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Salesforce is in talks to buy Slack
- laurentb 6y agoHow would that work considering Salesforce already has Quip ?
- jasonv 6y agoI use Slack and Quip and they’re not the same thing.
- laurentb 6y agoreally? I thought they were pretty much a direct competitor except with a different take on the whole idea. What's the use case for Quip then ?
- jitl 6y agoQuip is a wiki. Use it to write and share documents. Slack is a communication tool. Use it to have conversations.
- noema 6y agoAt my job we use Quip strictly for collaborative design docs (i.e. architectural design, project scope, tutorials etc). Personally I don't think it can be a true wiki platform since it lacks robust indexing -- this is without doubt its biggest shortcoming.
- lobotryas 6y agoCorrect. Quip is not a wiki. I would call it an “opinionated and stripped-down version of GSuite with excellent collaboration support”. Quip also has chat stapled to it. Slack is missing doc management/creation. Quip is missing a good chat solution. It’s almost like PB&J.
- Slartie 6y agoA wiki? I thought it was an electric toothbrush!
- Irishsteve 6y agoWe used it as a google docs alternative
- nateburke 6y agoQuip competes with Office 365/Gsuite, not Microsoft Teams/Gchat.
- jitl 6y agoI think it would be great for both products if they were integrated tightly. The chat features in quip are barely used because they’re so anemic, and Slack is missing a document catalog UI, and, in a way, has gone to war with document catalogs because it wants chat to be the “center” of work. But this is often a mismatch for customers who view both as equally important.
- adzm 6y agoAs a salesforce user, this disturbs me, since salesforce has been a terrible experience. That said, perhaps our organization just doesn't have it configured effectively. We use both Slack and Teams though, so if this somehow makes it easier to get the whole org on Slack then it would be worth it.
- kamyarg 6y agoNo, it is not you. Their chat api expects headers that they do not include in cors allowed headers, we had to write a proxy just for this. Salesforce as a company is a terrible experience. Had many incidents because of their bad practices or lack of knowledge or incompetency.
- arusahni 6y agoA better comparison might be Heroku, which, post SF acquisition, hasn't really changed to become more SalesForce-y as far as I can see.
- sb8244 6y agoYea, the only SFDC stuff I've seen is the postgres-sfdc connector. Which is fine as it's kept as an add-on and away from the core experience.
- couchand 6y agoThat seems apt. Slack comes in with a strong brand of its own, like Heroku but moreso. The integration will probably be more of a bridge model than a consumption one.
- freehunter 6y agoI actually don't think Heroku has changed much at all since they were bought by Salesforce. That's partially a good thing (Salesforce isn't making them worse) but also a bad thing because Salesforce doesn't seem to be making them any better either. Pricing is the biggest thing, despite running on AWS and AWS prices dropping pretty steadily but Heroku's pricing seems to have held firm. Their offerings don't seem to have changed much over the years either, you don't hear about them in the news much, you don't hear a lot of customer stories or companies talking about using Heroku... it just seems stagnant, which in the world of cloud computing is not great. It's hard to tell if Salesforce has been a positive for Heroku for keeping it alive, or a negative for mismanaging the company, since we don't know what they would have done if they stayed independent and had to actually compete. But I'm pretty sure if they were still independent and had to compete in the market with only the features they have right now, they would likely be out of business. There's very little reason to choose Heroku these days, and I say that as someone who has code running in production on Heroku's platform.
- btrautsc 6y ago"Enterprise software is boring"
- qz2 6y agoI think we need to replace that one with "Enterprise software is shit" these days.
- tabob 6y agoWell, it’s time to ditch slack. What is a good alternative that isn’t Microsoft or Google owned?
- redisman 6y agoDiscord ?
- zitterbewegung 6y agoDiscord if you still want to use someone else's service. Rocketchat if you want full control (open source).
- CharlesW 6y agohttps://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
- angulardragon03 6y agoWe use Mattermost internally, it’s pretty good. Don’t think the mobile client is quite as good as Slacks, though.
- TechBro8615 6y agoI consider this a bonus. (Mattermost is great)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vlucas 6y agoWhoa. $WORK already up +22% on the day due to this news: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WORK https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WORK
- Tiktaalik 6y agoAs an aside just talking bout WORK performance during this huge shift to WFH, it's been wild to seem ZOOM go wild this pandemic, while WORK stagnated. I wouldn't have expected that.
- cutenewt 6y agoZoom is a must have during the pandemic Slack has many alternatives including using email
- scottmcleod 6y agoLol what... WebEx, Cisco, Meet etc etc... Lot of alternatives.
