Fascinating. Amazon generally only does acquisitions of small companies for core technologies or teams; they've historically been great champions of the "not invented here" philosophy.
This would be a radical departure from that pattern.
It was launched only 4 months ago. I wonder how it's doing today and how important Amazon thinks this space is for them and their platform. It's AWS branded too which is a bit odd.
Really believe that Microsoft should have bought Slack. It makes perfect sense for them and aligns with their vision to be the productivity center of everyone's workflow.
Microsoft doesnt understand this space at all. Look what they are doing to Skype by making it more like Snapchat when their main use case is business related. Teams also feels so unfinished.
Don't generalize the company products with the company teams. I don't have an opinion on your comments on Skype. Teams is a competitor and tied to Active Directory. But many employees are involved in slack channels across Microsoft based, open sourced based, and other channels daily.
Slack/Teams/etc are tools. Real work will find the right tools and the right people and the right working model.
>Look what they are doing to Skype by making it more like Snapchat
Yes I was definitely thrown for a loop with the new Skype that auto-installed on my phone. I'm a boring 37 year old developer that needs skype for business calls, why the hell does it now look like some teenager's social app?
They also still use Lync on Windows, but it is unusable. Most of the teams in the company I am working for right now are either using Slack or Hipchat.
Microsoft buying Slack doesn't make sense to me, unless they buy it just to shut it down. MS already has Skype for Business (Lync) which is doing really well in more traditional companies. Their business strategy is all about integrating everything with all the other Microsoft products: Office, Outlook, Windows, Exchange, etc. Slack is completely stand-alone with an open API.
Microsoft is all over the map with collaboration apps—I can't really figure out where their head is at. They have Outlook Groups, GigJam, Teams (their new Slack clone), Sharepoint, and Yammer.
I'd love to say it's the only kind that's effective on me, but obviously that's not true. I do believe it's the most effective on me though. If nothing else it's the only kind I intentionally engage with on a regular basis.
Starting off at a new company this past week, and realize a lot of commerce happens on Slack. Whether it's deciding what monitor to order, the best shows to watch on TV or what live events are happening that weekend. Amazon could see this as a way to capture some value generated there.
Also, an easy way to get companies signed up w/ Amazon Prime!
This is an interesting take on the motivation. Amazon has shown that they're interested in building their own private labels in certain verticals. That trend coupled with the talk about "social shopping" and I can start to buy into the idea that this deal could possibly originate from somewhere other than AWS.
Yeah, but Twitch's chat sucks. Discord feels like an incredibly good fit with Twitch and Curse. I've been expecting this acquisition for at least a year. Figured it would be how Amazon broke into the chat space.
To your second point, I already use Discord over Slack at work. It is better in every way that matters. Some open source communities are feeling it out too.
Discord is the better app at this point. Even for business use. But Slack from an acquisition POV must be different. They have revenue, traction, and that all important paying subscriber base. It's like everyone has always said. Slack is just a chat app. It's not about the app, but rather, what they achieved with it.
I love discord so much part of me wants Amazon to buy Slack just so it would kill it (or MS or Verizon or anyone who tends to not know what to do with things).
It's very similar, but you get most of the paid options from slack for free and the apps seem to be more reliable in my experience.
My biggest problem is getting groups to move from slack to discord. People just use what they're used to and if their company already pays for one of the connections then they are going to be running it all of the time anyway.
Simpler. I don't need comments and threads and snippets and posts at the expense of simple communications. These features are also inconsistent and incompatible across devices.
Search/Cost. Search doesn't search contents of snippets which was a gotcha. And with a 10000 message limit, anyone using it for free reaches a point where search breaks. I was deleting messages for a while because at the end of the day all the 50/mo would have gotten us is unbroken search. It's like 99% of the product is free and they ask to pay 50/mo for the last 1%.
Web Hooks. Integrating anything is as simple as a single line cUrl command. So for business use, if you already have a server doing a bunch of stuff with various APIs, adding notifications to discord is a one liner.
Also Discord has a more intuitive server list on the side bar. With slack you have to register with every team and "switch". In Discord it's just another tab.
A business on Slack is one that 1) can't see a superior chat program when they see one, 2) are willing to pay for an inferior product, and 3) can't look past the "gamer" origins of a platform.
But to Slack's credit, they built a business out of just chat, which is miraculous. And though I've arrived at Discord, they deserve all the credit and respect in the world for achieving what they have achieved through a mere chat subscription service. And I'm sure their philosophy and business direction is what got them to where they are, so standing up and challenging exactly that would admittedly be naive on my part. However I still do not believe any of the points that I have made are incorrect either, which just tells you more about this industry (chat industry?).
They just need a "Discord for Business". They would kill.
Discord has Webhooks (which is all I need). Slack requires a bunch of admin hoops and adoption by 3rd parties. With webhooks, as long as a service has an API, people like me can plug them right in.
Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO.
Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something.
