6 ms·

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

by dkural 9y ago

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.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
They might be less interested in the app itself, and more interested in the giant corpus of conversation stored therein.
- jitix 9y ago
  Is all data on slack just available for viewing? If it were so I think its customers would have raised this as an issue by now.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    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.
    - 013a 9y ago
      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.
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    You mean available to slack? Ofc, how else would search work?
    - jitix 9y ago
      I'd imagine that they have separate, encrypted siloed search indexes for each paying organization. Why would someone put sensitive information on Slack otherwise?
      - adamnemecek 9y ago
        Doesn't seem like it https://slack.com/security https://slack.com/security
      - sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Few organizations care. And those that do get left in the dust by organizations that don't.
        pavel_lishin 9y ago
        > Few organizations care. And those that do get left in the dust by organizations that don't. Are you saying that organizations that care to keep secrets get left behind by those that don't? That sounds kind of ridiculous.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
        We live in interesting times. 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!
  - pm90 9y ago
    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.
    - mattl 9y ago
      Hmm, it looks like they still host it. https://slack.com/enterprise https://slack.com/enterprise
    - marcc 9y ago
      There is currently no way to run Slack and store the messages on your owganizations own machines.
- wonder_bread 9y ago
  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?
  - praneshp 9y ago
    Is it very different from running all your sensitive company code on Bezos & Co servers?
    - wonder_bread 9y ago
      I'll concede to that to a degree.
    - rhino369 9y ago
      Do the AWS Master Service Agreements really not preclude Amazon from searching through your data for their own purposes?
      - wonder_bread 9y ago
        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.
      - hueving 9y ago
        Isn't the only entity that could conclusively determine if the agreement has been violated the very one who would violate it?
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    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.
saosebastiao 9y ago
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.
hbosch 9y ago
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.
astrodust 9y ago
Yeah, like drone delivery and literal rockets to the moon.

by dkural 9y ago

pavel_lishin 9y ago

They might be less interested in the app itself, and more interested in the giant corpus of conversation stored therein.

jitix 9y ago
Is all data on slack just available for viewing? If it were so I think its customers would have raised this as an issue by now.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  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.
  - 013a 9y ago
    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.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  You mean available to slack? Ofc, how else would search work?
  - jitix 9y ago
    I'd imagine that they have separate, encrypted siloed search indexes for each paying organization. Why would someone put sensitive information on Slack otherwise?
    - adamnemecek 9y ago
      Doesn't seem like it https://slack.com/security https://slack.com/security
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Few organizations care. And those that do get left in the dust by organizations that don't.
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        > Few organizations care. And those that do get left in the dust by organizations that don't. Are you saying that organizations that care to keep secrets get left behind by those that don't? That sounds kind of ridiculous.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
        We live in interesting times. 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!
- pm90 9y ago
  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.
  - mattl 9y ago
    Hmm, it looks like they still host it. https://slack.com/enterprise https://slack.com/enterprise
  - marcc 9y ago
    There is currently no way to run Slack and store the messages on your owganizations own machines.
wonder_bread 9y ago
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?
- praneshp 9y ago
  Is it very different from running all your sensitive company code on Bezos & Co servers?
  - wonder_bread 9y ago
    I'll concede to that to a degree.
  - rhino369 9y ago
    Do the AWS Master Service Agreements really not preclude Amazon from searching through your data for their own purposes?
    - wonder_bread 9y ago
      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.
    - hueving 9y ago
      Isn't the only entity that could conclusively determine if the agreement has been violated the very one who would violate it?
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  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.

saosebastiao 9y ago

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.

hbosch 9y ago

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.

astrodust 9y ago

Yeah, like drone delivery and literal rockets to the moon.