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I'm somewhat surprised that Amazon didn't end up acquiring Slack, considering that the major thing they are missing compared to Microsoft is productivity tools.

• ogre_codes 6y ago
  Amazon would have been frustrating, but I suspect less terrible than Salesforce. What a mess.
• naringas 6y ago
  however amazon is not really a tech-first company, their main business is retail (even if a lot of their revenue comes from AWS).
  • greenshackle2 6y ago
    Retail is the lion share of revenue but AWS is over half of profits last I checked.
  • 98codes 6y ago
    Quite the other way, they're a cloud company with a gift shop.
  • cafed00d 6y ago
    I would say Amazon’s main business is commerce. They want to be involved everywhere people are buying/selling things. AWS & Amazon.com are coincidences of them starting up around the same time as the internet. Before long, they’ll own the entire feature for “oh, I need to buy cereal. Alexa buy me cereal. Ok, done. <few mins later>. I’m passing by the Amazon Go store on way home, Alexa. Can I return these shoes I bought last week and pick up my cereal there. Sure.”
  • codegladiator 6y ago
    please stop with this meme ? meme is not tech first for whatever definitions of /tech first/ you have.
    • runawaybottle 6y ago
      Tech first: Your main product is technology.
      • 8note 6y ago
        But then google is not a tech company either? Their main product is advertisements.
  • patmorgan23 6y ago
    Retail is Amazons biggest revenue (raw cash) generator. AWS is amazons biggest profit (cash after expenses) generator.
  • ncn 6y ago
    You’ve got it backwards. Their main business is aws.
• floatingatoll 6y ago
  If buying a business would put Amazon in the position of having to introduce a new end-user customer support burden, then they are unlikely to do so. Eero devices require this customer support, but that can be merged with their IOT support team for all other in-home objects. I think Amazon made an exception to their “user support is never our priority” choice because they know it’s the only way to get a physical foothold in our homes, with Kindle and Echo, and I think the burden of Eero support was worth it to them for the mesh networking technology that has been harvested for Sidewalk. Slack customer support cannot be easily integrated with any existing Amazon support team that I’m aware of, and does not offer a world-changing advantage to that degree.
  • foota 6y ago
    Doesn't amazon have relatively good customer support for retail? Or are you specifically talking about AWS here?
    • CharlesW 6y ago
      Not in my experience, at least in the relatively-rare occasions where exceptions happen. I had an order which Amazon claimed to have been delivered but wasn't, and it took several days and multiple interactions to resolve. Just figuring out a way to talk to a human felt like an ARG.
      • mike_d 6y ago
        The take away is that your issue was resolved. While it might not have been a satisfactory experience, you received resolution. If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void.
        • CharlesW 6y ago
          The question was whether Amazon has "relatively good customer support for retail", which it doesn't in my experience. If we move the goalpost to "have I been able to resolve problems", then yes — after 30 minutes of research into how to hack Amazon customer support in order to talk with a human, followed by multiple phone and chat interactions with generous on-hold time, I can share that Amazon support for retail technically exists and is excellent except when compared to 95% of other customer support experience I've ever had. > If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void. Ooof, I believe you. I'm Facebook-free, but maybe it's time to start looking for another email provider.
• filoleg 6y ago
  >Yes, I know Chime exists. But I don't think I've ever heard of anyone using it, and Slack is still rather popular. I think even Amazon realized how awful Chime is, given that they, as a company, switched to Slack just a few months ago.
  • nopzor 6y ago
    i heard this, but all my meetings with amazon folk are still on chime. plus, slack audio and video capabilities are imo sorely lacking.
  • variaga 6y ago
    Amazon is a big place and I can't speak for all of it, but while IT announced that slack was "available" a few months ago, I don't personally know anyone that has actually switched to using it. Everyone still uses Chime. That may just be a peculiarity of my department, but saying "Amazon as a company switched to slack" is definitely overstating what happened.
    • DigitalBison 6y ago
      This is super org-dependent -- my entire org has completely switched to Slack, I only use Chime for meetings now (except for the occasional recruiter or someone outside my org who will ping me on Chime).
      • variaga 6y ago
        So that's the thing. Switching to slack was brought up in our org and most people were at best noncommittal, because the option wasn't really "chime vs. slack", it was "chime vs. chime AND slack". We'd still all need chime for meetings and interacting with any groups that hadn't switched.
        • spike021 6y ago
          It's actually pretty smooth since you can do `/chime` in a Slack channel or DM and it automatically starts a Chime call. Otherwise I just keep Chime open for scheduled meetings.
• brenryd 6y ago
  Discord could be interesting as Amazon has already shown interest in the gaming / streaming / online community space with their Twitch acquisition.
  • young_unixer 6y ago
    One could copy-paste Discord, replace all occurrences of "gaming" for "enterprise" and it would be a much better business communication platform than Slack.
    • dmlittle 6y ago
      I don't think this is true. You can't really join/leave channels on Discord (yes I'm aware you can use roles to give permissions but it's not the same).
