


Best-of-breed companies, which do one thing extremely well, have clear priorities and their incremental edge creates value for customers on mission-critical uses and when customers use them intensely - particularly at large organizations. Why sell after a year of explosive growth? The deal, however, epitomizes a question facing so-called best-of-breed companies such as Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox: how secure is their edge over companies such as Microsoft, which offer integrated software bundles that directly compete. The news that the chat app Slack was being sold to veteran customer relationship management company Salesforce for $27.7 billion raised a lot of eyebrows.
