17 ms·

Salesforce completes acquisition of Slack

262 points by kalendos 5y ago

warrenm 5y ago
Interesting that it was Salesforce that went after them
- sudhirj 5y ago
  Salesforce also owns Heroku, which is interesting, I guess. I don’t full understand the game that’s being played, though. They own the way I deploy all my apps, and the way I communicate with my colleagues, but I’m not seeing the synergy. Both products will do better with enterprise sales and adoption and Salesforce does that well? Is that it?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - arcturus17 5y ago
    They mainly own a set of enterprise solutions. Salesforce is now a massive cloud ERP that has CRM, eCommerce and other modules - Heroku is actually pretty small within that universe. It makes sense to me that they would want to own conversations in order to cross-sell and up-sell solutions in their portfolio, and also defend against Microsoft which has Teams.
    - sudhirj 5y ago
      Heroku has a good use case as being the quick default way to deploy Salesforce platform applications, so there’s definitely some synergy there, but the Heroku for everybody else is languishing a bit. Slack, don’t know, maybe it’s going to be the default communications platforms for Salesforce products and integrations.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      That's what I see it as - Salesforce defending their core product against encroachment by the Office 365 suite - if your company is already on that and Microsoft begins offering Salesforce-like products, selling Salesforce itself becomes a harder prospect.
  - jerf 5y ago
    Oh, Salesforce probably has some grand ambition of becoming a "platform" in which "salesforce" proper is "just" first among equals. Moreso than the degree to which Salesforce is already a platform, I mean. Eventually probably headed for being a Company in a Box. For instance, this just went by on New: https://blog.zoom.us/start-using-zoom-apps/ https://blog.zoom.us/start-using-zoom-apps/ Zoom, unsatisfied with being the dominant video chat app, now wants to be a "platform" for running apps. While I understand the nominal business case, the business schools teaching MBAs to reach for this particular golden ring could probably stand to emphasize the importance of continuing to develop the core product as the foundation you expect to stand on in order to become this larger "platform"; seems like in practice, this sort of thing is also an announcement that their core product is now going to begin a long slide into a decaying buggy mess as it gets deprioritized internally in favor of the "platform" product, whereas the platform product usually fails, often non-trivially precisely because they got so excited about all that sweet, sweet lock-in walled-garden platform money that they let their foundation rot and all the wallets they meant to lock in their walled garden wandered away.
    - pfarrell 5y ago
      > Salesforce probably has some grand ambition of becoming a "platform" in which "salesforce" proper is "just" first among equals. I think they started that in the late 2000’s and accomplished it by 2011 or so. Salesforce was the first business to prove SaaS was a viable business model and then launched themselves as a generic application builder that we now call PaaS. I don’t disagree with your view, but to me, Salesforce isn't another wannabe platform. They’re the one who figured out how to make that path work. (Also, arguably AWS)
    - hajile 5y ago
      In the case of Zoom, this is probably a necessity. It is only a matter of time before the big companies muscle in on video chat now that the pandemic has shown demand and forced their hand. If zoom doesn't have a strategy to either diversify or get bought out, they are probably doomed to a slow death.
      - w4llstr33t 5y ago
  - brightball 5y ago
    Probably similar to how organizations go through the approval process for Google, Amazon or Microsoft. Once the company is approved, any of their services are green lit for use at the company. I could see Salesforce approaching it from that direction. Good investment that gets them in the door of more companies.
  - pc86 5y ago
    I didn't realize people were still using Heroku. Aren't there at least 3-4 cheaper and better alternatives?
    - sudhirj 5y ago
      Like what? Nothing I’ve seen comes close to the ease of use and developer experience. My only gripe is that they’re US and EU only, would like an APAC region. Fly.io is a leap ahead, probably move there next. But what’s a better Heroku than Heroku?
    - dannyw 5y ago
      Heroku is perfectly fine, and it's also squarely targeted at the small end of deployment. Why fret about $20/month vs $30/month when you have bigger issues to worry about? Also, to their credit, they have kept the free tier still going, more or less. I'd have expected Salesforce to have killed that.
  - linuxftw 5y ago
    I think there's some synergy in reducing management structure to save costs on Heroku and use it as a revenue stream. Also, salesforce has a large enterprise sales force, so this is another product that can be sold by the same team.
- mpeg 5y ago
  It does makes sense; Salesforce has been trying to be the operating system for work and real time communication was lacking. When I was there, we used Chatter in org62 and it was awful. Yet a lot of time and money was invested into trying to make it work. With Slack, they have a very easy upsell for their enterprise customers to keep them away from Teams; as well as inheriting a huge userbase that is very familiar with Slack – imagine getting feeds from Marketing and Sales Cloud on a slack channel, taking customer requests directly on Slack via Service Cloud, etc Note that these are mostly things you can do today, but by bundling it into the Salesforce suite of products they will greatly increase adoption by cross-selling.
- pm90 5y ago
  Neutralizing MS teams is probably what they ultimately want.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  If you look out from Salesforce Tower, right across Salesforce Park you see the colorful logo of Slack HQ. People don't think brand advertising produces sales, and it's impossible to prove for each individual transaction, but I'm sure it does work!
pipingdog 5y ago
Perhaps Stewart, Cal, and co will start work on a game next.
- m12k 5y ago
  Yes, I'm excited to see what web service they will pivot into this time!
- indigochill 5y ago
  This hurts in the Glitch-shaped hole in my heart. But also, if they did start work on a new game, I'd immediately start following it.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
2022: Salesforce announces Chat Cloud
- weego 5y ago
  I too am looking forward to migrating my Slack account to Salesforce CloudTeams™® Beta account
- rubixdude 5y ago
  I think you’re joking, but let’s be honest, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
  - theandrewbailey 5y ago