- cutenewt 6y agoI used WebEx and Google Meet the last 5 days. They're alternatives, but they are far from being usable alternatives.
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago>They're alternatives, but they are far from being usable alternatives. It has to be comments like this that drove someone to create n-gate. WebEx had 324,000,000 users running 73,000,000 meetings in March of this year [0]. As of April, Meet was adding 3,000,000 users per day with 100,000,000 users attending meets per day. [1] You're obviously right though, they're clearly utterly unusable. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-systems-webex-idUSKBN21L2SY https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-systems-webex-idUSK... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/28/21240434/google-meet-three-million-users-per-day-pichai-earnings https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/28/21240434/google-meet-thre...
- Waterluvian 6y agoSalesforce and Atlassian are the two big cloud things I have experince with. Both feel like they just swallow up products and duct tape them to their behemoth in what results in a complete mess. JIRA is a 22MB download any time I go to look at my tickets and the whole experience is grindy slow.
- Quarrelsome 6y agoI'm still amazed that JIRA redesigned the UI and chose to relegate the date the ticket was created to a "secondary piece of information". Every time I look at a ticket its like the 4th or 5th thing I check, its such useful information and they've allowed themselves to be so far removed from their principal use-cases its extraordinary. Unless maybe it was my org that foolishly decided to configure it away?
- zeckalpha 6y agoThe id is a proxy, ignoring cross project transfers
- pc86 6y agoMan, what happened to Atlassian? At some point in the not-so-distant past they were the gold standard, or at least I thought they were. Now they seem to be a cautionary tale.
- sjg007 6y agoCruising along. One issue though is that the integrated knowledge workflow is complex.
- nofinator 6y agoMy observation as a user is that it's still good if you are starting a new account from scratch. But if you have been using it for a decade and made lots of customizations and added plugins over the years, they get more clunky as they continue to update their product.
- awinter-py 6y agoslack market cap 20b and at the time of their IPO only half the stock was listed salesforce revenue 20b are they really going to pay 40b for something that makes 400m a year? I get they're paying in stock but forgive me for not understanding the synergies here
- 1123581321 6y agoSome possibilities: Slack revenue will increase on its own. Salesforce integrations and cross-sell will improve. An app discovery service that offers competitors can be brought in-house and managed. It could certainly be a mistake, though.
- awinter-py 6y agoslack projects 4b revenue w/in a few years so yeah, maybe SF is drinking the same kool aid? even in the cross-sell case, 'slack doubles the value of salesforce' is a stretch I suppose slack has way more customers so if even a few of them convert, salesforce grows tremendously? but the downside is this pushes SF into the freemium market. 'we're buying slack to help us grow our free tier' isn't ultra compelling.
- 1123581321 6y agoI could see that. How would you value Slack as a subsidiary of a larger B2B SaaS if all of those downsides are substantial?
- awinter-py 6y agoif the future of salesforce is workflows, slack provides a lot of data for workflows (assuming they're allowed to use it). if salesforce has a substantially more developed marketplace for plugins, SF can help slack get there too; not sure how rev-share works for slack plugins today.
- paxys 6y agoFYI market cap doesn't just take into account how many shares were listed on IPO day. It's the total value of all outstanding shares.
- offtop5 6y agoRip slack. Damn good exit though. Who woulda thought a chat utility could be worth billions
- paxys 6y agoSlack already had a "good exit". They are a public $20 billion company. If anything getting acquired is a step back for them.
- julianlam 6y agoWorking with Salesforce for the one project that required it, was an absolute nightmare. Opaque APIs, needlessly complex implementation requirements, useless documentation. It reeks of different services consolidated via acquisition (or one-off services kitbashed together), and adding slack to the mix will just add yet another variation to the existing APIs. I commend those devs that work with Salesforce on a daily basis!
- couchand 6y agoThis is an accurate description!
- arcturus17 6y ago> I commend those devs that work with Salesforce on a daily basis! I've heard decent ones are handsomely paid, so at least they have that going on for them.
- technofiend 6y agoSounds like modern-day SAP. Pays well if you're willing to wade in and learn the beast.
- iJohnDoe 6y agoYou can easily make a small fortune being a Salesforce dev/consulting shop. Medium to large business will easily pay $200k-$400k for Salesforce implementation projects.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoI have one of these companies in my town. It’s amazing to me how large the market is just to make somebody else’s product not suck so bad for you. Still feel like the business sales industry is waiting for its iPhone disruptor.
- dbancajas 6y agoYou mind telling us how to get started?
