Salesforce Goes To War With Microsoft Over LinkedIn Acquisition

When Microsoft won the bidding war for LinkedIn, Salesforce immediately jumped on the hate bandwagon. Now, the latter is arguing for regulators to stop the acquisition as it could be bad for business; their business, to be specific. Salesforce is basically afraid that they would lose one of their most valuable sources of revenue once the user data of LinkedIn members gets locked out by Microsoft.

Microsoft and Salesforce have been butting heads for quite a while, Business Insider reports, so the acquisition sabotage is not exactly surprising. Even as the CRM provider does its best to derail Microsoft’s deal with LinkedIn, however, the Windows creator is also gearing up to fight back.

The chief legal officer at Microsoft, Brad Smith sent an email clarifying that the company he represents is well within its rights to proceed with the acquisition. It already got the approval of several relevant countries to prove it too. More than that, Smith also declared Microsoft’s intention to shake up the market that Salesforce is currently dominating, which is one of the reasons why the company is so worried about the acquisition.

"Salesforce may not be aware, but the deal has already been cleared to close in the United States, Canada, and Brazil,” the email reads. “We’re committed to continuing to work to bring price competition to a CRM market in which Salesforce is the dominant participant charging customers higher prices today."

Salesforce won’t be taking that sitting down and is sending its Chief Legal Officer, Burke Norton to speak at the competition authority of the EU. The main point that he will be arguing is how Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn would be bad for competition, PC World reports.

While a complete stop to the acquisition might be unlikely at this point, analysts are saying that the EU competition authority could slap some additional conditions on the deal. It won’t prevent Microsoft from getting ownership of LinkedIn, but it can make things more complicated.