    I saw Salesforce buy/eat Demandware. It's called Salesforce Commerce Cloud now. I bet something similar will happen to Slack.
    - Aboh33 5y ago
      Slackforce
    - phponpcp 5y ago
      I saw it too, and IMO the ecosystem is better than ever now. It took a few years of stagnation for SF to really dig their hooks in, but everything is nice and integrated now.
  - volkk 5y ago
    and that is exactly when slack will die and something else will come in to take its place. an endless cycle
- spbaar 5y ago
  28b to get live message actually working
- chupchap 5y ago
  Will be rebranded to Messaging cloud in the Dreamforce after that
tracedddd 5y ago
$27.7 billion. Seems quite high given Discord’s momentum. Haven’t really been spending much time on Slack for a couple years and most new companies/projects seems to be selecting Discord. I suppose Salesforce has the money, though. I wonder if they are going to try to reposition it.
- mpeg 5y ago
  Discord is used heavily by OSS communities and other such projects; but I've yet to see it used by companies. It really doesn't target the enterprise customer, or even SMEs
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    Also Gitter?
- slap_shot 5y ago
  Is Discord used in the enterprise? I've only used it for a gaming community a long time ago.
  - impendia 5y ago
    I'm an academic. Since the pandemic began I've used Discord on multiple occasions for work -- for example, if someone runs an online conference it's common to create a Discord and encourage chat among the conference participants. But these are all fairly informal use cases, initiated by individual academics and not by "the university".
    - bachmeier 5y ago
      If you ask university IT about Discord, they'll probably tell you emailing .docx files back and forth is just as good.
      - impendia 5y ago
        My university's IT staff is surprisingly good. But they seem to be hamstrung by questionable decisions being made over their head.
croes 5y ago
Will get tough because Windows 11 has Teams integrated.
- hughrr 5y ago
  +1 reason not to upgrade.
- joobus 5y ago
  Slack is better than Teams, imo.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    That's the sort of brilliance of Microsoft's approach...Teams doesn't have to be better, it just has to be good enough, and only good enough in the eyes of the procurement teams. Leadership folks buy O365 because it's the cheapest way to get Office, Sharepoint, Exchange and so on. Enterprise Teams comes with it whether you want it or not, "no extra charge". Then, when someone wants Slack, the discussion becomes "We already have Teams. I see Slack does x and y a little better, but is that worth X dollars?".
    - AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
      While I agree slack is better, Teams is improving and slack seems to be devolving into a worse platform with lots of anti-features. The simplistic and focused approach that made me love slack have gone away. The whole integration aspect of teams with office365 is also a huge draw.
      - tyingq 5y ago
        >The whole integration aspect of teams with office365 is also a huge draw. Ah, yeah, should have mentioned that. Attachments in messages go into OneDrive, MS Forms is used to post a Poll/Quiz, Click on people's names, and you can see org hierarchy from AD, Meetings from Outlook/Exchange are tied to Teams, and so on.
  - 5y ago
keewee7 5y ago
I think both Slack and Discord are good examples of products that entered already well established niches and still succeeded. Slack launched in August 2013 as a plain text chat service without voice and video calls. Skype and HipChat already existed for a decade before Slack entered the market. In just seven years Slack went from being an internal team chat app to making a $28 billion exit.
- echelon 5y ago
  A key difference is that Slack was worried it couldn't complete with Microsoft's entire business suite. They had big ambitions but ultimately had to exit. A smarter play might have been to buy similar office services years ago and create a package of their own. Discord is relatively safe from this and can continue to grow atop its gamer user base.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Indeed. The week Slack became available, I was asking around for recommendations for a service that was “HipChat but nicer to use” and got a lot of scoffing in reply. Eventually someone linked Slack and said it looked dumb but maybe I could try it and see if it was different enough. Of course it was exactly what I wanted and got the right bunch of people talking to each other at work. I’m pretty sure every one of those scoffers had multiple Slack accounts within a couple years. :)
- kwanbix 5y ago
  I have been using chat systems since ICQ. I really don't get the hype on Slack and Discord. Discord in particular is so crowded, and I like tight interfaces, that is overwhelming. Maybe it is the servers that I have, but I am sure that the app allows that, like at the time MySPace allowed crazy profiles.
  - josephd79 5y ago
    too bad Discord doesn't allow 3rd party chat applications. Something like irssi for Discord would be awesome.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Wonder if Atlassian still thinks it was a good idea to retire Hipchat and take 10% of Slack.
- davidjgraph 5y ago
  Wouldn't they have been paid for their 10% and made a profit?
  - stonemetal12 5y ago
    Probably, but going forward they no longer have a chat app and more or less either have to revive HipChat or refer people to a competitor.
- bachmeier 5y ago
  They had already announced the retirement of Hipchat long before they made their deal with Slack. They agreed to stop development of their Slack competitor named Stride. IMO Stride had a lot of potential.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    Stride wasn't really going well. There were some obvious, serious issues with technical and product management, for example the insistence on using Jira's javascript-based textbox rewrite ("Fabric") as the GUI element for composing messages, under the spiel of 'unification'. As "Fabric" is a web component, this meant that mobile apps for Stride essentially had webviews for their input box, introducing additional latency (critical for typing), bugs, inconsistent editing behavior to native iOS/Android UIs, and performance issues especially across lower-spec android devices (it's just a textbox FFS!). Plus, engineers were wasting time figuring out how to sort browser and webview compatibility issues, instead of, you know, implementing a textbox using native technologies which isn't rocket science. To make matters worse, the team working on Fabric was juggling between fixing INPUT BOX bugs on Jira, on Confluence, and on Stride, making it a gigantic mess that kept multiple product managers distracted for the wrong reasons.
tayloramurphy 5y ago
It's pretty frustrating how many OSS projects use Slack but there are no options available to pay for a discounted pro plan. We'd love to pay a flat-ish fee for the community but it creates a disincentive to grow. Their active user fair pricing helps a bit, but it's not great.
