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Salesforce is shuttering Slack’s remote work research group Future Forum

142 points by taubek 4y ago

stareatgoats 4y ago
It's hard to know what really happened here, but Butterfields comments as cited reflects an all-too-common mindset in company mergers regardless: “The problem has been, there’s no incorporation of the Slack culture into the Salesforce culture, and unless there is some element of that, then it’s not integration in any sense. It’s just the elimination". It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in large orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to cooperate, and promote the people who only know how to dominate.
- LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
  > It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in large orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to cooperate, and promote the people who only know how to dominate. This is an inherent trait of our modern result-driven system. Being able to dominate is a key trait for a successful executive in this culture, and anyone saying otherwise is just trying to sell books. As egalitarian as we might think our modern work culture is, the idea that leading by cooperation just isn't true. Successful executives at big companies are able to make it look like they lead by cooperation (and sometimes do cooperate in the process) while fully maintaining control. And many don't even try to pretend to be cooperative.
  - parineum 4y ago
    > This is an inherent trait of our modern result-driven system. Is being result-driven modern?
    - shaneofalltrad 4y ago
      I believe it's a modern version of result-driven.
      - samstave 4y ago
        Results drive modernity
  - stareatgoats 4y ago
    I'm not really as pessimistic as all that. True, in the companies I've worked for there was always a tendency for the domineering types to make it to the top, but there is definitely a spectrum involved, a bell curve that could conceivably be shifted more towards cooperation than currently if the zeitgeist favored that more. Maybe after some time with more women on the boards?
    - esja 4y ago
      In my experience the women who make it to these levels are no less domineering than the men, and often more so.
  - ResearchCode 4y ago
    Don't think there's any evidence for that.
    - shaneofalltrad 4y ago
      I see it in most companies I work at, I see the most aggressive delegation minded extroverts climbing to the top and those heads down getting shit done stepped over much of the time or even considered less important because they are not playing the social game. We need a study to see this?
      - ResearchCode 4y ago
        That doesn't mean it's the best model. Successful in the sense of the career ladder, then maybe you're right. Successful as in productive or good for the organization or society, probably not. They are responsible for many of the biggest organizational failures.
  - indymike 4y ago
    > It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in large orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to cooperate, and promote the people who only know how to dominate. I don't think it's that simple. As you move up, you lose touch with those below you because the problems that can get you fired come from your other executive peers and the C suite. Most of these problems are really hard to explain because they are kind of stupid. Someone's sleeping with the CEO and wants something. Another VP promised the company would do X for an investor who will withold investment if X doesn't happen. Everyone is terrified of a lawsuit because someone got liquored up and said something to the media at a conference. Our rock star, investor-placed, infallible CFO made a mistake and we have one third the cash we thought we did. And your job as executive is to make it happen even if it is stupid. So it comes across as domineering and very political: "We're not doing that, Dave. We're doing this. Because I said so." If the executive took time to explain: "We're not doing that, Dave. I had to make a deal with CMO Schmidt (who referred me to the CEO for my job and is married in to the owner's family) because he committed that we would be ready to release feature X at convention Y at last week's investor meeting. So, that integration with Z that will make us a bunch of money isn't going to happen. I know, it's stupid. But we're doing the stupid. And yes, that guy who makes 3x what I do is an absolute idiot." This is why I much prefer to work in companies where the owners are still working in the business and the whole team is "dealt in" on outcomes (i.e. in a startup, has options) and executives are looking to increase the valuation of options/shares instead of trying to max out some badly designed "multi-dimensional, goal-aligned incentive structure".
    - FormerBandmate 4y ago
      > This is why I much prefer to work in companies where the owners are still working in the business and the whole team is "dealt in" on outcomes (i.e. in a startup, has options) and executives are looking to increase the valuation of options/shares instead of trying to max out some badly designed "multi-dimensional, goal-aligned incentive structure". This is incidentally why stock based comp exists
  - 8note 4y ago
    I don't know if you should call that results driven. Results tend to come from cooperation and collaboration. What you might be looking for is that were in an attribution-driven system and culture?