Turns out there's a market for ubiquitous software. Slack seems similar.
Another datapoint: Look how well the acquisition of Oculus turned out. Palmer now has money, which would've come eventually. He no longer controls Oculus, and hence can't impact the world. And in a twist of fate, Palmer has attracted public annoyance due to some political decisions, so he went from favorite underdog to just another wealthy person.
For ambitious people, this can sometimes be a worse fate than not being rich. Ideas require opportunity and timing, and opportunities like Oculus, Snapchat, and Slack are rare.
$9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world?
You could be right. But there are only so many ways to convert $B into impact. The most straightforward way is to become an investor, but investing isn't so easy. And while it's true investors are one of the most important engines driving our economy, investors aren't makers. The CEO is the one with the power to get the whole company working toward a shared goal, set by the CEO. And when your company is as ubiquitous as Slack, you have the best people fighting to work for you. That's a degree of influence you might not get back, even with billions.
From another angle, consider Steve Jobs. He had the money; he could've done anything. But being CEO of Apple was worth more.
The problem with selling isn't the money, the problem is what do you do with the rest of your life. If you sell, that is most likely your peak. This is what zuck and the Snapchat guy was thinking. If they sell, that's it, they are done. Life is over as they know it.
I'm sure most entrepreneur types run off the "thrill of the chase", and a big exit would momentarily dilute the initial mission. But you are waayyy overstating that effect.
You've suddenly got a massive amount of capital to execute on the things you've been dreaming up along the way but have never been able to do before. Zuck sure had a company of thousands of employees to look after. And even if your mission was always just to exit... get a new vision.
Do I really need to invoke Elon and his first acquisitions here?
Bill Gates had to go, he was dragging MSFT down after the court case. Besides, he'd being doing it a looong time. He probably already hit Peak Bill and he knew it.
Your comment makes very little sense to me. One obvious counter-example is Bill Gates, who left Microsoft and went on to do much more important work with the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. I'm also sure that Mark Zuckerberg has plenty of things to do with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
I just saw simonrobb's comment, and of course the best example is Elon Musk. That's how you sell a company and do something with the rest of your life.
Yeah, so, you think you can affect the world more through slack or through $9 billion on your own? If you have even a few hundred million dollars to your name, even a few million really, you can work on whatever project you want on your own. If you have more money you can even work on things for years without having to worry about making a profit. And that's hugely powerful.
As much as I hate the trend of companies gobbling up other companies, slack is a bad example here. Almost certainly everyone involved would be better off if a sale happened.
I don't know, to me $9B seems like a lot of money for a glorified IRC client built on web tech. Sure, you don't pay for the tech, but in the end you can do a lot with that kind of money. Elon Musk sold his first two businesses to get the funds to start what he really wanted to do.
We don't know where Oculus would be without FB, i would argue they are better off because they are creating a new market and are in a capital intensive business. The VR market is still slow overall. Without FB, they could have already run out of breath or cut corners on the product.
A glorified IRC client built on web tech... that everybody uses. Tech is only one small part of a business. Slack provides real value to millions of people, $9B certainly doesn't seem an unreasonable valuation to me.
You're spending too much time in the tech industry. Even if you double the daily active users from a year ago, that doesn't even reach 5% of the US population.
5% of the US population seems very large to me if that's right... They make a lot more money than something like facebook per user - even though we don't know how many organizations are paid vs free.
That's still a lot of users. By that logic most B2C companies (e.g.: Atlassian) shouldn't have a big valuation either. My point is that Slack has taken technology which has been around a long time, made it fun and usable so people use it, and most importantly they've got people to pay for it. GP's comment was dismissing Slack purely because of the tech.
Except Slack doesn't have any new ideas behind it. It's just another chat app. And just like other popular chat apps of yesteryear, it's a fad that will pass.
IRC was just a chat app, yet even though it didn't age nicely, was still seeing massive usage for professional communication up until lately. Is it only because of legacy? Hardly, new blood was pouring in constantly, the only hit it took was skype.
Slack is simply disrupting this area by offering product which is up to date and doesn't need bouncer running (+ hundreds of other useful nice to have features).
It makes sense to sell if Slack will have more value as part of a larger company, compared to being by itself. Acquisition typically makes it easier to integrate into that company's offerings, at the expense of making it harder to maintain all of the independent integrations that were in Slack's interest when it was independent.
It makes a lot of sense for Amazon to offer some kind of managed corporate communications platform to customers who are already heavily invested in AWS, but in the long term, it would probably hurt Slack's core integration strengths.
What would probably be best for Slack is to build out an on-premises enterprise version, which could then be deployed on your cloud of choice. It gets Slack most of the benefits of acquisition by a cloud provider, without the downsides.
I love Slack, but there's always the question that is it worth the monthly fees and related overhead. So far the answer is yes, but for example Microsoft is already trying to push competing offering via Office 365. If Google and Amazon follow the same path with their groupware offerings, this may hurt Slack sales. And it's not just about the price and quality of product, but also about the convenience. Do you deal with one vendor or do you have 10 different SaaS subscriptions you need to deal with.