- nimbius 5y ago
  why not just run a mattermost server instead? https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
  - Narretz 5y ago
    One reason you already mentioned, you have to run it. Slack is run for you.
    - KronisLV 5y ago
      That's a good thing, though. Get a VPS for 5$ per month, set up LetsEncrypt and launch the software in a Docker container - and you will have to do very little administration. Then no one can limit the messages that you can have in the chat or make you pay for many of the features or suddenly take the software away from you or make you have an outage due to external factors of any software vendor.
      - PenguinCoder 5y ago
        Until you get spammed to hell, or the next vulnerability leaves your system broken, you're utterly owned. There's a lot more that goes into self administration then just "put a server up".
        KronisLV 5y ago
        If updating a Docker tag every month or so after verifying that your backups are working is too hard, then it is probably indeed a better choice to rely on SaaS, however that line of thinking is dangerously close to falling into the trap of SaaSS: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... And if you want automatic updates, then either use the :latest tag, use apt/yum/... packages with unattended upgrades or something like Snaps for Ubuntu. However, in my experience, updates should be done manually and only when you're ready to roll them back (unless there are non-breaking security updates which are only available for OSes most of the time). As for spam, if you can't moderate your Discord or Slack Space, then the same will apply here, of course. As for getting owned: if your passwords are simple enough to be guessed or you don't follow other best practices, then the same will apply both to SaaS offerings and the software you're hosting yourself. Basic common sense like not exposing DBs to the Internet and using your firewall to only expose the ports you want was assumed, but not explicitly pointed out in my post.
ilovecaching 5y ago
Probably the worst thing that could happen to Slack. The second least hip company in the world (#1 is IBM) buying a hip ChatOps platform. Time to move back to IRC or go to discord.
- dylan604 5y ago
  How could you possibly think that with amazing PR jibberish quotes like how they are going to "define the future of enterprise software, creating the digital HQ that enables every organization to deliver customer and employee success from anywhere." Or how they "have a once-in-a-generation opportunity" to "give every company in the world a single source of truth"? /s These types of messages make me want to hurl at the self aggrandizing PR speak. I get positive self image and promotion, but good grief this is so over the top. I want a press release that says something closer to the truth, "we have no idea how to gain more users and the money from their wallets, so we're buying another company so we don't have to worry about developing anything on our own. This was the best idea we could come up with" Not a single quote from anyone from Slack on how they felt it was a good idea and what made it so exciting for them to sell at this time to this buyer. I honestly feel like I need a shower after reading this nonsense.
  - ilovecaching 5y ago
    Agreed. Corporate speak like this can't come across as anything but disingenuous, especially when they didn't even make the product they think they're going to "change the world" with. My sister's company recently got acquired, and it's reminded me how bad it feels to be a regular worker suddenly finding out a company you really love is selling out. Of course, the execs get big bonuses while the regular workers get no say in changes to the business including cuts to their bonuses and perks...
  - serverholic 5y ago
    I don't understand how anyone can stand that crap. Like what kind of person sees statements like the ones you quoted and thinks it's a good thing?
kissgyorgy 5y ago
Why every successful product has to be bloatware?
- istorical 5y ago
  enterprise customers have large feature set requirements to support their enterprise scale, regulatory obligations, international presence + the tendency not to reject any feature request ask that could yield an additional customer combined with how unique feature requests often are between customers
  - serverholic 5y ago
    Basically companies get bloated, then they need bloated software that supports all their bloat. They pay big money so they get what they want.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Because it wouldn't be worth billions otherwise. Feature bloat is a key part of the "emperor's new clothes" strategy that 'simple' products like Dropbox are pursuing, now that they're public and are under pressure to show growth. That's how you get stuff like Dropbox Paper.
  - APock 5y ago
    Dropbox paper is amazing though if you need to create an "easy to collaborate that look decent" document. And it does not affect in anyway your experience with the "cloud sync" functionality
- xeromal 5y ago
  Corporate compliance
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  Salespeople love bloatware. The more features salespeople can speak about the more successfully they can sell the product.
Bhilai 5y ago
I cant help but feel sorry for Salesforce engineers who will have to work on figuring out how to integrate the monolith with Slack and figure out the user permissions and access control nightmare.
- zippergz 5y ago
  I can't help but feel sorry for the Slack engineers who are used to working at a nimble and innovative company, and now will be beaten down by bureaucracy only rivaled by large governments.
  - Bhilai 5y ago
    Based on my experience, Salesforce does leave acquisitions to do their own thing for a long period of time - Heroku, Tableau and Quip are examples of that. But yes, its a big bureaucracy and things can move at a glacial pace.
    - nevir 5y ago
      It sounds like they kinda ran morale for Tableau folk into the ground; and a bunch have/are jumping ship
      - xena 5y ago
        This happened at Heroku too.
        Mandatum 5y ago
        MuleSoft too.
  - kaidon 5y ago
    Speaking from experience, getting absorbed as a small nimble company into a behemoth is akin to slowly boiling a frog alive. Things usually start out as business as usual for quite a while, at least for engineering; other departments are heavily impacted immediately. Then... the beuracracy creeps and grows and soon you have some corporate IT nonsense on your machine that blocks DNS lookups to github.com so you don't "leak intellectual property" and now you can't build your software any more and your manager is a plant.
throwslackforce 5y ago
How much money did the typical Slack engineer get out of this?
- dannyw 5y ago
