>And now Slack are going to sell for $24 billion or more.
I still can't quite grasp these acquisition numbers. At that price you expect Slack to generate 1.5-2 billion in profit per year. That's 4 times their current revenue. When you factor in risk and time value of money it becomes more like 3+ billion per year. I just can't imagine a chat app driving that level of profit.
It's a chat app that integrates to most other services you use and ends up being the most extensive repository to all of the information shared inside your company.
As someone who pays for Slack, it would be VERY hard to make a switch. The impact of this in retention and opportunity to monetize the 'integrate workflows' increases the multiplier. Salesforce has probably calculated how this opens up revenue to their existing product line and Slack itself is growing.
I'm not saying this is science but is part of the rationale that goes into the price.
I think it is a _little bit_ off to just consider Slack to be a chat app. Sure chat is the core function...One thing I find super valuable about Slack is that it is a searchable archive. When a new person joins a company, they have literally years and years worth of searchable content. This helps get up to speed, cuts down on time spent asking questions etc. I find myself searching Slack many times a day pretty much every day at work. Not to mention automated workflows, calendar, drive integration etc.
> When a new person joins a company, they have literally years and years worth of searchable content.
IF your company is paying to preserve it. At my not-very-tiny employer we only pay for something like 1 year of retention. I have no idea if that's a legal or financial decision, but either way it seems like a dumb one.
This is the exact reason we use Discord at my day job. Unlimited history for free. We still also get plenty of other integrations, webhooks, and bot-building for other automated things.
User account retention you mean? This is why I try to shy away from work-related conversations in private messages (only casual chat) and encourage everything to happen in channels, which in turn are preserved.
Definitely legal. In Teams our messages are only retained for 90 days. You have to create a team for messages to be stored permanently. Similar for surveillance footage. Fortune 50
If you are only required to keep data for one year and you keep it for 2 years, you can still be subpoenaed for that 2 year old data if you keep it. Thus, keeping data for longer than you are required is an increased business risk.
I've seen Slack, HipChat, Slack (round 2), Flock, and now Teams in as many years, at the same employer. I can't even say anything snarky about the people making these decisions because they're so far up and removed from us developers, I don't know anything about them. The whole thing is just comical now.
>"I'm not sure that puts Slack in too bad a light."
For another perspective, from a WSJ article on Friday:
>"Zoom has grown to more than 300 million daily active participants—a broader measure than daily active users—from around 10 million before the pandemic. Microsoft’s Teams, which offers Zoom and Slack-like features and comes at no extra cost for users of its Office 365 suite, grew from 32 million daily active users at the beginning of the pandemic in March to more than 115 million last month. Slack stopped updating its daily active user number late last year when it reached 12 million." [1]
The Zoom metric is totally incomparable (they’re definitely killing it, but that metric counts each user many times over), and Teams is included for free with O365 and the product boundaries are getting blurry - so who knows how much how much actual engagement those users have with the chat or video features.
300 million for zoom is actually kind of believable. Here in Mexico private schools were using Zoom for virtual classes. I know of many other countries who took the same route.
Obviously public education couldn't use it because of a lack of hardware or internet connection on both sides so it was broadcast over TV.
When you report Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users, you report distinct daily users. So unless each one of these users are using a different device with no identifying features to connect them under a same identifier, the numbers are more or less accurate. Users who do not use the application during the period are not counted.
Sure, it could be that they are lying, but considering how Zooming has become a synonym for video chat, I don't think it is that farfetched.
Sure, but the Zoom metric is not "Daily Active Users" it is "Daily Active Meeting Participants". They've been very clear that this counts each time a user joins a meeting.
(Of course this was all back in April, and especially with their adoption in education maybe they _do_ have 300m DAUs by now - I'm just responding to the metric in the original article.)
Teams is completely failing to replace Slack in my experience. I think it's must closer to replacing Zoom. I use all 3 daily.
Teams is strong in file storage, direct messages and video calling.
Slack is strong in channel messaging.
I would argue they barely compete, the Slack file storage and video are not great, and the Teams channel messaging is unusable and appears unfixable.
> So welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution. We’re glad you’re going to be helping us define this new product category. We admire many of your achievements and know you’ll be a worthy competitor. We’re sure you’re going to come up with a couple of new ideas on your own too. And we’ll be right there, ready.
This whole thing is dripping with condescension and ego. It reads like a nasty letter written to an ex-girlfriend about how you're super successful now and gee I'm glad you're doing well too. Yuck.
They come across as egregiously sardonic. I feel that same voice was evident with the whole fuss around their shitty WYSIWYG addition before they gave in and allowed you to turn it off.
> Third, you’ve got to do this with love. You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working.