One interesting option would be for Slack and Dropbox to merge. Don't know if this kind of deal could ever work out financially, but I think the combination would be quite interesting.
> He no longer controls Oculus, and hence can't impact the world
That makes absolutely no sense. Palmer Luckey has a vast fortune thanks to selling, he can easily impact the world depending on what he chooses to do with it.
Unlike Snapchat though people pay for Slack. Not sure how people pay Snapchat directly in comparison. A fun plot twist would be if Snap bought out Slack and became a communications company of sorts. Would be nice to see something different. Also waiting on Apple to buy out other companies to join their fold and become a little more cross-platform.
The power of slack isn't in their technology, it's in their marketing. There have been a thousand IRC clones. Few have gained any traction at all. I suspect under new management it will falter, but at the same time I also think that it's a terrible idea not to sell if the opportunity arises.
That and they have a lot of integrations which means it's hard for people to switch to something else other than slack because they will lose their plugins.
I haven't used Slack in a while, but if they got Search working well, that would be a real differentiator. I've seen them hiring quite a bit on that front too.
There isn't a lot here to read in to. I worked at a very small company that was going to be bought by amazon. We were "left at the alter" by amazon.
I would be very surprised to see a slack deal go through, knowing what I know about our acquisition process, but they are a little different than we were. If AMazon buys them they have better be sure they can quickly integrate them, unlike twitch that's unique enough to hang around.
In some ways, Goodreads suffers for its integration. List a book that's on Leanpub and not Amazon and you're left with an Amazon button that's worse than useless.
I mean they are clearly looking to sell and Stewart is trying to create a bidding war to get the most money out of this deal. How many companies can afford to create new enterprise contracts with Amazon for enterprise software? They are either Google customers or Microsoft customers for employee productivity software.
One article yesterday suggested that the Amazon non compete lawsuit agaimay their former AWS employee might indicate that they're planning on getting into the business productivity market.
With this news that might have credibility
I hope they do not buy it but I am afraid they will. I am somehow sick of these companies that do not generate enough profit to sustain themselves and have to be bought by oligopolies like Amazon.
Well this is what I do not know. I am not an investor nor a shareholder but I suspect a single niche product is not that appealing.
How long will it take for Facebook/Google/Microsoft to get a good enough product and release it for "free" ? I am not sure but I think it will be hard for slack to diversify its portfolio.
Would Twitch survive against Google's YouTube gaming if it would not get acquired by Amazon ?
Both Google and Microsoft have already done the "release it for free" part, but it's unclear if / when the market will think the products are "good enough":
But it's not really. It's primarily focused around text, and chime is around videos and meetings. That's the use case. Chime is built around meetings. Slack is built around chat.
This is not true. We use Chime for text every day. It doesn't have all the 3rd party integrations that Slack does, but it give you the same basic functionality.
It's definitely true. My team also uses Chime for text every day. The client has virtually no options, even basic formatting stuff that has been available on dozens of IRC clients for decades.
Chime is definitely better than Lync, but I stand by my statement that it's not very good at text. It's missing basic UI features like threading or merged comments, profile pictures/icons, not to mention more advanced integrations.
I love using it for meetings... but text functionality is still lagging behind Slack, or even Mattermost (also used within Amzn)
Chime's main use is video. Slack's main use is text/chat. While both have components of the other, they are optimized for different primary use cases. Pretending otherwise is silly.
Does Apple have a messenger that can support both messages and video? They have Messages and FaceTime but they are separate apps and only if you have an apple device
Amazon's been a prudent steward of its cash and shareholder value. I'd be really surprised if it spent this sum over Slack & encourage Bezos to go get his head checked. Messaging platforms come and go. Many better ways to spend $9B for Amazon.
You can go back through all of history in all Slack conversations as long as you pay the subscription fees, so yes. I'd expect Slack to put older conversations into cold storage too.
They do store a complete history of messages for non-paying teams. You can test this by paying for a month of Standard on a team that is really old; the conversation history will immediately expand backward until the beginning of time. Stop paying and you're limited again.
I'd imagine that they have separate, encrypted siloed search indexes for each paying organization. Why would someone put sensitive information on Slack otherwise?
Organizations that refuse to use Slack are at a disadvantage. When employees show up and realize there's no Slack, they start to analyze all other company decisions. How much effort could be saved just by using Slack? Those secrets had better be important to justify this loss.
There are alternatives. Rocket Chat is self-hosted, and maybe it's sufficient. But second-place software will always feel second-place.
If your reasoning is solely "We are a company, so we have secrets," that's justifiable only in narrow domains, like a security company.
For the rest, and especially at startups, the strategic risk of revealing your secrets to Slack is counterbalanced by the fact that Slack can't take advantage of those secrets without committing suicide. The moment everyone stops trusting Slack, that trust is gone forever.