  I actually find this to be a really interesting question. Founders do have significant sway in these kind of deals, in terms of advocating (or not advocating) for employees. How are Slack employees doing financially?
  - bitbckt 5y ago
    The direct listing was good to most everyone I know (lots of former Twitterati at Slack), and this deal doesn’t seem to have changed that situation. The post-acquisition exodus has started, which might imply folks aren’t interested in joining The Machine regardless of the money.
dkdk8283 5y ago
Great! I can’t wait for Slack to perish.
nodesocket 5y ago
I just sold all my $WORK shares on Monday. Curious, would my broker just have sold the shares and then issued some $CRM shares?
- avrionov 5y ago
  Whoever once the $WORK stock it will be replaced automatically with 26.79 in cash and 0.0776 Salesforce shares per share.
jjice 5y ago
Someone please correct my ignorance, but is the core of Salesforce (the traditional sales application) essentially a glorified CRUD app with integrations?
- tmpz22 5y ago
  It’s more of a managed database with a default scheme that is proven to be able to build sales tools around
  - Igelau 5y ago
    So... yes?
- spiderice 5y ago
  > a glorified CRUD app I feel like this can be said about most application development nowadays, especially anything web based. It's one of the reasons I'm losing steam as a web developer. It feels like no matter what project I do or company I work at, I'm really just doing CRUD all day. The only variations are the names of resources and the slight data manipulation you do between the HTTP request and storing it in the database. Has anyone else experienced this same feeling?
- thehappypm 5y ago
  So is Facebook
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  Sure, CRM/SFM is just database stuff. The rest is merely software.
fartcannon 5y ago
30 billion dollars is so unbelievably high for such a basic thing, that it makes me think some kind of money laundering is going on. Meanwhile, the most advanced robotics company on earth got sold for less than 1 billion. My mind boggles.
- ascorbic 5y ago
  It's a basic thing with getting on for $1bn in ARR. It's also a platform for hundreds of apps and integrations.
- cvhashim 5y ago
  Hype-based valuation?
- normac2 5y ago
  It's almost all economies of scale and "rich get richer" type effects, much like the big social networks. You make something that catches on (in Slack's case it really did have an edge on the existing stuff) and from then on you've got your loyal user base for whom it would be too much of a project to move to another thing. Slack is a great product, but at the end of the day it's a mildly more convenient way of doing stuff that you could do in 2002 with IRC and email. And Mattermost is a pretty good FOSS substitute. (This isn't counting audio and video calls, but those have been pretty good since around the time of Google Hangouts, long before Slack had audio/video.)
- muglug 5y ago
  Most of Boston Robotics' products are at least a decade away from being cheaper than humans for anything but the most trivial of tasks. BR requires a lot more investment before they can become a worthwhile purchase.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  It's really that the number of customers of these types of things is astronomical. Basically any business in the world might use Slack. And many, many do, especially high-value Western businesses. Boston Dynamics is great but who is buying robots? People spend more money on their electric bills than on iPhones.
ksec 5y ago
I remember the pitch from Render.com, they are doing it because Heroku stopped innovating since Salesforce acquired them. Although most of the time Salesforce just leave those acquisition alone and let them do their work. Which is sort of strange if there are no benefits and synergy, it is more like a long term asset investment. I sometimes wonder if these sort of acquisition has something to do with low interest rate, ease of capital, and tax reduction.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  Heroku decided to sail against the Docker wave rather than sail with it. They still have a "buildpack" OSS project that sort of competes with OCI image
- aasasd 5y ago
  > leave those acquisition alone and let them do their work Exactly the fate every casual commenter is hoping for with every acquisition of a decent company. Specifically in gaming. The companies keep calming the public down by promising they'll let the bought company work as before, which of course never happens—otherwise there'd be no reason for the acquisition. (Waiting for Codemasters to turn into regular EA trash, here.) If Salesforce found a way to make this very model work, that's great. Personally I've become too jaded to expect anything good from any acquisition.
ColinHayhurst 5y ago
Who needs Slack when you can use, as we do, Zulip? Yes, OK, I need to use Slack to participate in communities set-up by others. Thank you Kandra Labs and Dropbox: https://zulip.com/history/ https://zulip.com/history/
- gentleman11 5y ago
  There is also Mattermost
  - ColinHayhurst 5y ago
    Good shout. Zulip happended to fit best at the time the decision was made. It would be Mattermost or Zulip, for us, if starting from scratch.
mosseater 5y ago
I just installed an XMPP server (ejabberd). It's amazing how much money is in things that are already solved freely. This is chat! CHAT! TEXTUAL CHAT WITH OCCASIONAL VIDEO CALLS! WebRTC is a thing! IRC/XMPP is a thing! Sad techops people running out of things to host is a thing!
- anthk 5y ago
  Don´t worry, genz-ers coders don't know better but their smartphone-first fuzzed ecosystem. They are lost.
tails4e 5y ago
I've a dumb question as I don't use salesforce daily persay, however I feel our corporate intranet has been 'upgraded' to use a CRM style interface which may be salesforce SW as the backend, which I suspect purely as the url names have *force in them. To load the main home/landing page there must be 10 redirects, taking many seconds. It just feels so bloated to use - so is this the norm for salesforce SW, or is it the case we may be using something else entirely, that is itself bloated?
- mouth 5y ago
  In my experience, Salesforce feels bloated and sluggish.
- chupchap 5y ago
  10 redirects is unusual. Is there an SSO in place? That said Salesforce log in process should not have more than two redirects from what I have seen.
  - tails4e 5y ago
    SSO is in place, but that browser was already signed in, so should not require it again. Redirects are between things with names like visualforce. Maybe it's not 10, but it's a lot. Can Firefox developer tools be used to track the flow of redirects, I'd be interested to see what the exact flow is
    - chupchap 5y ago
      That doesn't seem like a standard setup; probably there is some custom work done there as part of the login flow.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  This matches my experience at a previous employer who was using Salesforce tools/websites.

