Change at the Top?

Salesforce

According to The Information, “the company’s No. 2 executive, Bret Taylor, has confided to people close to him that he expects to be promoted to CEO of Salesforce soon”. The soon bit is the surprise for me, but as I’ve mentioned before, if Taylor expects to be CEO there will be a bunch of other companies waiting to steal him away from Salesforce with exactly that offer. If it does happen, it will be interesting to see how the market takes it, as Salesforce is very much perceived as Marc Benioff and vice versa.

Seeking Alpha suggests that Box may be a target for a Salesforce takeover. Prior to the pandemic I’d have viewed this as an odd thing to go after, but now that Slack is the future of work for Salesforce, a cloud content management company looks complementary. Box is currently valued around $3.6 billion, which compared to the Slack acquisition is small potatoes.

An actual acquisition rather than a rumour, Salesforce has entered into an agreement to acquire LevelJump.io.

Pip White returns to Salesforce as Senior VP and GM for Slack EMEA, after 15 months at Google.

The Atlantic has a great article on Slack, pointing out some of the unexpected (by CEOs) effects, like helping workers get organised and hold their employers to account.

According to ZDNet, Tech workers are very keen on remote working, but employers aren’t entirely convinced. I’m still convinced that the remote working genie isn’t going back into the bottle, so companies need to find new ways to handle any team working challenges. Reverting back to the old way will cause other problems, as according to the article “Almost three-quarters (72%) of tech workers surveyed by Hackajob cited remote working as one of the key perks they looked for as part of a jobs package”.

Other

An awful lot of the tech news recently has been about the Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who testified before congress that the company consistently puts its own profits over users’ health and safety. Frances will be appearing before a UK parliamentary committee on October 25th.

Me

Winter 22 gives flows the ability to rollback changes when an error occurs, but only those in the current transaction. Digging into this led me to write a blog post on Transaction Boundaries in Salesforce (Apex and Flow)