The news doing the rounds this week is that Salesforce is in advanced talks to buy Slack, reportedly for a very large number indeed. Nothing is signed as I write this, the figures are coming out of unnamed sources, and the usual caveats apply. But it is plausible enough that I have spent a couple of days quietly thinking about what it means, because Slack is one of the few tools I genuinely live inside during the working day.
My first reaction was not about features. It was the small, familiar dread of watching a tool you rely on stop being its own thing. I have been through this enough times to recognise the shape of it.
What acquisitions actually do to a tool
The product rarely gets worse overnight. That is not how it goes. What changes is the centre of gravity. A tool that used to optimise for the people who use it starts, gradually, to optimise for the strategy of the company that now owns it. Roadmaps that were about making chat better become roadmaps about fitting into a larger suite. The integrations you cared about get less attention than the integrations that serve the parent's sales motion.
None of that is villainy. It is just gravity. When a thing becomes a feature of a platform rather than a product in its own right, its priorities are set somewhere further from you.
Why I'm not panicking
For all that, I am not rushing to migrate anything. A few reasons.
First, these things move slowly. Even if the deal closes, the Slack I open tomorrow morning will be the same Slack, and probably will be for a good while. Acquisitions of this size spend their first year on lawyers and org charts, not on rewriting the thing you use.
Second, the tools that survive acquisition best are the ones with a clear job and a loyal base, and Slack has both. The risk is not that it gets shut down. The risk is the slow drift towards being a tickbox in someone else's enterprise deck.
Third, and this is the boring grown-up point: I keep my dependence on any single tool shallow on purpose. The important conversations get summarised into the docs and the issue tracker. The decisions live in version control and the wiki, not in a chat scrollback that belongs to a company that just changed hands. If Slack vanished tomorrow I would be annoyed, not stranded, and that is a deliberate position rather than luck.
So I will watch this one with mild interest and a healthy detachment. The tool is good. It may stay good. But the lesson, every time, is the same: enjoy the tools, depend on them lightly, and keep the things that matter somewhere you control.