- croes 6y agoRIP Slack
- moocowtruck 6y agotrue that, I'm already working on my migration plans.. horrible horrible news
- dewey 6y agoYou are working on migration plans because there were some rumors about a possible future acquisition?
- CameronNemo 6y agoWhy not? Can't hurt to have a plan. Perhaps they wanted to have a backup for a while, and this news was just a kick in the butt.
- moocowtruck 6y agopretty big rumors, it was the push i needed to start evaluating options
- moocowtruck 6y agoguess that future happened eh?
- tehjoker 6y agoLooking forward to when salesforce gets acquired by an even bigger company. It'll be so cool when literally everything I do in life is basically owned by one company. Get paid in company scrip, buy food at the company store, live in company housing, talk to my family and coworkers over the company intercom, genuflect to the picture of the CEO in the mornings and before bed.
- northerdome 6y agoLinkedIn fought extremely hard to end up with Microsoft when Salesforce REALLY wanted them. LinkedIn execs new Salesforce would be the end of the company.
- cutemonster 6y agoHow would SF have gone about accidentally destroying LinkedIn?
- vehementi 6y agoIt's just nice to be able to make sweeping simplistic statements about a super complicated situation
- cutemonster 6y agoSaying that companies are really bad, even dog shit (a sibling reply to my reply above), also seems popular -- implying that the poster could have created a better company himself? hmm
- Zenbit_UX 6y agoLinkedIn is a pile of dogshit, they didn't need any help to do it either. It's laggy, spammy and covered in dark patterns with a user base populated almost entirely by self-aggrandizing boomers jerking each other off. Now please explain to me, how Salesforce would have ruined it?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gentleman11 6y agoDoes every company have to be owned by another in a chain that ends with Halliburton-PepsiCo-timeWarner-at&t-nestle?
- crocodiletears 6y agoLegally? Not yet. We'll get there.
- racl101 6y agoDo people want to cash out and make billions of dollars? Or continue to fight in a competitive landscape and constantly work hard to innovate lest another company over takes them? There's your answer.
- jdgoesmarching 6y agoThis is the end result of oligarchy capitalism, which is itself the end result of neoliberalism. The tech community is temporarily compensated enough to ignore the realities of our economy. It’s a shame, we are probably the most empowered to change its course. Quick plug for the General Internet Unit podcast, they’re a good starting point for those wondering how things might be different.
- randomsearch 6y agoWasn’t available via search on a podcast app.
- spurgu 6y agoIsn't found on the internet in general - the only thing I find is this HN thread. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- jdgoesmarching 6y agoGeneral Intellect* Unit. I swear I fixed that at least once, Apple’s damn autocorrect.
- hbt 6y ago
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoFunny, just earlier today I was noticing that a friend of mine seems to have started working at Slack and was thinking "hm, that seems like the kind of company I'd consider applying to... smaller, but still serious, good quality product, but not bogged down in BigCorp politics etc." Not anymore!
- stephenr 6y ago> good quality product You must be using a different version of slack to me.
- akfanta 6y agoWhat would Salesforce gain from this acquisition?
- 1_player 6y agoSlack.
- dyeje 6y agoI don't get it. Slack needs a productivity suite to fight off Microsoft eating their lunch with teams getting bundled for free with everything. Salesforce has no synergy with Slack that I can see. I guess you could deeply integrate with the CRM... but why would you want that abomination? The advantage of Slack is that it's centralized communication for the whole company. If it becomes bolted on to the CRM I guarantee other departments at companies will find a new tool.
- umeshunni 6y agoSalesforce is building its own productivity suite - they have acquired Quip and continues to push it as a "live editing intelligent document linked with data"-type thing.
- twblalock 6y agoQuip is probably where they think the synergy is. Quip could provide the productivity suite features, and Slack could provide the chat features. An integrated Slack and Quip product could be a decent competitor to Microsoft Teams, especially for the large amount of customers who already pay for either Salesforce, Quip, or Slack separately. It would probably be a lot easier for existing customers to add new features to what they are already paying for than it would be to switch to Microsoft Teams.
- lobotryas 6y agoSalesforce does have a productivity suite they purchased and built upon a few years ago called Quip.
- hw 6y agoI don't get it either. Great exit for Slack though, which has done nothing in terms of its stock price since IPO. Slack doesn't really have a moat, and they're slowly getting eaten up by Teams and other companies like RingCentral who also have their own chat app. Wouldn't be surprised if Zoom came out with one.
- skinnymuch 6y agoZoom has had a weak plain Slack copy cat for some time now. They bring it up in their change log a lot (Zoom Chat), but I only know of 1-2 people who use it.