In the meantime, Slack has been a faithful steward. What are the risks? An employee could go rogue and steal the data. An acquirer like Amazon could use the data maliciously. Slack could get hacked and the data could be made available publicly.
Of those, getting hacked is the only relevant concern. Employees are unlikely to end their careers by stealing data. But if Slack's data is ever stolen and made public, everyone will have egg on their face simultaneously. That means it's less likely to be a disaster for any individual organization.
Talent has a way of sniffing out incongruities like this. When an organizational mandate doesn't pass the bullshit test, opinionated talent will usually try to change the situation, or leave. And opinionated talent tends to be effective talent.
When effective talent leaves, better watch out. You might have suddenly become one of those organizations that find it impossible to attract top performers.
To put it plainly, who would want to work someplace that puts the company's quality of life over the employee's over something so trivial?
Of the startups that will eventually survive, even if all of them revealed all of their operational and strategic insights simultaneously, they're unlikely to die. Or even be slowed down, really. Most startups are working on ideas that seem bad. That's why startup investing is hard. Revealing your seemingly-bad strategies to the world won't change much. And if your idea seems good, you tend to be entrenched. It's unlikely some other company could form and steal it from under you before you can execute on it.
In all but a handful of domains, we're left with repellant pseudo-justifications for avoiding the one tool that everybody uses. Hopefully those secrets were very important!
I don't see how you get that. Slack does tons of things IRC doesn't. IRC is not a valid replacement for the entirety of slack. To choose IRC means deciding that you don't need or want the rest of slack's features.
What about uploading files, video and voice chat, scrollable and searchable chat history, code snippet support? These are the reasons people use slack. To say IRC is a substitute means your company doesn't need to solve these problems (which is fine, they may not have them) or it means you're using a bunch of products together to solve them.
I don't get the stance that this is "hype" or a "bandwagon" at all.
From what I've seen, there are plenty of companies that keep sensitive data out-of-band for just that reason, and have policies to keep it out of their Slacks.
Public slack, yes. But you also have enterprise slack, which is hosted on an organizations' own machines. I imagine they don't have access to that data.
Which brings the point, who would ever sign on to use Slack/continue to use Slack when Bezos & Co. could be scouring through your sensitive company conversations?
It seems unlikely given that Amazon has been rapidly scaling up the services they offer, with some of them conveniently taking the form of companies who run their entire operation on AWS (i.e. Twilio with AWS Contact Center).
If somebody can prove me wrong, however, that would be lovely :)
Regardless though, expecting Amazon to refrain from taking the proprietary information they have access to (in any form) and drilling you into the ground with their own twist on it seems like a bad bet, just ask Nucleus.
Who would ever sign on to Slack/continue to use Slack when <different corporation> could be scouring through your sensitive company conversations? It's not like Slack can't do so now, if they chose.
Companies that don't want to entrust their sensitive conversations to Slack, etc., opt to use on-site Hipchat servers, or other means of communication. Amazon buying Slack doesn't significantly alter their calculus.
Slack isn't in the business of offering competing services based on the data that flows through their systems. Something you can't exactly say is true with Amazon.
I get that you don't trust Amazon, but if you think they would protect your data less rigorously than Slack you really need to provide a more substantive argument.
Truth be told I love Amazon for the innovation they've brought to most of the industries they've touched but it's like there's some aura of trust around them just because they have brought some of their might against Facebook and Google which seem to be considered the evil twins on HN.
Seriously? More like Amazon has been lucky with one business, but otherwise completely reckless with their cash and shareholder value and has been propped up massively by speculation on future performance driven by pie in the sky thinking devoid of critical analysis. This is exactly the kind of shit they do all the time.
Slack would serve as an excellent Nexus between services such as AWS (take on enterprise more fully), Twitch (take on Discord), and retail customer service ops, not to mention as an internal tool probably.
Too late to buy, Slack is such old news now and their market is super saturated. This could have been a decent decision several years ago, but not now.
Although the search data would indicate Slack is still super hot - I tend to agree (anecdotally) that the market is saturated, first movers have already ... moved, and most likely growth will be slow.
So far of course Slack is still much more popular among business users, but I've anecdotally noticed a big surge in Discord usage among consumers (on Reddit especially).
Serious question..... but also more me fleshing out my thoughts on messaging apps....
What is the point in buying a messaging app?
- instant messenger
- ICQ
- Skype
- Yammer
- WhatsApp
They all seem to be popular for a short time and then fad away.
What does owing one of these get a company?
The case against owning them is that they all go out of favour and you only have a small window, say up to 5 years, where your platform is dominate before everyone moves onto another solution.
At one point the theory was it got people to use a companies proprietary login, when companies thought there was value in having people use their login.
At this point, if I said Slack would be a shell of its former self in 5 - 10 years would anyone put up an argument , if so what's the argument that this time its different.