This is so cringe-inducing, I can't believe they paid to have this in the NYT. Microsoft stock up to all-time highs as Teams eats Slack's lunch (for better or worse), while Slack bought for scrap by a company way worse than MSFT. Maybe don't publicly shame potential acquirers in passive-aggressive paid advertisements?
Agreed. I think in 2016 Slack just got absorbed in their own thing. Slack is pretty good and has some nice features but not really anything a big Acme corp can't copy. And I'd expect Slack to be another case where 90% of people just use direct & channel messaging, no or few apps, etc. which means the switching costs are very low.
Although on another side, MS Teams is still miles behind Slack. While you can be signed into multiple orgs in Teams, switching orgs literally restarts the program which means that switching from your org to a client's org is super disruptive. If you are in a video call your only option is to open teams in the browser to view another organization.
Yet the mobile app version seems to allow team switching pretty easily. So disappointing, as I've had multiple clients switch to teams over the last year. It was easier to keep multiple slack channels open and jump between as needed to keep an eye on things. Teams is really only focused on 'internal teams at one company' - users external to a company are, at best, an afterthought.
Microsoft's IAM features have always suffered from design by committee. See: Team Foundation Server, SharePoint.
The only explanation I've been able to come up with for how such a technically competent company can repeatedly generate such UX incompetent output is that they source all their IAM features from talking to (1) PMs & (2) HR.
I would agree with the low barrier to switch. At my last company, we switched 3 times within a year. Away from Slack, then to Stride, and back to Slack (due to stride being discontinued). The point being that it wasn't too difficult to switch. We didn't suffer from "lock-in" or anything.
I work at a large corporation. We had teams that were using all kinds of different collaborative tools. A LOT of teams were using Slack.
About four months ago, the edict came down, everybody was being moved to Teams. Usually you hear a lot of grumbling and lots of internal postings about how much better Slack or other tools are, this is a stupid move, etc.
This time? Exact opposite. People liked the integrating of most of their MS tools in once place. The transition was pretty smooth and people were happy about moving to Teams. Now, instead of using several different tools, I basically just use Teams now for most of my daily workflow.
I'm not sure how the move went at other companies, but it went a lot smoother than I thought it would here.
Slack’s today’s valuation is ~25B so my guess is Salesforce would buy them for around 30B. If that’s scrap to you then dip me in it 24*7 and never take me out
> You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working.
Another day in PR cringe. Yet another zero information statement.
IIRC sometime last year teams passed slack for daily & weekly users pretty comprehensively.
Office 365 is heading close to 200m users. Slack and Teams use is both in the low 10s, but teams is growing fast into that 200m since it is bundled and interacts with the other parts.
The bit about love and 'open platform is essential' reads pretty rich when they removed token support, killing off slack-keep-presence (https://github.com/eskerda/slack-keep-presence) so that you can be more thoroughly surveilled. Do they give admins productivity scores of all employees yet?
We tried Slack in the early days. No way we could run that across the entire business. It was clear back with Slack being then a cloud based, Electron based, lacking of MS Office integration, lacking Active directory integration a Microsoft me too offering would take all the market share. I’m surprised they didn’t do more to address this. Obviously Covid has massively accelerated Teams adoption too but it was a no brainer for businesses running Office 365.
I’m surprised they so clearly copied Apple’s letter to IBM, which turned out to be a letter to Microsoft. We know how that turned out in the 80s and 90s.
I'm a former MSFT employee with direct knowledge of the situation. There was an offer (not saying the amount), and Slack countered with a price that we deemed far too high.
Personally I thought we should have moved forward, but it wasn't anything I had a say in.
No proof, you'll just have to take my word for it.
It was a sad, sad day when our CVP forced our org to cancel our Slack plan and move to Teams. What a garbage piece of software it was back then. Probably still is, but it's been years since I was last subjected to it.
What official evidence can there be of a failed acquisition? News agencies with a good reputation and track record reporting on insider sources is as close as you are going to get.
They're maintaining the platform fine I'd say, which is quite a bit of work when you consider the frameworks and databases they offer.
As far as I am aware they had python 3 available a long time ago (long before the competition) and they have beta versions of some tools so you can test in advance.
I have to push back on this. Salesforce backpacks seem to be a huge hit with the homeless. I've seen them in multiple major cities now and they are almost de rigueur in SF.
So, how do search every public channel, regardless of whether you were even a part of the company at the time, with as convenient of a workflow as Slack has?
There's nothing wrong with IRC if you are trying to solve the problems of IRC. They don't solve the business problem as well as slack does. Slack is Slack because of search and an easy to use client with a universal extension set.
I get that people want this, I just don't get why. After 20 years of work as a sysadmin/coder/DBA, I've never even remotely wanted this.
Documentation is the key. Wikis. Code comments. Bug/issue trackers. I've never considered walking up to someone's desk, and talking to them, as something I need documented, and searchable.
