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Salesforce Deal to Buy Slack Expected to Be Announced Tuesday After Market Close
- theandrewbailey 6y ago2021: Salesforce introduces Chat Cloud.
- mrweasel 6y agoPopulated by bots and that one guy who accidentally clicked on the “chat with our sales team”
- chrismeller 6y agoI’m not going to say that Salesforce has ruined every product they’ve acquired, but...
- uCantCauseUCant 6y agoHooli Chat
- toast0 6y agoIsn't that the role of a big company? Everyonce in a while, an acquisition goes well, but usually it's like a private equity buyout; you know it's not going to end well, you just don't know when. Except if it's Oracle, then you know you need to start migrating immediately, cause you can maybe get one more contract renewal in before the terms change.
- symlinkk 6y agoQuip and Heroku are solid
- ciarannolan 6y ago+ Tableau
- user5994461 6y ago+ Concur
- realityking 6y agoThat’s SAP
- jbm 6y agoQuip has a mixed reputation. I liked it but I know a lot of people who viscerally disliked it.
- hajile 6y agoSo long Slack. It was great while it lasted. I have yet to see anything that got better because it involved Salesforce.
- dkdk8283 6y agoI detest Slack and their push for chat ops. Good riddance. Nothing wrong with IRC.
- ebiester 6y agoSo, how do search every public channel, regardless of whether you were even a part of the company at the time, with as convenient of a workflow as Slack has? There's nothing wrong with IRC if you are trying to solve the problems of IRC. They don't solve the business problem as well as slack does. Slack is Slack because of search and an easy to use client with a universal extension set.
- dijit 6y agoIf you want publicly accessible histories I can think of a few better ways. The (very) old school way was to have indexed logs accessible over HTTP. You can almost certainly still find IRC logs on google this way -- If it’s internal just stick an ELK stack behind an authentication proxy it’s 20 minutes of work, an hour most with the addition of a log bot which joins public channels. This is for IRC though, better options exist for things like Zulip or Matrix. (non-exhaustive list, obviously) Side note though: I find it weird that this is the bar. It comes up every thread but it’s tantamount to a “ha! Gotcha!”, because no -sane- messaging system logs its history in a way that is retrievable immediately because indexing -all that content- is expensive and better off being centralised; additionally chat history (almost by definition) loses relevance quickly. It’s almost certainly an anti-pattern when you feel the need to refer to things you said 2 years ago, immediately, in the same client you used to write those things. I don’t know how you’re using slack though, so I guess it’s pretty central to your flow. EDIT: am I wrong? Is this normal? Someone correct me please if you’re not happy with what I say.
- estomagordo 6y agoAccording to this site, Slack operated at a $138.9 MUSD loss last year. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012616/how-does-slack-work-and-make-money.asp#:~:text=More%20than%2095%2C000%20organizations%20are,%24138.9%20million%20in%20FY%202019 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012616/how-d.... And Slack themselves are expecting something similar for 2020. https://slack.com/intl/en-nl/blog/news/slack-announces-record-third-quarter-fiscal-year-2020-results#:~:text=For%20the%20full%20fiscal%20year%202020%2C%20Slack%20currently%20expects%3A&text=Total%20revenue%20of%20%24621%20million,of%2055%25%20to%2056%25.&text=Non%2DGAAP%20operating%20loss%20of%20%24144%20million%20to%20%24142%20million,time%20direct%20listing%20related%20expenses https://slack.com/intl/en-nl/blog/news/slack-announces-recor.... People who actually know how to reason about business finances will elaborate, I'm sure. What I'm wondering is, what are some realistic scenarios for how a new owner will pursue more aggressive revenue generation for Slack?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoSalesforce will have their sales teams push it alongside their other offerings, raise prices for those who want to use it, kill the free plan, and trim any fat (or strongly encourage cost savings measures, depending on how much autonomy Slack will continue to have post-acquisition) not needed to operate the product. I have no doubt they'll be able to make it profitable, even at the loss of market share (free users and price sensitive paying orgs).
- samcat116 6y agoI do not see them killing the free plan, even Salesforce knows better than that. I bet they'll run it very similarly to how they run Heroku, and the Slack integration will get better. But prices might go up too.
- DamnYuppie 6y agoLOL, having worked with SF for the last two years I can completely see them killing the free plan. They care only about licensed seat count, at ALL COST!
- CharlesW 6y agoThis aged well: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-slack-will-be-acquired https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-slack-will-be-ac... (You have to give them your email address to read.)
- troughway 6y agoI remember that, was on the front page. The writing was on the wall the moment they took out that full page ad in NYT which is a bizarre PR move that signalled fear. Can someone pastebin the article for us?
- MikeKusold 6y agoThere is no email verification. The article appears after you submit any valid email address.
- adwww 6y agoThat letter Slack wrote to Microsoft after they rejected a $$$ takeover a few years ago has not aged that well. https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/news/dear-microsoft https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/news/dear-microsoft
- elevenoh 6y agoWhat'd you say aged least well about this?
- adwww 6y agoMostly the arrogance that went into writing it..!
- bdefore 6y agoThe bit about love and 'open platform is essential' reads pretty rich when they removed token support, killing off slack-keep-presence (https://github.com/eskerda/slack-keep-presence https://github.com/eskerda/slack-keep-presence) so that you can be more thoroughly surveilled. Do they give admins productivity scores of all employees yet?
- saagarjha 6y agoOr when they removed the IRC and XMPP bridges?
- seibelj 6y ago> Third, you’ve got to do this with love. You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working. This is so cringe-inducing, I can't believe they paid to have this in the NYT. Microsoft stock up to all-time highs as Teams eats Slack's lunch (for better or worse), while Slack bought for scrap by a company way worse than MSFT. Maybe don't publicly shame potential acquirers in passive-aggressive paid advertisements?
- KingMachiavelli 6y ago
- tbenst 6y agoSlack fosters vibrant (free) communities in open source and academia. I fear these are not long for this world.
- foepys 6y agoAren't people already preferring Discord? I saw a lot of Discord links in the past few months and nobody even talked about Slack.
- symlinkk 6y agoWhen are people going to realize that software is largely a fashion industry? Slack was in style, now it’s not. Right now Zoom is the hot new thing, give it half a year and it’ll be out. None of these products do anything functionally different than their predecessors, it’s just aesthetic.
- Spivak 6y agoI don’t think software would be so fad-oriented if there wasn’t a culture of infinite growth and expansion.
- tootie 6y agoI think Zoom is actually appreciably better than the competition. And I also think there's still a lot more space for video conferencing to innovate. Company's like Zoom that sell integrated conference setups can integrate themselves pretty thoroughly into an enterprise.
- corytheboyd 6y agoCan’t wait to go through this same exact routine in a few years lol
- troughway 6y agoDiscord is an interesting case compared to Slack. Slack is, from my understanding anyway, built out in PHP. Fairly lingua franca for the web. Discord, on the other hand, seems to have built a "technical moat" of sorts for themselves by using Erlang/Elixir and other non-standard tech. Suppose SF or a company like them were to acquire Discord. If and when the staff were to leave once their vesting period or whatever is over, who would take over the codebase from them?
- remarkEon 6y agoIs everyone else dreading the inevitable forced quip integration as much as I am?
- minutillo 6y agoLooking forward to Stewart's next attempt at making a game. Third time's the charm!
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoOr at least we'll get another piece of usable business software ;)
- frankietaylr 6y agoFor people who don't know Stewart Butterfield is the creator of Flickr and Slack. Both Flickr and Slack are side products/ideas which came up while developing a game. Interesting read: https://www.fastcompany.com/3026418/this-story-about-slacks-founder-says-everything-you-need-to-know-about-him https://www.fastcompany.com/3026418/this-story-about-slacks-...
- remote_phone 6y agoZoom missed a good opportunity to buy slack. They could have used their inflated stock price to purchase it snd consolidate into a WFH platform. The only weakness is probably the Zoom CEO who probably wouldn’t know how to run both businesses. But I think that would have been a better match than salesforce
- paxys 6y agoThere is no way in hell any company would accept a buyout offer for $25+ billion worth of Zoom stock at their current (very inflated) price.
- remote_phone 6y ago“No way in hell”?? Sounds like you know nothing about how business works. Plenty of companies use their stock price to buy other companies, regardless of what you think the value is.
- satellite2 6y agoIt seems that Salesforce stock price could also be considered pretty inflated looking at their PE ratio.
- paxys 6y agoIt'll at least be 50% cash, as the article says.
- MangoCoffee 6y agowe don't use Slack at my job. we do use MuleSoft which got bought by Salesforce. not sure about every touched by Salesforce die but Salesforce is giving out the Oracle vibe. they just keep buying other companies...
- xtracto 6y ago> MuleSoft Ooh my, that brings me back terrible nightmares. I remember having to use Mule Eclipse based platform to create "service buses". That was crazy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xwdv 6y agoNow I'm just waiting to see who is going to buy Zoom.
- cutenewt 6y agoSlack has a $135B market cap. At that price, it'll be a merger, not an acquisition.
- JohnTHaller 6y agoAs Salesforce is basically Oracle, Jr, who wants to take bets on when they kill off the free option (or greatly water down the features), raise the prices to fit better with with Salesforce's pricing, and force-integrate it with the rest of their product stack?
- foolmeonce 6y agoHmm, I would have gone from slack to keybase, if keybase weren't bought out. It seems to me like running a matrix server without open registration would be about all I need and is startup resistant. But intros understandably don't seem geared to details for migration of simple automated systems. JSON/HTTP is great, but what does sending messages in via API look like given e2e? Is one installing a whole robot framework to replace a simple webhook (similar to how one would be using a whole keybase install for its CLI)?
- karaterobot 6y agoAm I paranoid to assume that Salesforce is probably very (mostly?) interested in the business intelligence that comes from analyzing team communications?