.

But there is a danger of sticking with a bad idea because of sunk costs.

It is expensive to do that and when your main line of business is not doing that great. It is hard to justify the ongoing cost. Second, the company may simply be working on a problem that is too difficult to solve without more years of effort -- not to mention, regulatory hurdles.

All of those reasons are why Uber is in talks with Aurora to sell its self driving unit Advanced Technology Group (ATG).

When you combine this with its ongoing regulatory challenges to operate in various markets, Uber needs no more headaches. If Aurora (or any other company for that matter) is successful in its effort to launch a self-driving car, it will be much easier to create a legal barrier between itself and any liability lawsuits.

At this moment, Uber wants to become the lean, mean, (finally) profitable machine. So, this is the strategy that makes sense, now.

There is not one strategy that will work for every business. But focus and growth should be there all the time.


And that’s the recurrent pattern.