And that's what slack/irc/IM/etc is to me. Walking up, and talking to someone at a desk.
Not to mention, if you want any REAL functionality with Slack, you have to pay. And you thereby outsource all backups, and additionally loads of confidential conversations to an external company.
Which then cuts you off if you cancel your account!
Most of the people I know who use Slack, use it "because that's why SV uses".
> Documentation is the key. Wikis. Code comments. Bug/issue trackers.
That requires people to write them and unless there's a strong managerial hand poking constantly, it's often "there's no time right now, we'll do it tomorrow" and, as we know, tomorrow never comes.
You're certainly describing failed managerial methods. And employees who aren't very good at their job.
Yet Slack isn't really the answer. Frankly, Slack is inept management's attempt to fix their own, and employee's, shortcomings.
Having a new on-board use some search function on Slack, to look through 100s of hours of conversation for "random important things", isn't going to fix that. Nor will people sifting through that junk, help when some bonehead didn't backup, or document key vital parts of a config. Or code.
If it's important, it needs to be documented. Not be stuck in a deluge of endless blather, random docs, zero real version control, the list goes on.
> Having a new on-board use some search function on Slack, to look through 100s of hours of conversation for "random important things", isn't going to fix that.
Just been through that and I 100% agree. Unfortunately my push for "everything needs more documentation" has not succeeded because "we don't have time to document stuff!"
Slack logs are a liability. It’s absolutely not a feature to me. It solved a problem they created: claiming working synchronously is better than asynchronously and pushing people away from things like wikis and email.
Which I think says more about their competitors search offerings than something revolutionary about Slack. “Functional enough to be useful” is a bar that a lot of products can’t seem to meet.
If you want publicly accessible histories I can think of a few better ways. The (very) old school way was to have indexed logs accessible over HTTP. You can almost certainly still find IRC logs on google this way --
If it’s internal just stick an ELK stack behind an authentication proxy it’s 20 minutes of work, an hour most with the addition of a log bot which joins public channels.
This is for IRC though, better options exist for things like Zulip or Matrix. (non-exhaustive list, obviously)
Side note though: I find it weird that this is the bar. It comes up every thread but it’s tantamount to a “ha! Gotcha!”, because no -sane- messaging system logs its history in a way that is retrievable immediately because indexing -all that content- is expensive and better off being centralised; additionally chat history (almost by definition) loses relevance quickly.
It’s almost certainly an anti-pattern when you feel the need to refer to things you said 2 years ago, immediately, in the same client you used to write those things.
I don’t know how you’re using slack though, so I guess it’s pretty central to your flow.
EDIT: am I wrong? Is this normal? Someone correct me please if you’re not happy with what I say.
Some organizations have basically regressed to "we don't have an intranet/wiki, we have slack" and there you are, HR have uploaded every important policy somewhere and it's now your job to get down in the basement and locate the store room with a door saying beware of tiger. Every day. Is there something important being said that you should probably know about? Sure. Somewhere! No need for organization, distribution lists, or any such quaint concepts, it's all there in slack, somewhere.
> So, how do search every public channel, regardless of whether you were even a part of the company at the time, with as convenient of a workflow as Slack has?
How likely is that scenario? Chat is far less organized compared to email or forums and it's difficult to find the result you're looking for unless you've seen it and have a vague memory of what it was and when it was posted.
When I try to use Slack's search feature, I typically get a bunch of irrelevant results. In fact, I've had better luck scrolling back and finding the message I'm looking for.
The groundwork is there, I don't know that anyone has written a client to implement it in a single gui. Today you'd dump the logs into a central repo (splunk/database/whatever) - likely pushed by a bot in the channels you want to log but there are also IRCd servers that will do logging - and users would search logs there while chatting in the main client.
I'd imagine someone could write an extension to Hexchat to integrate it directly into the client.
There's always Mattermost. It'd be funny to see Pega or some other Salesforce competitor fund Mattermost development to try to make Saleforce's acquisition of Slack less valuable.
Salesforce will have their sales teams push it alongside their other offerings, raise prices for those who want to use it, kill the free plan, and trim any fat (or strongly encourage cost savings measures, depending on how much autonomy Slack will continue to have post-acquisition) not needed to operate the product. I have no doubt they'll be able to make it profitable, even at the loss of market share (free users and price sensitive paying orgs).
I do not see them killing the free plan, even Salesforce knows better than that. I bet they'll run it very similarly to how they run Heroku, and the Slack integration will get better. But prices might go up too.
LOL, having worked with SF for the last two years I can completely see them killing the free plan. They care only about licensed seat count, at ALL COST!