262 points by kalendos 5y ago

warrenm 5y ago

Interesting that it was Salesforce that went after them

sudhirj 5y ago
Salesforce also owns Heroku, which is interesting, I guess. I don’t full understand the game that’s being played, though. They own the way I deploy all my apps, and the way I communicate with my colleagues, but I’m not seeing the synergy. Both products will do better with enterprise sales and adoption and Salesforce does that well? Is that it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- arcturus17 5y ago
  They mainly own a set of enterprise solutions. Salesforce is now a massive cloud ERP that has CRM, eCommerce and other modules - Heroku is actually pretty small within that universe. It makes sense to me that they would want to own conversations in order to cross-sell and up-sell solutions in their portfolio, and also defend against Microsoft which has Teams.
  - sudhirj 5y ago
    Heroku has a good use case as being the quick default way to deploy Salesforce platform applications, so there’s definitely some synergy there, but the Heroku for everybody else is languishing a bit. Slack, don’t know, maybe it’s going to be the default communications platforms for Salesforce products and integrations.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    That's what I see it as - Salesforce defending their core product against encroachment by the Office 365 suite - if your company is already on that and Microsoft begins offering Salesforce-like products, selling Salesforce itself becomes a harder prospect.
- jerf 5y ago
  Oh, Salesforce probably has some grand ambition of becoming a "platform" in which "salesforce" proper is "just" first among equals. Moreso than the degree to which Salesforce is already a platform, I mean. Eventually probably headed for being a Company in a Box. For instance, this just went by on New: https://blog.zoom.us/start-using-zoom-apps/ https://blog.zoom.us/start-using-zoom-apps/ Zoom, unsatisfied with being the dominant video chat app, now wants to be a "platform" for running apps. While I understand the nominal business case, the business schools teaching MBAs to reach for this particular golden ring could probably stand to emphasize the importance of continuing to develop the core product as the foundation you expect to stand on in order to become this larger "platform"; seems like in practice, this sort of thing is also an announcement that their core product is now going to begin a long slide into a decaying buggy mess as it gets deprioritized internally in favor of the "platform" product, whereas the platform product usually fails, often non-trivially precisely because they got so excited about all that sweet, sweet lock-in walled-garden platform money that they let their foundation rot and all the wallets they meant to lock in their walled garden wandered away.
  - pfarrell 5y ago
    > Salesforce probably has some grand ambition of becoming a "platform" in which "salesforce" proper is "just" first among equals. I think they started that in the late 2000’s and accomplished it by 2011 or so. Salesforce was the first business to prove SaaS was a viable business model and then launched themselves as a generic application builder that we now call PaaS. I don’t disagree with your view, but to me, Salesforce isn't another wannabe platform. They’re the one who figured out how to make that path work. (Also, arguably AWS)
  - hajile 5y ago
    In the case of Zoom, this is probably a necessity. It is only a matter of time before the big companies muscle in on video chat now that the pandemic has shown demand and forced their hand. If zoom doesn't have a strategy to either diversify or get bought out, they are probably doomed to a slow death.
    - w4llstr33t 5y ago
- brightball 5y ago
  Probably similar to how organizations go through the approval process for Google, Amazon or Microsoft. Once the company is approved, any of their services are green lit for use at the company. I could see Salesforce approaching it from that direction. Good investment that gets them in the door of more companies.
- pc86 5y ago
  I didn't realize people were still using Heroku. Aren't there at least 3-4 cheaper and better alternatives?
  - sudhirj 5y ago
    Like what? Nothing I’ve seen comes close to the ease of use and developer experience. My only gripe is that they’re US and EU only, would like an APAC region. Fly.io is a leap ahead, probably move there next. But what’s a better Heroku than Heroku?
  - dannyw 5y ago
    Heroku is perfectly fine, and it's also squarely targeted at the small end of deployment. Why fret about $20/month vs $30/month when you have bigger issues to worry about? Also, to their credit, they have kept the free tier still going, more or less. I'd have expected Salesforce to have killed that.
- linuxftw 5y ago
  I think there's some synergy in reducing management structure to save costs on Heroku and use it as a revenue stream. Also, salesforce has a large enterprise sales force, so this is another product that can be sold by the same team.
mpeg 5y ago
It does makes sense; Salesforce has been trying to be the operating system for work and real time communication was lacking. When I was there, we used Chatter in org62 and it was awful. Yet a lot of time and money was invested into trying to make it work. With Slack, they have a very easy upsell for their enterprise customers to keep them away from Teams; as well as inheriting a huge userbase that is very familiar with Slack – imagine getting feeds from Marketing and Sales Cloud on a slack channel, taking customer requests directly on Slack via Service Cloud, etc Note that these are mostly things you can do today, but by bundling it into the Salesforce suite of products they will greatly increase adoption by cross-selling.
pm90 5y ago
Neutralizing MS teams is probably what they ultimately want.
BurningFrog 5y ago
If you look out from Salesforce Tower, right across Salesforce Park you see the colorful logo of Slack HQ. People don't think brand advertising produces sales, and it's impossible to prove for each individual transaction, but I'm sure it does work!

pipingdog 5y ago

Perhaps Stewart, Cal, and co will start work on a game next.

m12k 5y ago
Yes, I'm excited to see what web service they will pivot into this time!
indigochill 5y ago
This hurts in the Glitch-shaped hole in my heart. But also, if they did start work on a new game, I'd immediately start following it.

