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How to plan for a cloudy year ahead

Good morning! This Wednesday, what's new from AWS, Salesforce really did buy Slack and the Facebook Oversight Board picked its first cases.
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Anna Kramer writes: Welcome to the last month of 2020, the year we all had to start caring about vaccine tech and social distancing and ... enterprise cloud software. Yesterday was the kickoff event for AWS re:Invent, one of the most important weeks in the year for the future of the cloud, and Tom Krazit and the rest of the Protocol crew wrote a series of stories about how the pandemic made businesses accelerate their digital transformation.
One big takeaway: This year's new dependence on cloud computing is here to stay, but the majority of companies will likely maintain hybrid cloud infrastructure (a mix of data centers and cloud services) for the foreseeable future.
Microsoft and Google were quicker to embrace the hybrid cloud in an effort to catch up to AWS. And yet AWS remains the most dominant cloud player heading into 2021: It could record well over $40 billion in revenue by the end of the year.
This rest of this week's "The New Enterprise" manual dug into how Zoom managed to handle its exponential user growth without any serious interruptions to service, the challenges of managing cloud spending, the fear of being overly dependent on one cloud provider and more stories to come over the next few days. You can dig into all the details here, where we'll be posting new stories through Friday. And subscribe to Tom's Cloud newsletter, if you haven't already!
It's official! Salesforce is buying Slack for $27.7 billion. Stewart Butterfield will still be in charge, and as he told employees, "we're not changing our roadmap, our brand, or the way we do business." Still, it sounds like Slack is going to become a key cog in the Salesforce machine. With Dreamforce kicking off today, I suspect we'll hear a lot more about how all this is going to work.
It's a tricky moment for M&A in the business-software world, with so many companies riding new tailwinds of success in the pandemic. That makes acquisitions more expensive, but also gives the biggest companies even more money to spend. And many of them want to plant their flag at the center of the future of work while they still can. There's a good chance Slack is only the first of a series of big-ticket deals going forward.
We started thinking about who could be next on the future-of-work M&A target list — established companies, validated by the shift to distributed work, but not hitting Zoom-like growth or price levels — and there are a few companies to watch.
What do you think? Any companies you're keeping an eye on, either as buyers or sellers, in the coming months? Reply to this email or send me a note at david@protocol.com.
The Facebook Oversight Board has chosen the first six cases it will adjudicate, setting a tone and expectation for what the independent group cares about. Five cases come from user appeals, and one comes from Facebook itself. Here are the six:
So, lots of politics, lots of questions about context and intent, and lots of potential ramifications from the rulings. The Board's asking for public comment on each one before making its decisions in the coming weeks.
At Micron, we see an opportunity to establish memory and storage platform capabilities that will unleash software developers to deliver solutions that speed insight and ultimately support emerging customer requirements. The data-centric era has ushered in a new opportunity to tap data for business growth, but many companies continue to struggle to transform mounting data stores into competitive advantage.
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Elon Musk is worried that Tesla's stock price might be too high:
A group of shareholders is suing Pinterest over allegations about its work culture:
Nasdaq wants to require companies to have more diverse boards, and the stock exchange's president Nelson Griggs said every company should take it seriously:
Brian Pinkerton is a new SVP at Roku, where he'll lead advanced technology development. He's the former chief architect for Siri at Apple, and will be working across all of Roku's platform.
HPE is moving to Houston. It's making the Texas city its new headquarters, and has been building a new campus there since the beginning of the year. It's keeping its office in San Jose, but plans to relocate a lot of employees to Houston. Cybersecurity company Tanium also relocated, moving its HQ from the Bay Area to Kirkland, Washington.
Adam Nash and Alejandro Crosa are starting a new company. What it will be is still a mystery, but Nash said that "We believe that there is a lot more to do in consumer fintech, and that software can help bring purpose to our financial lives."
It's year-end list time, and Spotify's Wrapped lists are always among my favorites. (They're a great litmus test for how old you are: The more names you know, the younger and hipper you are, which means I am approximately 153 years old.) This year's big winners? Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, The Joe Rogan Experience and the notion that Spotify is a thoroughly global company with a thoroughly global audience. Oh, and Drake. Drake always wins.
At Micron, we see an opportunity to establish memory and storage platform capabilities that will unleash software developers to deliver solutions that speed insight and ultimately support emerging customer requirements. The data-centric era has ushered in a new opportunity to tap data for business growth, but many companies continue to struggle to transform mounting data stores into competitive advantage.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Anna Kramer and Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you tomorrow.
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