I'm a happy slack user, but i"ll move to a new platform tomorrow if a better one comes along, there is almost no network effect or lock with these apps so switching has almost zero cost.
Plugins might provide a slight lockin but time has shown again and again the same plugins will move to the next popular messaging app, which seems to negate any benefit.
They had funds from their parent companies which made money by other means. I'm not certain, but I suspect neither product made any money for Microsoft or Yahoo. What CEO in that position is going to double down on R&D funding to keep the chat program relevant?
ICQ was a classic first mover that had explosive growth and continued to succeed in a relative way, but not relative to the overall market. AIM, Yahoo! and MSN messenger platforms knocked it off that pedestal, and the company seemed more interested in sabotaging its platform to squeeze ad revenue than making it more relevant or meaningful to their userbase.
I think of all of those WhatsApp has been the most successful both in terms of moat defense purposes and it still has the potential of turning into something like WeChat or LINE (or what they're doing with FB Messenger itself) with its own monetization.
For Skype I think it was mostly about rounding out the office suite, MS doesn't want anyone else getting a toehold in workplace collaboration and expanding from there - if you get real classical about it MS Office is the true DNA of the company even more so than Windows/infrastructure. Same reason they bought Yammer and why they were so early on in trying to move on Slack (with the $8B offer that Bill Gates intervened in and shot down).
Agreed. These purchases seem to work the best when they're used for defensive purposes and to round out a product offering that already has a substantial userbase.
Whatever gadgets they might hang off the app, they're fundamentally a way for people to talk to each other. If you don't have the people, why would you need a slick implementation? As you mentioned, the app would go out of vogue and users would move on.
Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.
Which is ironic, because their properties would play a lot better with one than, say, Google or MS. And starting with something like Slack (bottom up vs top down) is an interesting move.
> Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.
Honest question, since I might be out of the loop here in Europe, but what user engagement pieces does Amazon have then ? I use Amazon for shopping and AWS, and would have no idea what other products they have that are dominating a market. Is this about Kindle ?
The shopping portal, reviews, AWS, Kindle, and Echo are all direct touchpoints with users of some sort.
If you're going to launch social, you could do a lot worse for a starting point...
And in a broader sense, I'm much more optimistic about building a social network to unify disparate features that people already love, vs imposing one from the top down (e.g. G+). FB only got away with the latter because of being first, and seems to be pivoting to backfill as much functionality around it as quickly as possible.
“Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.”
Interesting to note on this front is Amazon's move towards enabling voice and chat communication via Alexa between Alexa accounts, and by extension Alexa-enabled devices.
Sounds like they really want in on the communication game.
Slack has a rather large number of paying customers for a messaging platform, so even over just 10 years you could extract quite a bit of cash directly on top of that owning platforms allows for a lot of indirect profits.
That said, if they make ~15M per month directly then up to 1 to 4 billion is probably completely reasonable purchase price. And depending on how things are evolving and internal costs etc 9B while probably high is not crazy ridiculous.
We all asked the same question about Facebook. All social networks before Facebook had faded away. But, Facebook didn't. Potential Slack buyers think that Slack is also here to stay in a similar manner. EDIT: I'm not saying Slack is Facebook.
One reason why I think Slack may survive longer than ICQ, Skype etc is how well integrated it is with all other services. For a tool to replace Slack, it should also provide the same level of seamless integration with GitHub, Google Docs, and a hundred other services. That's much harder to do than just building a messaging app.
I don't think that's true. Switching to another messaging service means you lose all past messages. It also means you need to integrate all other services (like Github, Google Doc, Travis, and many others) to this new messaging service. That is a lot of friction!
A consumer to consumer N-N network is much harder to coordinate a migration than a corporate N-N network, for one.
Also messengers aren't as N-N since you end up only talking to a small number of people after a while and don't actually want to move all your contacts.
I don't want to move all my FB contacts either but the number of connections I sort of care about is still likely more than 100.
Large corporations will buy messaging / social networks over time because of the fact that there is a long tail for people who will use the service. The perception that app X is "uncool" or has no growth is the fact that being a part of HN makes you think that the bleeding edge is whatever everyone uses. Of those other frameworks there are a multitude of users on those platforms. The perpetual buying of these companies is a part of the Red Queen hypothesis that large megacorporations have to adapt to survive. One way to do this is the purchase of companies and messaging and social have so much cool platform churn that it becomes endless.
I'd say Slack has better penetration into enterprise than all those except sykpe. if you look at Amazon's prior communication attempt, its aimed as a business communication solution. Slack has done well to penetrate that segment. Your list is consumer grade, whereas Slack, Webex, Gotomeeting, Zoom, bluejeans, google meetings etc are focused on improving business communications.
WhatsApp didn't fade at all. They have 1.2 billion monthly active users and climbing. Their "stories" feature got 177 million daily active users in just 10 weeks. For comparison, Snapchat is only at 166 million DAU as of Q1 this year.