theandrewbailey 5y ago

2022: Salesforce announces Chat Cloud

weego 5y ago
I too am looking forward to migrating my Slack account to Salesforce CloudTeams™® Beta account
rubixdude 5y ago
I think you’re joking, but let’s be honest, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  I saw Salesforce buy/eat Demandware. It's called Salesforce Commerce Cloud now. I bet something similar will happen to Slack.
  - Aboh33 5y ago
    Slackforce
  - phponpcp 5y ago
    I saw it too, and IMO the ecosystem is better than ever now. It took a few years of stagnation for SF to really dig their hooks in, but everything is nice and integrated now.
- volkk 5y ago
  and that is exactly when slack will die and something else will come in to take its place. an endless cycle
spbaar 5y ago
28b to get live message actually working
chupchap 5y ago
Will be rebranded to Messaging cloud in the Dreamforce after that

tracedddd 5y ago

$27.7 billion. Seems quite high given Discord’s momentum. Haven’t really been spending much time on Slack for a couple years and most new companies/projects seems to be selecting Discord. I suppose Salesforce has the money, though. I wonder if they are going to try to reposition it.

mpeg 5y ago
Discord is used heavily by OSS communities and other such projects; but I've yet to see it used by companies. It really doesn't target the enterprise customer, or even SMEs
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  Also Gitter?
slap_shot 5y ago
Is Discord used in the enterprise? I've only used it for a gaming community a long time ago.
- impendia 5y ago
  I'm an academic. Since the pandemic began I've used Discord on multiple occasions for work -- for example, if someone runs an online conference it's common to create a Discord and encourage chat among the conference participants. But these are all fairly informal use cases, initiated by individual academics and not by "the university".
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    If you ask university IT about Discord, they'll probably tell you emailing .docx files back and forth is just as good.
    - impendia 5y ago
      My university's IT staff is surprisingly good. But they seem to be hamstrung by questionable decisions being made over their head.

croes 5y ago

Will get tough because Windows 11 has Teams integrated.

hughrr 5y ago
+1 reason not to upgrade.
joobus 5y ago
Slack is better than Teams, imo.
- tyingq 5y ago
  That's the sort of brilliance of Microsoft's approach...Teams doesn't have to be better, it just has to be good enough, and only good enough in the eyes of the procurement teams. Leadership folks buy O365 because it's the cheapest way to get Office, Sharepoint, Exchange and so on. Enterprise Teams comes with it whether you want it or not, "no extra charge". Then, when someone wants Slack, the discussion becomes "We already have Teams. I see Slack does x and y a little better, but is that worth X dollars?".
  - AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
    While I agree slack is better, Teams is improving and slack seems to be devolving into a worse platform with lots of anti-features. The simplistic and focused approach that made me love slack have gone away. The whole integration aspect of teams with office365 is also a huge draw.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      >The whole integration aspect of teams with office365 is also a huge draw. Ah, yeah, should have mentioned that. Attachments in messages go into OneDrive, MS Forms is used to post a Poll/Quiz, Click on people's names, and you can see org hierarchy from AD, Meetings from Outlook/Exchange are tied to Teams, and so on.
- 5y ago

keewee7 5y ago

I think both Slack and Discord are good examples of products that entered already well established niches and still succeeded. Slack launched in August 2013 as a plain text chat service without voice and video calls. Skype and HipChat already existed for a decade before Slack entered the market. In just seven years Slack went from being an internal team chat app to making a $28 billion exit.

echelon 5y ago
A key difference is that Slack was worried it couldn't complete with Microsoft's entire business suite. They had big ambitions but ultimately had to exit. A smarter play might have been to buy similar office services years ago and create a package of their own. Discord is relatively safe from this and can continue to grow atop its gamer user base.
1123581321 5y ago
Indeed. The week Slack became available, I was asking around for recommendations for a service that was “HipChat but nicer to use” and got a lot of scoffing in reply. Eventually someone linked Slack and said it looked dumb but maybe I could try it and see if it was different enough. Of course it was exactly what I wanted and got the right bunch of people talking to each other at work. I’m pretty sure every one of those scoffers had multiple Slack accounts within a couple years. :)
kwanbix 5y ago
I have been using chat systems since ICQ. I really don't get the hype on Slack and Discord. Discord in particular is so crowded, and I like tight interfaces, that is overwhelming. Maybe it is the servers that I have, but I am sure that the app allows that, like at the time MySPace allowed crazy profiles.
- josephd79 5y ago
  too bad Discord doesn't allow 3rd party chat applications. Something like irssi for Discord would be awesome.

robertlagrant 5y ago

Wonder if Atlassian still thinks it was a good idea to retire Hipchat and take 10% of Slack.

davidjgraph 5y ago
Wouldn't they have been paid for their 10% and made a profit?
- stonemetal12 5y ago
  Probably, but going forward they no longer have a chat app and more or less either have to revive HipChat or refer people to a competitor.
bachmeier 5y ago
They had already announced the retirement of Hipchat long before they made their deal with Slack. They agreed to stop development of their Slack competitor named Stride. IMO Stride had a lot of potential.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Stride wasn't really going well. There were some obvious, serious issues with technical and product management, for example the insistence on using Jira's javascript-based textbox rewrite ("Fabric") as the GUI element for composing messages, under the spiel of 'unification'. As "Fabric" is a web component, this meant that mobile apps for Stride essentially had webviews for their input box, introducing additional latency (critical for typing), bugs, inconsistent editing behavior to native iOS/Android UIs, and performance issues especially across lower-spec android devices (it's just a textbox FFS!). Plus, engineers were wasting time figuring out how to sort browser and webview compatibility issues, instead of, you know, implementing a textbox using native technologies which isn't rocket science. To make matters worse, the team working on Fabric was juggling between fixing INPUT BOX bugs on Jira, on Confluence, and on Stride, making it a gigantic mess that kept multiple product managers distracted for the wrong reasons.

