Internet Explorer is DEAD. Finally. After decades of making lives miserably for thousands upon thousands of front end developers across the globe, we can finally celebrate the end of Internet Explorer. For me, this is a great relief and yet another remnant of the Steve Ballmer area that I am happy to see put to rest. Microsoft will not put their efforts into Microsoft Edge, which like most things that has been introduced under Satya Nadella seems to be pretty good.

Microsoft has finally announced the death of Internet Explorer as they officially retire and end support for Internet Explorer 11. It has been a long time coming, and many of us old people have grown up with Internet Explorer. Some of us even remember the battle with Netscape, back in the days before Netscape became Mozilla and then re-invented itself as Firefox. We have seen Internet Explorer almost gain monopoly status, only to slowly die as Firefox and Chrome ate away the market share.

As frontend developers, many have cursed over the course that Microsoft steered Internet Explorer under Steve Ballmer's reign, always insisting on having its own quirks that forced countless hours to "fix". For many years, front end developers had to support the hated Internet Explorer 6 because it had been built in into many company solutions at the time. It was hell. Pure and simple.

Ever since, Internet Explorer has been despised for its reluctance to conform with standards the other browsers agreed upon and for the need to polyfill and CSS hack just to make websites cope with the madness.

I, for one, are glad that Internet Explorer is dead.

Now, rest in peace and long live Edge.

Salesforce announced on January 1st that they have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the very popular communication and collaboration platform Slack. The price tag for this acquisition is a staggering 27.7 billion us dollars. This is the biggest software acquisition of 2020 and it will have a big impact on the communications market for 2021.

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SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 1, 2020 – Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, and Slack Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: WORK), the most innovative enterprise communications platform, have entered into a definitive agreement under which Salesforce will acquire Slack. Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020. 

- Salesforce News

This is no small acquisition by any means and with Slack becoming and integrated part of the Salesforce Customer 360 suite it will make ripples across the communications and collaboration ecosystem for sure. Slack have been loosing ground to Microsoft's Teams in the last years and it will be interesting to see what the future holds for Slack with this acquisition.

For Salesforce, I think this is a great acquisition as it will add a very popular and useful communication service into their products. They also get a huge customer database with millions of Slack users that they can try to convert into Salesforce customers. Hopefully this will also make their Salesforce Customer 360 suite more attractive because they will need to bring in quite a few customers to cover that price tag.

For existing Slack users I don't think there will be much that will change in the short term. I assume Slack will still be available as a standalone product, just like for example Trello was when Atlassian purchased them. Speaking of Atlassian it will be interesting to see what this means as Atlassian have been closely collaborating with Slack since Atlassian cancelled their own chat based collaboration  tools Hipchat and Stride that was sold to Slack in February 2019.

This acquisition surprised me a bit to be honest, but from a business perspective it makes sense from both lack and Salesforce perspective I think. It will be interesting to see what this means and if we might finally see a proper enterprise version of Slack or if Slack will slowly phase into Salesforce products and vanish...

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Details on the Proposed Transaction

The board of directors of each of Salesforce and Slack have approved the transaction and the Slack board recommends that Slack stockholders approve the transaction and adopt the merger agreement. The transaction is anticipated to close in the second quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2022, subject to approval by the Slack stockholders, the receipt of required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Salesforce has also entered into a voting agreement with certain stockholders of Slack common stock, under which each such stockholder has agreed to vote all of their Slack shares in favor of the transaction at the special meeting of Slack stockholders to be held in connection with the transaction, subject to certain terms and conditions. The Slack shares subject to the agreement represent approximately 55% of the current outstanding voting power of the Slack common stock.

Salesforce expects to fund the cash portion of the transaction consideration with a combination of new debt and cash on Salesforce’s balance sheet. Salesforce has obtained a commitment from Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Bank of America, N.A. and JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. for a $10.0 billion senior unsecured 364-day bridge loan facility, subject to customary conditions.