WhatsApp is (AFAIK) the only major chat service that offers a J2ME app. There are a _lot_ of feature phones in the Global South, and a lot of telecoms that charge gouging rates for SMS and MMS.
> WhatsApp is (AFAIK) the only major chat service that offers a J2ME app
WhatsApp's support for J2ME ended in 2016[1] - it is now smartphone only, because it requires "advanced features" (or bloat) to compete with Snapchat and complete Facebook's flanking manoeuvre (along with Instagram).
It's best to compare Slack to MS Lync (which is now branded as Skype, was built out of MSN Messenger). In Windows environments, it's a pretty important piece of communication software. I use it constantly everyday to communicate and meet with those across my province (Alberta).
I wonder if the price/valuation will be so high if they have a large and growing _paying_ customer base or if they assume to monetize the customer data in the long term via other means (e.g. selling aggregate data for ad purposes).
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadThis would be a radical departure from that pattern.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-chime-unified-commun...
It was launched only 4 months ago. I wonder how it's doing today and how important Amazon thinks this space is for them and their platform. It's AWS branded too which is a bit odd.
Microsoft doesnt understand this space at all. Look what they are doing to Skype by making it more like Snapchat when their main use case is business related. Teams also feels so unfinished.
Slack/Teams/etc are tools. Real work will find the right tools and the right people and the right working model.
Yes I was definitely thrown for a loop with the new Skype that auto-installed on my phone. I'm a boring 37 year old developer that needs skype for business calls, why the hell does it now look like some teenager's social app?
PS. ux-app looks interesting. I can give some feed back as a designer if you want.
Thanks :) and yes, I'd love to hear your feedback, me email is eli@ux-app.com
[1] http://matrix.org
Also, an easy way to get companies signed up w/ Amazon Prime!
1. Great fit with twitch.
2. Seems like it could be "forked internally" and reskinned to compete with slack in the business space too.
I love discord so much part of me wants Amazon to buy Slack just so it would kill it (or MS or Verizon or anyone who tends to not know what to do with things).
My biggest problem is getting groups to move from slack to discord. People just use what they're used to and if their company already pays for one of the connections then they are going to be running it all of the time anyway.
Simpler. I don't need comments and threads and snippets and posts at the expense of simple communications. These features are also inconsistent and incompatible across devices.
Search/Cost. Search doesn't search contents of snippets which was a gotcha. And with a 10000 message limit, anyone using it for free reaches a point where search breaks. I was deleting messages for a while because at the end of the day all the 50/mo would have gotten us is unbroken search. It's like 99% of the product is free and they ask to pay 50/mo for the last 1%.
Web Hooks. Integrating anything is as simple as a single line cUrl command. So for business use, if you already have a server doing a bunch of stuff with various APIs, adding notifications to discord is a one liner.
Also Discord has a more intuitive server list on the side bar. With slack you have to register with every team and "switch". In Discord it's just another tab.
A business on Slack is one that 1) can't see a superior chat program when they see one, 2) are willing to pay for an inferior product, and 3) can't look past the "gamer" origins of a platform.
But to Slack's credit, they built a business out of just chat, which is miraculous. And though I've arrived at Discord, they deserve all the credit and respect in the world for achieving what they have achieved through a mere chat subscription service. And I'm sure their philosophy and business direction is what got them to where they are, so standing up and challenging exactly that would admittedly be naive on my part. However I still do not believe any of the points that I have made are incorrect either, which just tells you more about this industry (chat industry?).
They just need a "Discord for Business". They would kill.
That, and the gaming specific branding, are the only reasons I can think of why businesses might not even consider Discord.
Discord has Webhooks (which is all I need). Slack requires a bunch of admin hoops and adoption by 3rd parties. With webhooks, as long as a service has an API, people like me can plug them right in.
Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something.
Turns out there's a market for ubiquitous software. Slack seems similar.
Another datapoint: Look how well the acquisition of Oculus turned out. Palmer now has money, which would've come eventually. He no longer controls Oculus, and hence can't impact the world. And in a twist of fate, Palmer has attracted public annoyance due to some political decisions, so he went from favorite underdog to just another wealthy person.
For ambitious people, this can sometimes be a worse fate than not being rich. Ideas require opportunity and timing, and opportunities like Oculus, Snapchat, and Slack are rare.
$9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world?
Get real, they're not curing cancer they're providing a (great) chat service for businesses and organizations.
That's a false dichotomy isn't it? You could have a large impact on the world with that sort of money.
From another angle, consider Steve Jobs. He had the money; he could've done anything. But being CEO of Apple was worth more.
Pretty sure that could have some impact.
You've suddenly got a massive amount of capital to execute on the things you've been dreaming up along the way but have never been able to do before. Zuck sure had a company of thousands of employees to look after. And even if your mission was always just to exit... get a new vision.
Do I really need to invoke Elon and his first acquisitions here?
Elon is an outlier of grand proportions.
I don't know anything about Evan Spiegel, but I just read about the Snap Foundation - https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/02/snap-inc-snap-foundation...