tayloramurphy 5y ago

It's pretty frustrating how many OSS projects use Slack but there are no options available to pay for a discounted pro plan. We'd love to pay a flat-ish fee for the community but it creates a disincentive to grow. Their active user fair pricing helps a bit, but it's not great.

nimbius 5y ago
why not just run a mattermost server instead? https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
- Narretz 5y ago
  One reason you already mentioned, you have to run it. Slack is run for you.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    That's a good thing, though. Get a VPS for 5$ per month, set up LetsEncrypt and launch the software in a Docker container - and you will have to do very little administration. Then no one can limit the messages that you can have in the chat or make you pay for many of the features or suddenly take the software away from you or make you have an outage due to external factors of any software vendor.
    - PenguinCoder 5y ago
      Until you get spammed to hell, or the next vulnerability leaves your system broken, you're utterly owned. There's a lot more that goes into self administration then just "put a server up".
      - KronisLV 5y ago
        If updating a Docker tag every month or so after verifying that your backups are working is too hard, then it is probably indeed a better choice to rely on SaaS, however that line of thinking is dangerously close to falling into the trap of SaaSS: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... And if you want automatic updates, then either use the :latest tag, use apt/yum/... packages with unattended upgrades or something like Snaps for Ubuntu. However, in my experience, updates should be done manually and only when you're ready to roll them back (unless there are non-breaking security updates which are only available for OSes most of the time). As for spam, if you can't moderate your Discord or Slack Space, then the same will apply here, of course. As for getting owned: if your passwords are simple enough to be guessed or you don't follow other best practices, then the same will apply both to SaaS offerings and the software you're hosting yourself. Basic common sense like not exposing DBs to the Internet and using your firewall to only expose the ports you want was assumed, but not explicitly pointed out in my post.

ilovecaching 5y ago

Probably the worst thing that could happen to Slack. The second least hip company in the world (#1 is IBM) buying a hip ChatOps platform. Time to move back to IRC or go to discord.

dylan604 5y ago
How could you possibly think that with amazing PR jibberish quotes like how they are going to "define the future of enterprise software, creating the digital HQ that enables every organization to deliver customer and employee success from anywhere." Or how they "have a once-in-a-generation opportunity" to "give every company in the world a single source of truth"? /s These types of messages make me want to hurl at the self aggrandizing PR speak. I get positive self image and promotion, but good grief this is so over the top. I want a press release that says something closer to the truth, "we have no idea how to gain more users and the money from their wallets, so we're buying another company so we don't have to worry about developing anything on our own. This was the best idea we could come up with" Not a single quote from anyone from Slack on how they felt it was a good idea and what made it so exciting for them to sell at this time to this buyer. I honestly feel like I need a shower after reading this nonsense.
- ilovecaching 5y ago
  Agreed. Corporate speak like this can't come across as anything but disingenuous, especially when they didn't even make the product they think they're going to "change the world" with. My sister's company recently got acquired, and it's reminded me how bad it feels to be a regular worker suddenly finding out a company you really love is selling out. Of course, the execs get big bonuses while the regular workers get no say in changes to the business including cuts to their bonuses and perks...
- serverholic 5y ago
  I don't understand how anyone can stand that crap. Like what kind of person sees statements like the ones you quoted and thinks it's a good thing?

kissgyorgy 5y ago

Why every successful product has to be bloatware?

istorical 5y ago
enterprise customers have large feature set requirements to support their enterprise scale, regulatory obligations, international presence + the tendency not to reject any feature request ask that could yield an additional customer combined with how unique feature requests often are between customers
- serverholic 5y ago
  Basically companies get bloated, then they need bloated software that supports all their bloat. They pay big money so they get what they want.
rchaud 5y ago
Because it wouldn't be worth billions otherwise. Feature bloat is a key part of the "emperor's new clothes" strategy that 'simple' products like Dropbox are pursuing, now that they're public and are under pressure to show growth. That's how you get stuff like Dropbox Paper.
- APock 5y ago
  Dropbox paper is amazing though if you need to create an "easy to collaborate that look decent" document. And it does not affect in anyway your experience with the "cloud sync" functionality
xeromal 5y ago
Corporate compliance
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
Salespeople love bloatware. The more features salespeople can speak about the more successfully they can sell the product.

Bhilai 5y ago

I cant help but feel sorry for Salesforce engineers who will have to work on figuring out how to integrate the monolith with Slack and figure out the user permissions and access control nightmare.

zippergz 5y ago
I can't help but feel sorry for the Slack engineers who are used to working at a nimble and innovative company, and now will be beaten down by bureaucracy only rivaled by large governments.
- Bhilai 5y ago
  Based on my experience, Salesforce does leave acquisitions to do their own thing for a long period of time - Heroku, Tableau and Quip are examples of that. But yes, its a big bureaucracy and things can move at a glacial pace.
  - nevir 5y ago
    It sounds like they kinda ran morale for Tableau folk into the ground; and a bunch have/are jumping ship
    - xena 5y ago
      This happened at Heroku too.
      - Mandatum 5y ago
        MuleSoft too.
- kaidon 5y ago
  Speaking from experience, getting absorbed as a small nimble company into a behemoth is akin to slowly boiling a frog alive. Things usually start out as business as usual for quite a while, at least for engineering; other departments are heavily impacted immediately. Then... the beuracracy creeps and grows and soon you have some corporate IT nonsense on your machine that blocks DNS lookups to github.com so you don't "leak intellectual property" and now you can't build your software any more and your manager is a plant.

throwslackforce 5y ago

How much money did the typical Slack engineer get out of this?

dannyw 5y ago
I actually find this to be a really interesting question. Founders do have significant sway in these kind of deals, in terms of advocating (or not advocating) for employees. How are Slack employees doing financially?
- bitbckt 5y ago
  The direct listing was good to most everyone I know (lots of former Twitterati at Slack), and this deal doesn’t seem to have changed that situation. The post-acquisition exodus has started, which might imply folks aren’t interested in joining The Machine regardless of the money.