- Source: Slack Announcement

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Vaam.io is a Swedish “video as a message” service that was started by Josef Fallesen, Hampus Persson and Gohar Avagyan that I worked with on the H&M project. Vaam is a very easy to use service that has a lot to offer, even though it is still very new and under rapid development.

I first noticed Vaam.io on LinkedIn and since Gohar is an amazing designer I looked into it. What I found was a service that is incredibly simple to use, yet very powerful. It has a lot of potential and I will make use of it here on the site as soon as I figure out the best way to use it. I have some ideas on how to implement it, but there are some technical issues I need to figure out first. This is on my end though, not with Vaam.

So, what does Vaam do? Simply put it allow you to record yourself while interacting with whatever you have on your screen. So it can be used as a presentation or as a quick message as you can link directly from your Vaam library.

Once you have recorded a message, then you have several options already, and more are on the way. You can download the video of course as well as sharing the recording in multiple ways. One interesting feature is to link as a Gif for emails and things like that.

In order to use Vaam today you need to install an app that is currently only available for Chrome. Once installed you simply click a button and start recording. Once done your recording is automatically added to your library and you can share it or delete it if you did not like it.

As with all startups the team behind Vaam are very active, and they have invited people to a Vaam slack where the so called Vaambassadors provide feedback and discuss features with the team.

I think Vaam have a bright future ahead and Vaam.io and the team have secured plenty of funds already.

Episerver invest for the future as they complete their Acquisition of my favorite A/B testing tool Optimizely. With this acquisition Episerver strengthen their platform offer, and they now claim that they have the industry's most advanced Digital Experience Platform.

Episerver have long been one of the big names in content management and digital experience and Optimizely have been fighting for the title of the king of A/B testing  against VWO for many years. This combination of forces makes sense as it will add value to both companies as they combine their customer bases.

Will this take Episerver closer to Adobe who sit comfortably at the top of the digital experience market, if for nothing else than revenue alone. I doubt it very much, but it should bring them closer if nothing else. Hopefully though we will see more people start experimenting as Optimizely becomes more accessible and integrated.

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“While every B2B and B2C company is online today, not every team is using customer insights to confidently seize new opportunities and adapt to challenges,” said Alex Atzberger, CEO of Episerver. “I’m thrilled that with the completion of our acquisition of Optimizely, we are democratizing experimentation so companies can replace guesswork with evidence-based outcomes that drive transformation, customer engagement and brand differentiation.”

- Episerver Press Release

Transaction Details

Episerver is a privately held portfolio company of Insight Partners, purchased in 2018 at $1.16B. Insight Partners acted as the strategic advisor and sponsor for Episerver’s acquisition of Optimizely, as well as the company’s 2019 acquisitions of B2B commerce leader Insite Software and analytics and personalization provider Idio. Now with Optimizely, Insight Partners further advances Episerver’s market-leading product. In the same manner, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC served as exclusive financial advisor to Optimizely.

A global Internet Outage that is affecting thousands of services is currently in effect. It seems that the origin is Level3 / Centurylink which affects not just games, but also internet traffic and even phone services. It is safe to say that people are not happy at the moment.

It seems that this started just before lunch swedish time and reports of network issues started flood in right after that. Popular games suddenly had server issues and the list of affected services on Downdetector grew fast. Centurylink seem to have some serious issues right now as they seem to have somehow manage to break IPv4 and IPv6 making traffic loop without finding their intended destination.

Besides breaking a large portion of services it also seem that their ISP part is also down, causing a lot of people loose their Internet connection. This also affect IP based phone services of course, which could be a big problem.

Based on reports from different sources, such as the Cloud Helix status page it seems that CenturyLink have identified multiple Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) issues causing service impacts across multiple markets. This would explain the IPv4 and IPv6 issues and it is not a total surprise that the now 26 year old protocol would be the cause.

We are still waiting fo the official word from CenturyLink that has remained dead silent about the situation. That is never a good sign, even if it is a sunday and the world in general is a bit crazy.

We hope for a quick resolution and hope everyone affected remain safe and calm.