- geoelkh 6y agoZoom buying it instead would be huge
- skinnymuch 6y agoAgreed. That would be the biggest. Would be insane and who knows what that could have led to for Zoom being the newest big tech company. Before I thought Perhaps Atlassian and Slack would merge in a mostly stock deal. Was looking at their recent partnerships. Atlasssian’s market cap is 3x bigger. Only big enough if both were on board.
- umeshunni 6y agoNot surprising. It's really hard to see how slack could survive as an independent company given that their product has been more or less stagnant while Teams has been eating their lunch on large accounts. I don't think their corporate culture let their product make the leap from "cute chat app used by Silicon Valley startups because it has emojis" to Enterprise-level support and functionality.
- m23khan 6y agoWow, this would be another big move for Salesforce -- I think this year they acquired Tableau as well.
- skinnymuch 6y agoMulesoft is the other recent huge acquisition. While the smaller but still decent sized Quip acquisition is a big part of this acquisition. One of the Quip founders is President and COO of SF too.
- api 6y agoIf people want a self-hosted alternative: https://mattermost.com https://mattermost.com We use it. Its great.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoHuh, for some reason I thought this was the same thing as element.io. I guess they're different. I was pretty impressed with mattermost in the brief time I used it. Shame it looks like their starter package is twice the price of Slack...
- agustif 6y ago> Shame it looks like their starter package is twice the price of Slack... It has also an open source option you can self-host no?
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoYes, but my company is not going to do that.
- api 6y agoOh no you have to pay for it! It’s free for lots of use cases including basic commercial use and is open source.
- pb7 6y agoThis is the time to raise flags about anti-trust, not years later when the market is hurting. There is no reason for this acquisition other than to kill competition with gross incompetence and $$$ acquired via other sources.
- gtirloni 6y agoThere are countless chat apps in the market right now. What competition is this killing?
- nikolay 6y agoThis is great news for Microsoft Teams! Salesforce will slowly kill it!
- clement_b 6y agoNo. No. Please No.
- ogre_codes 6y agoUuuuggggghhhhhh While I've already kind of fallen out of love with Slack, I do appreciate that they are independent. I do understand why smaller companies do this, but generally it results in a crappier product. Skype is a perfect example of a good product left to rot on the corporate vine. The software world would be so much richer if there were more difficult for bigger companies to suck them up and turn them into corporate goop. I'm not necessarily suggesting regulation here. Just wishful thinking.
- molsongolden 6y agoThis is my quarterly Zulip[1] mention! Independent OSS chat and unlikely to be turned into corporate goop. [1] https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/
- spurgu 6y agoLet's add in Mattermost. Have you used both? I remember trying Zulip briefly one evening and it just felt horribly confusing. Mattermost feels more at home but its threading model is weird, it's not really threading (at least like Slack) since all messages are echoed to the channel. https://mattermost.org/ https://mattermost.org/
- cutemonster 6y ago> unlikely to be turned into corporate goop What are reasons it's unlikely? (I like Zulip btw)
- tabbott 6y agoZulip's founder here. (I should write a blog post on this topic.) The structural reason is that we're intentionally not taking VC funding, which does more or less inevitable lead to that outcome. Less structural but just as important is that my personal priority is in creating great open source software for the world, not personal enrichment. This thread may be useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23105031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23105031.
- onida 6y agoSlack headquarters is directly across from Salesforce tower. Makes sense for that reason as well.
- BurningFrog 6y agoYeah, the Salesforce execs look out over that Slack sign all day. Advertising does work!
- whatthesmack 6y agoThen it seems it's time Salesforce finally picked up Okta, too :)
- asattarmd 6y agoI just don't want them to stagnate it like they stagnated Heroku. Heroku and Slack were revolutionary. But Heroku has stalled for many years.
- pod123 6y agoI see a lot of comments about why Salesforce would acquire them and what the product benefit would be. It's not the product they are acquiring, it's the business and more importantly their financials. Salesforce's market cap is primarily driven by its ability to keep growth rates high. That's hard to do for a 25 year old company with a mature product. The easiest way to prop your growth rate up is find a fast growing company with a somewhat related product and absorb their growth rate. Who better than slack growing in the 40% range with revenues that aren't insignificant for Salesforce. The challenge with that strategy (apart from the awful customer experience of cobbling those products together) is that the next year you have to keep doing these large acquisitions to maintain that growth rate.
- kornish 6y ago2019: Tableau (BI) 2020: Slack (messaging) 2021: Zendesk? (CS)
- inthewoods 6y agoJust my opinion, but I think Atlassian is a much more likely outcome.