dkdk8283 5y ago

Great! I can’t wait for Slack to perish.

nodesocket 5y ago

I just sold all my $WORK shares on Monday. Curious, would my broker just have sold the shares and then issued some $CRM shares?

avrionov 5y ago
Whoever once the $WORK stock it will be replaced automatically with 26.79 in cash and 0.0776 Salesforce shares per share.

jjice 5y ago

Someone please correct my ignorance, but is the core of Salesforce (the traditional sales application) essentially a glorified CRUD app with integrations?

tmpz22 5y ago
It’s more of a managed database with a default scheme that is proven to be able to build sales tools around
- Igelau 5y ago
  So... yes?
spiderice 5y ago
> a glorified CRUD app I feel like this can be said about most application development nowadays, especially anything web based. It's one of the reasons I'm losing steam as a web developer. It feels like no matter what project I do or company I work at, I'm really just doing CRUD all day. The only variations are the names of resources and the slight data manipulation you do between the HTTP request and storing it in the database. Has anyone else experienced this same feeling?
thehappypm 5y ago
So is Facebook
xyzzy21 5y ago
Sure, CRM/SFM is just database stuff. The rest is merely software.

fartcannon 5y ago

30 billion dollars is so unbelievably high for such a basic thing, that it makes me think some kind of money laundering is going on. Meanwhile, the most advanced robotics company on earth got sold for less than 1 billion. My mind boggles.

ascorbic 5y ago
It's a basic thing with getting on for $1bn in ARR. It's also a platform for hundreds of apps and integrations.
cvhashim 5y ago
Hype-based valuation?
normac2 5y ago
It's almost all economies of scale and "rich get richer" type effects, much like the big social networks. You make something that catches on (in Slack's case it really did have an edge on the existing stuff) and from then on you've got your loyal user base for whom it would be too much of a project to move to another thing. Slack is a great product, but at the end of the day it's a mildly more convenient way of doing stuff that you could do in 2002 with IRC and email. And Mattermost is a pretty good FOSS substitute. (This isn't counting audio and video calls, but those have been pretty good since around the time of Google Hangouts, long before Slack had audio/video.)
muglug 5y ago
Most of Boston Robotics' products are at least a decade away from being cheaper than humans for anything but the most trivial of tasks. BR requires a lot more investment before they can become a worthwhile purchase.
thehappypm 5y ago
It's really that the number of customers of these types of things is astronomical. Basically any business in the world might use Slack. And many, many do, especially high-value Western businesses. Boston Dynamics is great but who is buying robots? People spend more money on their electric bills than on iPhones.

ksec 5y ago

I remember the pitch from Render.com, they are doing it because Heroku stopped innovating since Salesforce acquired them. Although most of the time Salesforce just leave those acquisition alone and let them do their work. Which is sort of strange if there are no benefits and synergy, it is more like a long term asset investment. I sometimes wonder if these sort of acquisition has something to do with low interest rate, ease of capital, and tax reduction.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago
Heroku decided to sail against the Docker wave rather than sail with it. They still have a "buildpack" OSS project that sort of competes with OCI image
aasasd 5y ago
> leave those acquisition alone and let them do their work Exactly the fate every casual commenter is hoping for with every acquisition of a decent company. Specifically in gaming. The companies keep calming the public down by promising they'll let the bought company work as before, which of course never happens—otherwise there'd be no reason for the acquisition. (Waiting for Codemasters to turn into regular EA trash, here.) If Salesforce found a way to make this very model work, that's great. Personally I've become too jaded to expect anything good from any acquisition.

ColinHayhurst 5y ago

Who needs Slack when you can use, as we do, Zulip? Yes, OK, I need to use Slack to participate in communities set-up by others. Thank you Kandra Labs and Dropbox: https://zulip.com/history/ https://zulip.com/history/

gentleman11 5y ago
There is also Mattermost
- ColinHayhurst 5y ago
  Good shout. Zulip happended to fit best at the time the decision was made. It would be Mattermost or Zulip, for us, if starting from scratch.

mosseater 5y ago

I just installed an XMPP server (ejabberd). It's amazing how much money is in things that are already solved freely. This is chat! CHAT! TEXTUAL CHAT WITH OCCASIONAL VIDEO CALLS! WebRTC is a thing! IRC/XMPP is a thing! Sad techops people running out of things to host is a thing!

anthk 5y ago
Don´t worry, genz-ers coders don't know better but their smartphone-first fuzzed ecosystem. They are lost.

tails4e 5y ago

I've a dumb question as I don't use salesforce daily persay, however I feel our corporate intranet has been 'upgraded' to use a CRM style interface which may be salesforce SW as the backend, which I suspect purely as the url names have *force in them. To load the main home/landing page there must be 10 redirects, taking many seconds. It just feels so bloated to use - so is this the norm for salesforce SW, or is it the case we may be using something else entirely, that is itself bloated?

mouth 5y ago
In my experience, Salesforce feels bloated and sluggish.
chupchap 5y ago
10 redirects is unusual. Is there an SSO in place? That said Salesforce log in process should not have more than two redirects from what I have seen.
- tails4e 5y ago
  SSO is in place, but that browser was already signed in, so should not require it again. Redirects are between things with names like visualforce. Maybe it's not 10, but it's a lot. Can Firefox developer tools be used to track the flow of redirects, I'd be interested to see what the exact flow is
  - chupchap 5y ago
    That doesn't seem like a standard setup; probably there is some custom work done there as part of the login flow.
perryizgr8 5y ago
This matches my experience at a previous employer who was using Salesforce tools/websites.