I just saw simonrobb's comment, and of course the best example is Elon Musk. That's how you sell a company and do something with the rest of your life.
As much as I hate the trend of companies gobbling up other companies, slack is a bad example here. Almost certainly everyone involved would be better off if a sale happened.
We don't know where Oculus would be without FB, i would argue they are better off because they are creating a new market and are in a capital intensive business. The VR market is still slow overall. Without FB, they could have already run out of breath or cut corners on the product.
You're spending too much time in the tech industry. Even if you double the daily active users from a year ago, that doesn't even reach 5% of the US population.
Slack is simply disrupting this area by offering product which is up to date and doesn't need bouncer running (+ hundreds of other useful nice to have features).
Billions of dollars can be made on old ideas positioned properly.
It makes a lot of sense for Amazon to offer some kind of managed corporate communications platform to customers who are already heavily invested in AWS, but in the long term, it would probably hurt Slack's core integration strengths.
What would probably be best for Slack is to build out an on-premises enterprise version, which could then be deployed on your cloud of choice. It gets Slack most of the benefits of acquisition by a cloud provider, without the downsides.
One interesting option would be for Slack and Dropbox to merge. Don't know if this kind of deal could ever work out financially, but I think the combination would be quite interesting.
That makes absolutely no sense. Palmer Luckey has a vast fortune thanks to selling, he can easily impact the world depending on what he chooses to do with it.
Exactly, because their technology is complete crap.
I would be very surprised to see a slack deal go through, knowing what I know about our acquisition process, but they are a little different than we were. If AMazon buys them they have better be sure they can quickly integrate them, unlike twitch that's unique enough to hang around.
I like they don't necessarily have to vertically integrate all their acquisitions.
I don't have anything against Microsoft per se, but in my opinion, they ruined Skype.
https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/
At least 10 million a month, I assume?
Edit: "Slack has 5 million daily active users -- 1.5 million of whom pay to use the service -- and had $150 million in annual recurring revenue as of Jan. 31." from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/messaging...
How long will it take for Facebook/Google/Microsoft to get a good enough product and release it for "free" ? I am not sure but I think it will be hard for slack to diversify its portfolio.
Would Twitch survive against Google's YouTube gaming if it would not get acquired by Amazon ?
https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat...
https://blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterprise...
But it's not really. It's primarily focused around text, and chime is around videos and meetings. That's the use case. Chime is built around meetings. Slack is built around chat.
Disclaimer: Work for AWS.
Disclaimer: Also work for AWS.
Chime is definitely better than Lync, but I stand by my statement that it's not very good at text. It's missing basic UI features like threading or merged comments, profile pictures/icons, not to mention more advanced integrations.
I love using it for meetings... but text functionality is still lagging behind Slack, or even Mattermost (also used within Amzn)
[1]https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16713667011
https://slack.com/security
Are you saying that organizations that care to keep secrets get left behind by those that don't?
That sounds kind of ridiculous.
Organizations that refuse to use Slack are at a disadvantage. When employees show up and realize there's no Slack, they start to analyze all other company decisions. How much effort could be saved just by using Slack? Those secrets had better be important to justify this loss.
There are alternatives. Rocket Chat is self-hosted, and maybe it's sufficient. But second-place software will always feel second-place.
If your reasoning is solely "We are a company, so we have secrets," that's justifiable only in narrow domains, like a security company.
For the rest, and especially at startups, the strategic risk of revealing your secrets to Slack is counterbalanced by the fact that Slack can't take advantage of those secrets without committing suicide. The moment everyone stops trusting Slack, that trust is gone forever.
In the meantime, Slack has been a faithful steward. What are the risks? An employee could go rogue and steal the data. An acquirer like Amazon could use the data maliciously. Slack could get hacked and the data could be made available publicly.
Of those, getting hacked is the only relevant concern. Employees are unlikely to end their careers by stealing data. But if Slack's data is ever stolen and made public, everyone will have egg on their face simultaneously. That means it's less likely to be a disaster for any individual organization.
Talent has a way of sniffing out incongruities like this. When an organizational mandate doesn't pass the bullshit test, opinionated talent will usually try to change the situation, or leave. And opinionated talent tends to be effective talent.
When effective talent leaves, better watch out. You might have suddenly become one of those organizations that find it impossible to attract top performers.
To put it plainly, who would want to work someplace that puts the company's quality of life over the employee's over something so trivial?
Of the startups that will eventually survive, even if all of them revealed all of their operational and strategic insights simultaneously, they're unlikely to die. Or even be slowed down, really. Most startups are working on ideas that seem bad. That's why startup investing is hard. Revealing your seemingly-bad strategies to the world won't change much. And if your idea seems good, you tend to be entrenched. It's unlikely some other company could form and steal it from under you before you can execute on it.
In all but a handful of domains, we're left with repellant pseudo-justifications for avoiding the one tool that everybody uses. Hopefully those secrets were very important!