- imwithstoopid 4y ago
  well Stewart always had the choice of going it alone and building out Slack as its own brand, but he took the $$$ he had the same experience with Yahoo buying Flickr so its not like any of this should have surprised him...he still consented to the acquisition of Slack no difference here from the WhatsApp guys who took a ton of money and then pooped on Facebook...be happy you got the money and understand that you agreed to be acquired
  - gonehome 4y ago
    I’ll defend Brian Acton a bit here - he refused to sell WhatsApp until it got up to a ludicrous 19B$ for 30 full time employees? Few people are tested to that amount and then it becomes a legitimate question of opportunity cost (he gave 50M$ to signal after the sale). Even with that Meta has been a decent steward of it imo despite obvious conflicts of interest. 19B$ of character is more than most. Slack failed to compete with Microsoft and then the CEO sold it to one of the worst possible acquisition companies in the industry (maybe only behind oracle?) not unlike his flicker sale, it’s not the same. I have a lot lower opinion of him (to the point I’d be less likely to join a company he’s running).
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      >>Slack failed to compete with Microsoft I dont know that is a fair characterization, by most accounts Slack is a better product, however Microsoft has a vertical integration and with the strong push to bring most orgs on to Microsoft 365 it is hard to compete with "free" in the sense that Teams is included in the suite products you are already going to pay for anyway.... I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand alone product each company had to buy per user that it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.
      - gonehome 4y ago
        Slack had an in to expand and capture what eventually became 365, but they didn’t do it and Microsoft caught up and captured it.
      - 4y ago
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  Exactly. Big companies can't innovate, they can't get out of their own way enough to get something all the way through. The way it goes: 1.Company with great leadership gets investment (angel, VC, government, etc.) to do something great. 2. Great leadership takes the time and effort to a - understand what is needed and how to recognize talent in those areas and b - gets that talent onboard, even if it's expensive and time consuming to align their desires with the companies 3. A great team, with great leadership, does great things. 4. Great things are profitable, so the company is sold to a big soulless company, or becomes a big soulless company over time 5. Many of the people with true passion and skill leave because they can. They generally leave because the toxic environment in big soulless companies hurts them and takes away what makes them individually so great. 6. Company is left with a shell. They manufacture and sell a product, but all the people who made that product from first principles, the people who can do it again, have been alienated,insulted, or otherwise fell victim to the toxic culture and had to leave to preserve their humanity. Source: I've been through this cycle 3 times, one with a company that went IPO and is big now, one time with St. Jude/Medtronic and one time with J&J. Edited to correct a spelling error
  - eftychis 4y ago
    You can also add my personal anecdota in the pot. Same experience. (I know there is self selection sampling here that needs to be adjusted for.)
  - fatfox 4y ago
    Big soulless company will fail to replicate success of original founders due to lack of genuine vision for the acquired business. Will try to shoehorn acquired business into mega corps core competencies and remove whatever made it uniquely successful.
  - 8note 4y ago
    4.5 the big company has different constraints that the small company did not have
    - fatfox 4y ago
- anon2358 4y ago
  The simplest explanation is that the small team of people who ran Future Forum probably just didn't want to deal with Benioff and Salesforce's bullshit anymore. Either that, or they got laid off in one of the recent rounds of cuts.
- WhyNotHugo 4y ago
  > The problem has been, there’s no incorporation of the Slack culture into the Salesforce culture, and unless there is some element of that, then it’s not integration in any sense. It’s just the elimination. Considering that the CEO is pushing for "back to the office" mentality and against remote work, I'd say it's pretty clear that this is just elimination of Slack. Slack is a key tool in remote work, it basically stands against what they're pushing for.
malermeister 4y ago
Salesforce keeps killing everything that made Slack good.
- jmspring 4y ago
  You will love canvas ... (not).
j-bos 4y ago
Maybe I misread, and I'm definitley being trite, but, is the tldr that this research group consistently found evidence that remote work is good, and thus the evidence must be stopped?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
flappyeagle 4y ago
At some point it will make sense to start a new slack/teams replacement. We’re close.
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  Anything missing from Matrix (and clients) from your POV?