      • otterlicious 6y ago
        I've never used Slack but in Microsoft Teams there are Teams and Channels and they pretty much map 1:1 to Discord's Servers and Text Channels. You cannot leave individual channels of a Team though you can mute them and you have even less permissions than Discord. So maybe it isn't a 1:1 replacement for Slack but it certainly could compete in the field.
        • astauf5 6y ago
          Teams is garbage compared to Discord or even Slack imo. Complete garbage UI.
      • zacharycohn 6y ago
        This is my biggest complaint about Discord, and the reason I rarely check the few servers I'm on. There are three channels out of 80 I'm interested in. Just let me leave them!
        • square_usual 6y ago
• qppo 6y ago
  > if you already use Office, why not Azure? My gut reasoning is that cloud infrastructure is not the same product as office productivity and the two use cases are not the same, the purchasing decisions aren't made by the same people (except at scale, I guess, I'll concede that), and the boots on the ground building shit in the cloud take the path of least resistance where that logic would never apply. I don't really subscribe to the belief that a company should half ass a product or acquire something in a new market because they aren't already there, but I may be in the minority. Amazon has shown they can build a trillion dollar enterprise without caring about office productivity or chat, but they'll sell the shovels to anyone who wants to try and dig those holes.
  • homarp 6y ago
    First, you start with Office 365, then you put some stuff on One Drive, you add a little list in SharePoint online, then you use Teams to access all that. You move to Azure AD. And then you want to automate or do some nice charts, and there is Power platform just around the corner... and then you find yourself limited so you go Azure Functions... and then start one VM on Azure...
    • syshum 6y ago
      The jump from Power Platform to Azure Functions and a VM is likely not to be the same people Power Platform is for "power users" to be able to "no code" things, this is targeted (MS Claims) as non-IT Users, as is the Rest of the office/Microsoft 365 stack Azure (including Azure AD) however is targeted at IT Staff, dev's,sysadmins, etc. There is a clear line in how the tools are marketed, deployed, licensed and utilized
    • freetanga 6y ago
      Next after that is running VDIs on either a small Citrix farm on Azure or as Desktop as a Service, since AD, SSO, 2FA ,Productivity tools and user file storage is there. After that, you already have some firewalling and VPNs in place so adding the odd server is just a step away. Adding dedicated lines and firewalls and rules and all bella and whistles with all four big players (AMZ, IBM, MSFT, GOOG) plus 2 ISPs adds cost fast, so you typically pick 2. MSFTbis already there for O365 so yeah, they have a head start
• s_dev 6y ago
  Surely S3 is a pebble compared to Dropbox?
  • foota 6y ago
    You're probably backwards there. Edit: in 2016 Dropbox stored 400PB (https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/magic-pocket-infrastructure https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/magic-pocket-infrastruct...), in 2018 S3 was storing multiple exabytes (https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Amazon-S3-across-all-regions https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Amazon-S3-across-all-region...) I suspect multiple exabytes is a low ball.
    • sethhochberg 6y ago
      Plus, that 400PB Dropbox was storing in 2016 was - until around that same time, when they built their Magic Pocket system - itself stored on S3.
    • s_dev 6y ago
      >You're probably backwards there. Probably -- came back to my comment 24 hours later and realized I mixed up DB and S3 in the sentence.
  • TheFlyingFish 6y ago
    I'm not as sure about that, given the extent of the chaos that ensues every time S3 goes down for half a day.
  • patmorgan23 6y ago
    People don't put big data warehouses on Dropbox, they do in S3.
• michaelbuckbee 6y ago
  Amazon is more likely to buy Discord.
• gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  They also need email. They should buy Zimbra.
  • 28304283409234 6y ago
    They bought Zarafa instead. 10 Years ago. Which is now Workmail.
• lmeyerov 6y ago
  Amazon pays under market for acquisitions while sf pays above market. Unclear if slack would ever grow revenue to the level sf is offering at, nor if shrinking set of alternative high-payers like cisco/google/other will, so cashing out while they can at such a high level makes sense.
• tinyhouse 6y ago
  | you already use Office, why not Azure? Not sure why using Office would be a reason to prefer Azure over something else. Can you elaborate? Are there some useful integrations one can benefit from? Regarding Amazon buying Slack. My guess would be it's too expensive. If you look at Amazon's acquisitions history, you would see they almost never spend more than $1B. The one exception I recall is Whole Foods which they paid ~$13B for.
  • rrdharan 6y ago
    Fewer vendors, unified billing/support/contract negotiations. These non-technical things are still integrations in a sense, that enterprises can benefit from. It's nice to be able to get your email (Exchange), identity (Active Directory), productivity/office apps (Office), and underlying infrastructure (Azure), and even business intelligence/analytics (Dynamics) all from one place.
    • tinyhouse 6y ago
      Yes it's nice. But not sure it's $25B nice...
  • sempron64 6y ago
    I think the big seller/on-ramp is Azure Active Directory. Once you’re all set up to permission your shared documents in Office, and log into your corporate machines with the same accounts, those permissions are automatically available to cloud services. Authentication/authorization is built in automatically to any app you want to spin up, much more easily than syncing your ldap accounts to AWS or creating them manually, and/or manually building auth for your internal app. So internal apps and resources end up on azure, and other usages follow.