If I hire you, and your concern is "why can't I use this one specific chat service", I hired the wrong fucking person.
My friend's company used Hipchat over Slack for precisely that reason - they're a security company, one you've likely heard of.
If this is just going to be a game of "let's list every feature Slack has bolted on to their chatroom" then I don't care to play.
I don't get the stance that this is "hype" or a "bandwagon" at all.
https://slack.com/enterprise
If somebody can prove me wrong, however, that would be lovely :)
Regardless though, expecting Amazon to refrain from taking the proprietary information they have access to (in any form) and drilling you into the ground with their own twist on it seems like a bad bet, just ask Nucleus.
Companies that don't want to entrust their sensitive conversations to Slack, etc., opt to use on-site Hipchat servers, or other means of communication. Amazon buying Slack doesn't significantly alter their calculus.
Although the search data would indicate Slack is still super hot - I tend to agree (anecdotally) that the market is saturated, first movers have already ... moved, and most likely growth will be slow.
So far of course Slack is still much more popular among business users, but I've anecdotally noticed a big surge in Discord usage among consumers (on Reddit especially).
What is the point in buying a messaging app?
- instant messenger
- ICQ
- Skype
- Yammer
- WhatsApp
They all seem to be popular for a short time and then fad away.
What does owing one of these get a company?
The case against owning them is that they all go out of favour and you only have a small window, say up to 5 years, where your platform is dominate before everyone moves onto another solution.
At one point the theory was it got people to use a companies proprietary login, when companies thought there was value in having people use their login.
At this point, if I said Slack would be a shell of its former self in 5 - 10 years would anyone put up an argument , if so what's the argument that this time its different.
I'm a happy slack user, but i"ll move to a new platform tomorrow if a better one comes along, there is almost no network effect or lock with these apps so switching has almost zero cost.
Plugins might provide a slight lockin but time has shown again and again the same plugins will move to the next popular messaging app, which seems to negate any benefit.
For Skype I think it was mostly about rounding out the office suite, MS doesn't want anyone else getting a toehold in workplace collaboration and expanding from there - if you get real classical about it MS Office is the true DNA of the company even more so than Windows/infrastructure. Same reason they bought Yammer and why they were so early on in trying to move on Slack (with the $8B offer that Bill Gates intervened in and shot down).
[Edited slightly for clarity]
Whatever gadgets they might hang off the app, they're fundamentally a way for people to talk to each other. If you don't have the people, why would you need a slick implementation? As you mentioned, the app would go out of vogue and users would move on.
Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.
Which is ironic, because their properties would play a lot better with one than, say, Google or MS. And starting with something like Slack (bottom up vs top down) is an interesting move.
Honest question, since I might be out of the loop here in Europe, but what user engagement pieces does Amazon have then ? I use Amazon for shopping and AWS, and would have no idea what other products they have that are dominating a market. Is this about Kindle ?
If you're going to launch social, you could do a lot worse for a starting point...
And in a broader sense, I'm much more optimistic about building a social network to unify disparate features that people already love, vs imposing one from the top down (e.g. G+). FB only got away with the latter because of being first, and seems to be pivoting to backfill as much functionality around it as quickly as possible.
Well they do own twitch & good reads, right?
Sounds like they really want in on the communication game.
That said, if they make ~15M per month directly then up to 1 to 4 billion is probably completely reasonable purchase price. And depending on how things are evolving and internal costs etc 9B while probably high is not crazy ridiculous.
One reason why I think Slack may survive longer than ICQ, Skype etc is how well integrated it is with all other services. For a tool to replace Slack, it should also provide the same level of seamless integration with GitHub, Google Docs, and a hundred other services. That's much harder to do than just building a messaging app.
Exporting your Facebook profile is a labyrinthian effort few would consider.
Switching chat providers is as simple as getting everyone to use the new thing and going from there, there is little to no baggage to bring with you.
Also messengers aren't as N-N since you end up only talking to a small number of people after a while and don't actually want to move all your contacts.
I don't want to move all my FB contacts either but the number of connections I sort of care about is still likely more than 100.
Not yet. We used to think MySpace is huge and not going away anytime soon
WhatsApp's support for J2ME ended in 2016[1] - it is now smartphone only, because it requires "advanced features" (or bloat) to compete with Snapchat and complete Facebook's flanking manoeuvre (along with Instagram).
1. https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/s60/21099118
Given how deep it is in a company's workflow you could think of it almost like an operating system where apps can attach to.
It would perfectly fit to eg salesforce, google etc
Unsure what Amazon's goal would be - maybe "enterprise as customers" are the interlinking part between ecommerce and webservices
Internet access is deep in company workflows as well, but that doesn't mean they can't change ISPs.
Are companies building their ordering systems to depend on slack API's or something?
Off the top of my head, both mattermost and rocketchat provide compatible webhook apis that make them drop-in replacements for slack.
So not that deep into peoples workflow...