The cost of sales for Slack will be very low for Salesforce, because they’re already selling a ton of stuff to large customers. Their guys are already flying out to the customer, taking them out to dinner, getting their commission checks, etc. they’ll just ask “you want any Slack with that?” Imagine the economics of trying to sell lip balm door to door vs. just putting it in a pharmacy for people to buy when they’re buying other stuff.
It's also why I don't trust sales figures on individual products from companies with a portfolio. Sales tend to get credited to products that the company wants to show as gaining traction while really the favored product was an add-on to a bundle of established products that had their license renewed.
absolutely. One thing that does temper this is that companies want to disproportionately reward the strategic businesses, so Microsoft will likely give higher commissions for selling Microsoft Teams than SQL Server. They have controls to prevent gaming that internally, although obviously not 100% effective.
For people who don't know Stewart Butterfield is the creator of Flickr and Slack. Both Flickr and Slack are side products/ideas which came up while developing a game.
Everyonce in a while, an acquisition goes well, but usually it's like a private equity buyout; you know it's not going to end well, you just don't know when. Except if it's Oracle, then you know you need to start migrating immediately, cause you can maybe get one more contract renewal in before the terms change.
Slack has no moat. It won the market by dint of excellent marketing and a good enough product with a little design panache. Admittedly, this has been really hard for it's competitors to match 100% but really no chat platform has had any major innovation in like 20 years. They have mostly all failed due to a combination of network effects and poorly-conceived monetization strategies. Slack is hot, but it's not going to last 10 years.
I think one of the most important aspects was that Slack was flying under the radar of procurement, IT and security. Anybody could just setup a nice place for their team to start chatting and sharing documents - even across organizations.
When are people going to realize that software is largely a fashion industry? Slack was in style, now it’s not. Right now Zoom is the hot new thing, give it half a year and it’ll be out. None of these products do anything functionally different than their predecessors, it’s just aesthetic.
I think Zoom is actually appreciably better than the competition. And I also think there's still a lot more space for video conferencing to innovate. Company's like Zoom that sell integrated conference setups can integrate themselves pretty thoroughly into an enterprise.
Discord is an interesting case compared to Slack. Slack is, from my understanding anyway, built out in PHP. Fairly lingua franca for the web.
Discord, on the other hand, seems to have built a "technical moat" of sorts for themselves by using Erlang/Elixir and other non-standard tech. Suppose SF or a company like them were to acquire Discord. If and when the staff were to leave once their vesting period or whatever is over, who would take over the codebase from them?
In practice I’m not so sure I think that’s really a concern, especially for a company like Salesforce. They could probably just afford to let it stagnate while they dangle massive salaries in front of the few that could actually maintain the codebase. And it’s not like everyone would leave immediately after the acquisition... but definitely very soon after haha
They signed up for this by using Slack in the first place. I don’t mean to be anti-corporation, just saying the wise move for keeping communities around for the long haul does not involve tying yourself to the life of a SV company.
I hate to beat the dead horse but IRC sounds great for such free communities. If it’s just about connecting people without the need for historical data or discovery, IRC is great and won’t die when [tech company] folds
as an avid IRC user in the past... discord and slack added considerable value in the form of built-in search history, voip/video chat, integrations with other platforms and games. IRC was a great tool during the 90s and early 2000s for me, but going back would just be a nostalgia trip for me.
i think the constant comparison between the previous gen chat platform of IRC and slack/discord is just extremely tiresome.
As Salesforce is basically Oracle, Jr, who wants to take bets on when they kill off the free option (or greatly water down the features), raise the prices to fit better with with Salesforce's pricing, and force-integrate it with the rest of their product stack?
we don't use Slack at my job. we do use MuleSoft which got bought by Salesforce. not sure about every touched by Salesforce die but Salesforce is giving out the Oracle vibe. they just keep buying other companies...
Hmm, I would have gone from slack to keybase, if keybase weren't bought out.
It seems to me like running a matrix server without open registration would be about all I need and is startup resistant.
But intros understandably don't seem geared to details for migration of simple automated systems. JSON/HTTP is great, but what does sending messages in via API look like given e2e? Is one installing a whole robot framework to replace a simple webhook (similar to how one would be using a whole keybase install for its CLI)?
Am I paranoid to assume that Salesforce is probably very (mostly?) interested in the business intelligence that comes from analyzing team communications?
I remember that, was on the front page. The writing was on the wall the moment they took out that full page ad in NYT which is a bizarre PR move that signalled fear.
Zoom missed a good opportunity to buy slack. They could have used their inflated stock price to purchase it snd consolidate into a WFH platform. The only weakness is probably the Zoom CEO who probably wouldn’t know how to run both businesses. But I think that would have been a better match than salesforce
“No way in hell”?? Sounds like you know nothing about how business works. Plenty of companies use their stock price to buy other companies, regardless of what you think the value is.
https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/news/dear-microsoft