- skinnymuch 6y agoThat would be pretty wild. Close to a merger even. Atlassian is growing steadily and their market cap has risen like so many others. Unless a huge recession And reset occurs, Salesforce, a ~$200B company would have to put down possibly $75B to get Atlassian. $225B is only 3x $75B.
- adventured 6y agoSlack's small contribution isn't going to make a serious dent in Salesforce's need for growth. Slack is adding $200m per year in sales growth and burning massive amounts of red ink to do it, which will harm rather than improve Salesforce's financial situation. Salesforce is approaching $20b in sales, to generate a mere 10% growth in the coming year they obviously need $2b per year in additional sales - that $200m from Slack is almost meaningless, other than being a shovel to the head of CRM shareholders in price paid to get it. Slack is such a horrible financial Titanic that post acquisition it'll destroy most of Salesforce's already mediocre profitability. Salesforce generated $463m in operating income in its most recent fiscal year; Slack lost $330m in operating income over the prior four quarters. Slack's growth prospects are bad to make matters worse. This deal will result in a giant writedown in the not very distant future. It'll eventually be considered a bad joke that someone paid ~$25 billion for Slack. For Slack's part, it's a brilliant exit. Get out while they can still fetch an extreme bubble multiple. Their stock had performed so poorly post IPO (while everything else cloud & remote zoomed) because the market knows their prospects are not great. In 2016 Salesforce was getting a valuation of about 10-12 times sales, before this latest mania really lifted off, with a market cap similar to or lower than what eg Snowflake is getting today (with Snowflake now doing around 1/9th the sales that Salesforce was back then, ha). Slack is getting 30-35 times sales on its exit with no evidence they have a great business that will endure (versus a mere product that Microsoft will forever be squeezing the financial life out of by making the segment inhospitable territory). It's not just a product? Sure it is, that's why it's about to end up in the belly of Salesforce as a really dumb acquisition mistake typical of later stage bubbles.
- creade 6y agoHeadline predictions: -2024 Stewart Butterfield announces new MMORPG, "Cology" -2025 Butterfield reluctantly shutters Cology after failing to attract playerbase -2026 Butterfield announces public release of collaborative VR design tool first built for Cology, "Devival" -2027 Devival passes 3 million DAUs -2028 Devival announces IPO -2029 Devival sold to Adobe for $35b -2032 Stewart Butterfield announces new MMORPG, "Breviariam"
- not_knuth 6y agoThats one way to stay in the loop. ;)
- avolcano 6y agoDon't forget the part where he sells the Cology domain and trademarks to another tech startup :) (I have quite a few friends who have some fondness for what Glitch-the-game was trying to do. Always appreciated that they open sourced the art from it: https://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/ https://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/)
- vilifiedtwin 6y agoThis is what's wrong with capitalism. Companies buy other companies to get so big, they are too big to fail, they have money to "optimise" taxes, lobby politicians to introduce barriers to entry for the competition and then gather personal data to be able to manipulate people and extract as much value as possible off of them. I think this is where we need strong regulation. Companies should not be allowed to buy other companies if there is no legitimate need for that.
- antoniuschan99 6y agoWhat happened to Slacks and Atlassian's partnership? Atlassian essentially surrendered Hipchat to Slack's dominance (I think this was before Microsoft Teams). Salesforce also has Heroku. Someone mentioned Salesforce owning Tableau. There hasn't been much going on between Slack and Atlassian, if we could see a cohesive integration going on there's definitely a chance they could become dominant within this ecosystem but for now it seems all so fragmented still.
- sys_64738 6y agoWho knew you could make money off an IRC clone.
- barry27 6y agoI think this makes a lot of sense. Slack blows, and so does Salesforce. Synergies abound.
- skinnymuch 6y agoHaven’t seen it mentioned. People are talking about Quip being a large part of the synergy for this deal. One of the founders of Quip was co creator of Google Maps, co-made FriendFeed, was an early CTO of Facebook, and is now President and COO of Salesforce. Presumably he is another big force in SF outside Benioff and would love Quip to get the addition of Slack to really give it a chance to take off.
- scottisbrave84 6y agoYes apex (insert. .. $lack)
- Harvey77 6y agoI was scammed by a binary option website iq options to be exact. I lost about $153,000 to them. It was a really hard time for me because that was all i had and they tricked me into investing the money with a guarantee that i will make profit from the investment.. I was referred to Mr Gary, he’s a senior recovery specialist and he helped in recovering all my lost funds to me. I couldn’t believe at first that this was possible as i have lost all hope in contacting anyone on the internet, but i guess not everyone is bad after all. You can reach him on cybertechhub100 at gmail dot com