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    It’s not better than slack in any way that matters to a corporate user
  - oblio 4y ago
    Can I send a scheduled message even if my client is down, with Matrix?
    - Arathorn 4y ago
      we’re working on scheduled msgs currently (it’s hard because you don’t know what devices will be i the room by the time the msg sends, and so who to encrypt for)
- malermeister 4y ago
  I think Mattermost might fit the bill?
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    It does not. It’s basically worse slack.
    - imwithstoopid 4y ago
      its free-as-in-beer which is all 99% of orgs want it also provides 99% of the functionality most orgs actually care about
barbazoo 4y ago
> “I believe this is what's best for Slack,” Elliot wrote And again no data, no evidence whatsoever. I'd expect the companies making such big decisions like RTO to be more data driven and transparent.
- DogLover_ 4y ago
  Even if the data was there. Is it worth it if employees are much happier with remote work? It should really not be a binary question whether the productivity is higher or lower.
  - elbigbad 4y ago
    I guess the somewhat cynical question-answer to that question is: As a business, is their mission to be productive and make great products, or to make employees happy to the detriment of the company’s productivity?
    - DogLover_ 4y ago
      Sure, if you are only using thinking shortsighted. I doubt they consider what effect remote has on retention and company reputation and how those factors could affect productivity.
      - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
        I'd assume remote work greatly lowers retention. People are way less "attached" to their company when working remotely.
        cwilkes 4y ago
        Counterpoint to that: if you can work remotely you won’t leave for a company that requires your butt to be in a seat in the office.
    - blitz_skull 4y ago
madboston 4y ago
Its funny that the tools that actually allow you to work remotely are pushing their own employees to come back. The leadership sure has some vision right there (vision for more money and nothing else but that's not shocking).
- zainhoda 4y ago
  Exactly. If I were in charge of Slack I would double down on 100% remote and also not allow any other third-party remote collaboration tool. The team would be forced to build out all the remote tooling they need and then eventually incorporate it into the core product.
softwaredoug 4y ago
The eternal story of “we’re going to acquire you but leave you alone” that turns out to almost never be true.
- digdigdag 4y ago
  Ten years in IT, I've been part of roughly 4 acquisitions across a few jobs. Each time the line delivered to the employees is more or less the same: "don't worry, we don't intend to change anything. It's business as usual". Then a few months in, the warning signs begin. New HR documents to sign. New benefit schedules. Then there's some turbulence from above -- talks of upper management getting reshuffled. New org charts. A few months after that, there's new customers to support, new SLA guidelines, new meetings for us to attend. _Then_ it's your organization that starts getting sacked. It's all just a cynical dog whistling to get people to stay complacent and continue turning the cog while they pull the rug out from under you. Thankfully I've become adept at the skill of jumping ship when I see the first leaks, if you know what I mean.
  - imwithstoopid 4y ago
    why jump at the sign of a first leak? you can usually get another full year of slacking off at full pay while the parent company dithers around unless you see truly greener pastures elsewhere, getting acquired is one of the best gigs in IT
    - livelielife 4y ago
      for some people a job is just a job, and any job is potentially ok. some other suckers like myself, we need something more out of our jobs; it sucks to be like this; it makes us easier to exploit.
      - itronitron 4y ago
        I've never been more miserable than when I have been paid to show up and do nothing.
speakfreely 4y ago
Salesforce is a plague on every company it buys. They completely ruined Heroku and I expect it won't be long before Slack starts to suffer.
- samwillis 4y ago
  This is a common meme about Heroku, but when you look at the timeframes it's not quite true. Heroku was founded in 2007, acquired by Salesforce in 2010 well before its innovation and growth began to decline. Many of their biggest products and innovations came after the acquisition. That's not to say it was then neglected by them later on!
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    They had existing momentum which dwindled and was never recharged
    - justeleblanc 4y ago
      Must have been some incredible momentum, built in three years and lasting for a decade.
  - holografix 4y ago
    Heroku’s downfall had little to do with Salesforce and much to do with AWS, Google and Azure muscling in to the PaaS market. Once K8s got wide adoption Heroku was over. