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Well, Slack, it was nice knowing you. I wonder who Discord will get bought up by when it replaces Slack after a year or two of Salesforce mismanagement? It's s

Well, Slack, it was nice knowing you. I wonder who Discord will get bought up by when it replaces Slack after a year or two of Salesforce mismanagement? It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now. Start small, get big fast, get sold, get ruined. I realize I am presupposing Salesforce will ruin Slack - but it's hard to see how they won't, unless they take the approach Microsoft took with Github and keep it as a totally separate business unit. Even then, there's often meddling (see e. g. Facebook with Instagram and Oculus).

virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
> It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now ...now?
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Earlier you could just stick with the version you had on your CD or floppy and not care what the C-suits was up to on the company that made the software you used. So I guess it wasn't as obvious back then?
  - ivraatiems 6y ago
    That and software wasn't a service, so you weren't chained to the price points and plan levels that executives decided. If Salesforce decides to force everybody using Slack to get Salesforce instead (which seems not unlikely), there's no recourse. We can't just say "well, we have a perpetual license, so we'll do what we want."
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I still know quite a few people who still use their old version of WordPerfect. At some point it became feature complete for them and they've stuck with it ever since.
- ajkjk 6y ago
  It was sad then, too.
turtlebits 6y ago
Just curious, what Salesforce aquisitions ruined a product? The only ones I know of are Heroku, Quip, and Tableau. I don't see any mention of Salesforce other than optional integrations.
- ivraatiems 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions lists a ton of companies I'm not familiar with that look like they were mostly absorbed. Beyond that, I'm not sure, but it's more of a reputational judgment I'm making. I'm not sure I can think of a time when an acquisition or merger ever made a product better for the users.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I had forgotten that they bought Heroku. As far as I know, Heroku is still as cool as when I used to frequently use it. Time will tell how it goes with the Slack acquisition.
  - ryanSrich 6y ago
    Aside from it being absurdly expensive and understaffed for support and CS. I mostly agree.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      Client services?
      - borski 6y ago
        Not OP, but likely 'Customer {Service|Support}'
      - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        Customer Support.
    - 6y ago
throwaway837 6y ago
Slack never really fulfilled its promise as a stand-alone company, so not sure what you’re afraid of now. Very unreliable at times eg latency, missed out of video calling, did not take advantage of WFH boom at all, document search was bad.
- ivraatiems 6y ago
  I don't know if I'd agree that it never fulfilled its promise. It's got a lot of market share and its core product - text chat and messaging - remains pretty solid, despite some missteps. I haven't had that level of unreliability issue with text, though I _definitely_ have with calls. I would agree that Slack had an opportunity to compete with Zoom and others because of COVID that it seems to have relatively squandered. Slack calls are still less reliable and usable than Zoom calls for many purposes. You can't dial in with a phone, you can't mute other people's video or even audio (though I'm not sure Zoom offers client-side video muting either), Slack's screenshare is less reliable and doesn't have as many options for limiting what you share, and so on. So I guess I'd say it fulfilled its core promise: "decent enterprise real-time communications", but it's the failure to innovate or even keep up with competing services in some important areas that's the issue. Maybe that's splitting hairs?
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Zoom clients can turn off receiving video, even in browser
- pea 6y ago
  Not sure how they got that quite so wrong from an engineering POV. We try and use Slack video calling probably every day and have to revert to Meet/Zoom/Discord/WhatsApp, due to terrible latency, random crashes (like not being able to hang up!), UI freezes, etc.
m463 6y ago
> I realize I am presupposing Salesforce will ruin Slack It's statistically likely to happen. It's interesting to read through lists like this and see what happened: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electronic_Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electr...
- krrrh 6y ago
  Counterpoint is that when Salesforce acquired Heroku, it had almost no negative impact on the product at all.
dheera 6y ago
> Start small, get big fast, get sold, get ruined Why does every business have to be a $100G business? Can we support a model in which we have a lot of $100M businesses that are doing great things and delivering quality instead of quantity? Investors seem to not like that idea, but customers would love that idea. It's unfortunate that our markets are not optimized for customers.
- zamfi 6y ago
  > Investors seem to not like that idea Because too many businesses fail for the model to work without multi-billion-dollar home runs, I think? > but customers would love that idea Sounds like an opportunity. :) There are many domains where small-ish scale SaaS is extremely profitable. The typical HN reader is usually not the target market, so we don't hear about them. The real problem is when VCs think there's a billion-dollar business in your market, but there's not. And you have to spend millions in VC money just to compete with "we'll-make-it-up-on-volume" free services, and poof goes your nice margin. There were app-based delivery services long before DoorDash, GrubHub, etc. -- where are they now?
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  > Why does every business have to be a $100G business? Because the VC model relies on big returns for early investors and founders, both have no reason to change anything about it.
- vfclists 6y ago
  Because major takeovers are ways of fleecing investors, enriching owners, top executives and merger brokers.
Technophile1991 6y ago
I'd just like to point out quip used to have a free tier now that's gone. They now push Salesforce anywhere. Also, marketing cloud is a mess from its former exact target. They will for sure ruin slack.

virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago

> It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now ...now?

rightbyte 6y ago
Earlier you could just stick with the version you had on your CD or floppy and not care what the C-suits was up to on the company that made the software you used. So I guess it wasn't as obvious back then?
- ivraatiems 6y ago
  That and software wasn't a service, so you weren't chained to the price points and plan levels that executives decided. If Salesforce decides to force everybody using Slack to get Salesforce instead (which seems not unlikely), there's no recourse. We can't just say "well, we have a perpetual license, so we'll do what we want."
- Spivak 6y ago
  I still know quite a few people who still use their old version of WordPerfect. At some point it became feature complete for them and they've stuck with it ever since.
ajkjk 6y ago
It was sad then, too.

turtlebits 6y ago

Just curious, what Salesforce aquisitions ruined a product? The only ones I know of are Heroku, Quip, and Tableau. I don't see any mention of Salesforce other than optional integrations.

ivraatiems 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions lists a ton of companies I'm not familiar with that look like they were mostly absorbed. Beyond that, I'm not sure, but it's more of a reputational judgment I'm making. I'm not sure I can think of a time when an acquisition or merger ever made a product better for the users.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I had forgotten that they bought Heroku. As far as I know, Heroku is still as cool as when I used to frequently use it. Time will tell how it goes with the Slack acquisition.
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  Aside from it being absurdly expensive and understaffed for support and CS. I mostly agree.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Client services?
    - borski 6y ago
      Not OP, but likely 'Customer {Service|Support}'
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      Customer Support.
  - 6y ago

throwaway837 6y ago

Slack never really fulfilled its promise as a stand-alone company, so not sure what you’re afraid of now. Very unreliable at times eg latency, missed out of video calling, did not take advantage of WFH boom at all, document search was bad.

ivraatiems 6y ago
I don't know if I'd agree that it never fulfilled its promise. It's got a lot of market share and its core product - text chat and messaging - remains pretty solid, despite some missteps. I haven't had that level of unreliability issue with text, though I _definitely_ have with calls. I would agree that Slack had an opportunity to compete with Zoom and others because of COVID that it seems to have relatively squandered. Slack calls are still less reliable and usable than Zoom calls for many purposes. You can't dial in with a phone, you can't mute other people's video or even audio (though I'm not sure Zoom offers client-side video muting either), Slack's screenshare is less reliable and doesn't have as many options for limiting what you share, and so on. So I guess I'd say it fulfilled its core promise: "decent enterprise real-time communications", but it's the failure to innovate or even keep up with competing services in some important areas that's the issue. Maybe that's splitting hairs?
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Zoom clients can turn off receiving video, even in browser
pea 6y ago
Not sure how they got that quite so wrong from an engineering POV. We try and use Slack video calling probably every day and have to revert to Meet/Zoom/Discord/WhatsApp, due to terrible latency, random crashes (like not being able to hang up!), UI freezes, etc.

m463 6y ago

> I realize I am presupposing Salesforce will ruin Slack It's statistically likely to happen. It's interesting to read through lists like this and see what happened: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electronic_Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electr...

krrrh 6y ago
Counterpoint is that when Salesforce acquired Heroku, it had almost no negative impact on the product at all.

dheera 6y ago

> Start small, get big fast, get sold, get ruined Why does every business have to be a $100G business? Can we support a model in which we have a lot of $100M businesses that are doing great things and delivering quality instead of quantity? Investors seem to not like that idea, but customers would love that idea. It's unfortunate that our markets are not optimized for customers.

zamfi 6y ago
> Investors seem to not like that idea Because too many businesses fail for the model to work without multi-billion-dollar home runs, I think? > but customers would love that idea Sounds like an opportunity. :) There are many domains where small-ish scale SaaS is extremely profitable. The typical HN reader is usually not the target market, so we don't hear about them. The real problem is when VCs think there's a billion-dollar business in your market, but there's not. And you have to spend millions in VC money just to compete with "we'll-make-it-up-on-volume" free services, and poof goes your nice margin. There were app-based delivery services long before DoorDash, GrubHub, etc. -- where are they now?
AsyncAwait 6y ago
> Why does every business have to be a $100G business? Because the VC model relies on big returns for early investors and founders, both have no reason to change anything about it.
vfclists 6y ago
Because major takeovers are ways of fleecing investors, enriching owners, top executives and merger brokers.

Technophile1991 6y ago

I'd just like to point out quip used to have a free tier now that's gone. They now push Salesforce anywhere. Also, marketing cloud is a mess from its former exact target. They will for sure ruin slack.