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Around 2007-2010 I worked on the business IM product at Barracuda. We offered an IM server and client software for Windows, Mac, and Linux. We were known for se

Around 2007-2010 I worked on the business IM product at Barracuda. We offered an IM server and client software for Windows, Mac, and Linux. We were known for selling security products and had an "in" with the kinds of companies that ought to care about securing their IM usage. Unfortunately, our IM product wasn't very popular and eventually it was canceled. Barracuda had some 15 products at the time, and it made more sense to focus on the popular ones. Today, Slack is worth more than all of Barracuda.

Eridrus 7y ago
Slack is a really interesting company IMO. They were very late to the space - I was using Flowdock when they became a thing, and felt like Slack's lack of threads was a deal breaker. But Slack raised a boat load more money than their competitors, offered a free product and spent a huge amount of money on marketing and now they are the top dog. They're still losing money, and both Microsoft and Google have competitors rolled into their productivity suites, but I think they've largely crushed the smaller competition. I'm still not very bullish on Slack since I don't see how they build a defensible moat against competitors for what is a fairly simple product, particularly when Google/Microsoft have basically free versions for their enterprise customers, but all I know is that I have no idea how to evaluate anything even remotely like a consumer company!
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  Unfortunately for me, Slack’s moat seems to be its network effects. We have tech community groups setting up Slack instances, and other alternatives are rejected because “everyone already has Slack at work and it’s easy to add another one”. Between my handful of clients and the communities I participate in, I am currently signed into 9 Slack instances. It’d be fine (I’m also on about 9 IRC channels), but the RAM... and the slowness of switching around between them. X-Chat is my baseline, and it makes Slack feel really bloated and clunky.
  - Eridrus 7y ago
    But I feel like this doesn't make them any money. If Slack started charging money, people would jump to something else pretty quick.
    - tonyarkles 7y ago
      If Slack started charging money for community groups, then sure, some of them would definitely jump ship. But... looking at my Slack here, I've got 4 clients and 6 community groups that I'm connected to. If a new client asks me what I'd prefer for a group chat, I'm probably going to say Slack. Not because I love it, but because I've already been sucked into the ecosystem. The free tier is definitely a marketing tool. Get people into the ecosystem and make it easier for someone to choose Slack rather than something else.
wahern 7y ago
sigh I remember arguing with other engineers, managers, and executives, even though I was never part of the team, that IM had huge market potential. But they had zero interest in exploring the space to find the right recipe. After the server and client acquisitions their one and only goal was to implement a long checklist of enterprise features, like LDAP integration with every conceivable variation, as if that was the only thing holding back the market. Those features were a bottomless resource sink, and the kind of thing that only makes sense to focus on after market adoption breakout. The IM space was too immature for that, but it was all they knew--grab some pre-existing solution, preferably open source-based, and refine it according to the demands of IT departments. It was also a waste of talent as your team had some of the best talent in the company and perhaps the only ones with the foresight and restraint capable of exploring the space and implementing big, novel solutions. I mean, a rich client GUI and a backend that permitted strong value-add data processing and transformation were what they acquired. But they never continued down the path that was being blazed prior to the acquisitions. Plus, other than spam it was the only project that saw (or even could see) significant internal usage, which means you guys could iterate quickly with live feedback, as opposed to being guided by the [poor] imaginations of the product and sales managers. Indeed, AFAIU it was only a couple of years ago that Barracuda moved off the internal IM product. Barracuda's anti-spam product, the only one that was even remotely trail blazing, succeeded precisely because they ate their own dog food; it was originally built to scratch their own itch while the founders were pursuing another venture. Everything required for success was right under their noses.... :( To be fair, by the time Slack came along expectations for enterprise integration were limited to web-based SSO, and you could throw together a multimedia rich GUI with Electron. Scaling simply meant using AWS, and the economics of cloud infrastructure meant enterprises were already used to higher per-user costs (presuming an attempt at profitability). There were fewer distractions. But at least Slack saw the potential.

Eridrus 7y ago

Slack is a really interesting company IMO. They were very late to the space - I was using Flowdock when they became a thing, and felt like Slack's lack of threads was a deal breaker. But Slack raised a boat load more money than their competitors, offered a free product and spent a huge amount of money on marketing and now they are the top dog. They're still losing money, and both Microsoft and Google have competitors rolled into their productivity suites, but I think they've largely crushed the smaller competition. I'm still not very bullish on Slack since I don't see how they build a defensible moat against competitors for what is a fairly simple product, particularly when Google/Microsoft have basically free versions for their enterprise customers, but all I know is that I have no idea how to evaluate anything even remotely like a consumer company!

tonyarkles 7y ago
Unfortunately for me, Slack’s moat seems to be its network effects. We have tech community groups setting up Slack instances, and other alternatives are rejected because “everyone already has Slack at work and it’s easy to add another one”. Between my handful of clients and the communities I participate in, I am currently signed into 9 Slack instances. It’d be fine (I’m also on about 9 IRC channels), but the RAM... and the slowness of switching around between them. X-Chat is my baseline, and it makes Slack feel really bloated and clunky.
- Eridrus 7y ago
  But I feel like this doesn't make them any money. If Slack started charging money, people would jump to something else pretty quick.
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    If Slack started charging money for community groups, then sure, some of them would definitely jump ship. But... looking at my Slack here, I've got 4 clients and 6 community groups that I'm connected to. If a new client asks me what I'd prefer for a group chat, I'm probably going to say Slack. Not because I love it, but because I've already been sucked into the ecosystem. The free tier is definitely a marketing tool. Get people into the ecosystem and make it easier for someone to choose Slack rather than something else.

wahern 7y ago

sigh I remember arguing with other engineers, managers, and executives, even though I was never part of the team, that IM had huge market potential. But they had zero interest in exploring the space to find the right recipe. After the server and client acquisitions their one and only goal was to implement a long checklist of enterprise features, like LDAP integration with every conceivable variation, as if that was the only thing holding back the market. Those features were a bottomless resource sink, and the kind of thing that only makes sense to focus on after market adoption breakout. The IM space was too immature for that, but it was all they knew--grab some pre-existing solution, preferably open source-based, and refine it according to the demands of IT departments. It was also a waste of talent as your team had some of the best talent in the company and perhaps the only ones with the foresight and restraint capable of exploring the space and implementing big, novel solutions. I mean, a rich client GUI and a backend that permitted strong value-add data processing and transformation were what they acquired. But they never continued down the path that was being blazed prior to the acquisitions. Plus, other than spam it was the only project that saw (or even could see) significant internal usage, which means you guys could iterate quickly with live feedback, as opposed to being guided by the [poor] imaginations of the product and sales managers. Indeed, AFAIU it was only a couple of years ago that Barracuda moved off the internal IM product. Barracuda's anti-spam product, the only one that was even remotely trail blazing, succeeded precisely because they ate their own dog food; it was originally built to scratch their own itch while the founders were pursuing another venture. Everything required for success was right under their noses.... :( To be fair, by the time Slack came along expectations for enterprise integration were limited to web-based SSO, and you could throw together a multimedia rich GUI with Electron. Scaling simply meant using AWS, and the economics of cloud infrastructure meant enterprises were already used to higher per-user costs (presuming an attempt at profitability). There were fewer distractions. But at least Slack saw the potential.