    • verst 6y ago
      Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, but I'm not here to tell you to use Azure - just providing an example for the use of AAD. Kubeflow is an OSS framework for doing distributed data science / machine learning (including Tensorflow hence the name) on Kubernetes. With the AAD integration it's just much more convenient to give a team of data scientists access to a Kubeflow Kubernetes cluster - AAD with the Kubeflow OpenIDConnect component will handle AuthN & AuthZ. Kubeflow itself sets up different Kubernetes namespaces for each authorized user upon first login. You definitely don't need to run Kubernetes on AKS or Azure in general to take advantage of the AAD features.
• corytheboyd 6y ago
  Joke’s on Microsoft, now Amazon can just buy Salesforce instead! /s
• prepend 6y ago
  I don’t think Amazon wants this. It seems like they are trying to have more completely automated, higher scalable services for companies to build stuff on top of. While slack and Dropbox are customer facing and build on top of Amazon. Theoretically that stuff is more value added, but I think their markets are smaller compared to what Amazon is going for. If the goal is to be the buggy whip maker for the universe there’s a lot more there until they need to start vertically integrating and buying stuff that uses the buggy whips.
• wp381640 6y ago
  They'd have to acquire so much more - it's AD, Office and Exchange that keep Microsoft embedded in the enterprise. Hosted AD on Azure and Office 365 are _so good_ that nobody is coming close, not even Google.
  • spicyramen 6y ago
    You nailed it, Google product managers, specially in Cloud lack the Enterprise expertise. They need to get that a company with IT staff already went through updating NT to Windows 2000 and then 2008 and deploying Linux and Active Directory and Exchange 5.5, 2k..etc...many MS products which were de facto for any large Company, if you can't integrate with it you will never have a solid footstep into the Enterprise world, yeah they may use BigQuery and that's it.
    • astral303 6y ago
      My large disappointment with Google's Cloud Platform offering was lack of commitment to parity features. I am sorry but the concept of "Beta release level" is a complete misfire/mismatch for what an enterprise needs. For example, you cannot, on one hand, advertise that you have a competitive feature (Google Functions competing with AWS Lambda), but then, on the other hand, turn around and label it beta and basically use that an an excuse for inferior reliability and inferior documentation. How can you basically GA a major piece of platform functionality, call it beta, and then ask any enterprise (that has lower risk tolerance) to use it? Enterprises don't want to invest into beta-labelled features, because they know it's an excuse for bugs and half-baked support. No wonder GCP is struggling for adoption. ("beta release" level is a conversation you have with select trusted partners that are willing to tolerate your early stuff in exchange for early access to value... it is not something that is acceptable to advertise as open enrollment to all)
      • spicyramen 6y ago
        Agree I heard they are changing the release process, they call it private early access now and then they will make it GA directly, no more alpha, beta and GA. But I think your point still is valid. Watching Re-invent today, just helped me realize that many Google Products are playing catch up and once launched Product managers and Eng team move somewhere else as there is no incentive to get promoted, this means your GA product may be understaffed or supported by new staff and at the end dead. Look at Cloud Datalab and the mess they have in ML world (Kaggle, Colab, AI Platform Notebooks, plans for new editor...etc)
• jrochkind1 6y ago
  > If they had purchased Dropbox and Slack they could've gotten a foothold rather quickly and slowed down one of Microsoft's major selling points (you already use Office, why not Azure?). Are you suggesting an enterprise is going to leave Office for Dropbox and Slack? Cause that's not happening.
  • easton 6y ago
    Small businesses aren't nearly as attached, and the Office experience sucks on mobile and web. There's definitely a market for someone who can get that right, and I don't think that someone is Microsoft. I say this as someone who is irrevocably attached to Excel (and to a lesser extent, Word and PowerPoint), I don't think Microsoft is currently willing to cut off the entire ecosystem of software based around Office on the desktop, but if you were to make a clean break, make it cheap and have it work great on web and mobile, a new player could have a shot. There's tons of people going to Google and their suite isn't great, what if it was?
    • higerordermap 6y ago
      Can you explain the shortcomings of both Google suite and MSO on mobile/web you mention?
• ma2rten 6y ago
  I heard people say the thing they like about discord is that it's not associated with work.
• raxxorrax 6y ago
  Maybe the culture at Amazon isn't a fit for Slack. Depends on the users, I guess, but it may end up as a tool that hinders productivity. I think Salesforce compares itself to Microsoft and sees its ambitions to enter ERP, CRM and BI markets and they already have a collaboration platform with Teams, for better or for worse.
• lloydatkinson 6y ago
  > as I'm sure they are considering an enterprise play (if they aren't they are insane, considering they have one of the more user friendly chat services and with SSO and a SLA they could probably charge $10 per user). I truly hope not. I like discord for its informal, gaming, and specifically not enterprise or "professional" approach/atmosphere. I use it to chat with friends and talk in some communities (eg. programming ones).
  • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    I mean, you'd probably white label it, call it harmony as someone suggested up thread.