Salesforce and Microsoft broaden partnership, which will include integration of Skype, OneNote, and new Salesforce 1 Mobile app for Windows 10 for cloud tools
Ron Miller / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2015 deal lands just weeks after Microsoft moved to strengthen its own customer-service stack by acquiring FieldOne Systems for Dynamics — so Microsoft is arming a competitor's mobile app while building its rival. The partnership puts Salesforce1 Mobile on Windows 10 and wires Skype and OneNote into Salesforce workflows.
The arc since then shows Salesforce treating these alliances as a portfolio: it followed with Slack-Salesforce integrations in 2016, turned integration itself into product after the MuleSoft acquisition, and later extended the playbook with an AWS partnership built around data sharing and app-building. The Microsoft pact is the early template — co-opetition with whoever owns the user's desktop.
First-order effects
- Salesforce customers running Windows 10 get native access points — Skype calling and OneNote capture tied into CRM records — without leaving Microsoft's apps.
- Microsoft gains Salesforce presence inside Office-era tools even though its own Dynamics business, freshly expanded via FieldOne, sells against Salesforce directly.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft has to balance the alliance against its Dynamics push, keeping FieldOne-built mobile service capabilities from cannibalizing goodwill with Salesforce's installed base.
- Collaboration-tool vendors like Slack respond by cutting their own direct Salesforce deals, as the 2016 integration wave did, rather than waiting for Microsoft-mediated paths.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise SaaS competition settles into serial cross-vendor integration agreements rather than winner-take-all platform wars, with each vendor hedging by embedding rivals' software.
- Integration shifts from ad hoc partnerships toward a product category of its own — the direction Salesforce formalized with Integration Cloud after buying MuleSoft.
The trend: Enterprise cloud leaders increasingly compete and integrate simultaneously, signing serial cross-platform partnership deals that treat interoperability as strategy rather than surrender.