The world was taken by surprise when Microsoft in the early part of the year announced that he was taking over LinkedIn at the sum of $26.2 billion. The new plan however is that Salesforce is working towards using the European Union to make sure the deal does not go through.
Burke Norton, Chief Salesforce legal officer, is basing his argument to EU’s competition authority that allowing Microsoft to take over LinkedIn will results to the market being anticompetitive. Chief Margarethe Vestager of EU competition in January disclosed that the agency she oversees we look into issues of a company making use of data to compete and if it is a bad idea.
According to Norton, sole acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft will destroy the future of competition and innovation. Still on the matter, Norton said that allowing Microsoft to have not less than 450 million professionals in different parts of the world all to itself will make having access to the data impossible, making the other companies to be disadvantaged competitively.
This case reveals the unfriendly relationship between Salesforce and Microsoft. The two companies were in the early part of the year fighting over acquisition of LinkedIn. For this reason, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce has been taking jabs at Microsoft ever since.
Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, did not pretend when he made fun of Salesforce while emphasizing Microsoft’s dominance of the market.
Smith noted that the deal is as good as closed in states like United States, Brazil and Canada. He said that his company is in the market so as to remove the monopoly that was otherwise controlled by Salesforce, which they used as an advantage to charge customers a very high price.
Although, EU may not be able to stop Microsoft from getting LinkedIn, it can decide to look deeply into the deal which could prevent the deal from being closed for months to come. This idea will not make both companies happy since the two companies wants the matter closed this year.
Even after it became obvious that Salesforce is sharing a partnership with Microsoft, the former prefer to make use of Amazon’s cloud in running its workloads. We also saw Microsoft making use of HP enterprise to migrate to Dynamics 365 from Salesforce. This was not the case in 2014 when the two companies were a whole lot friendlier.
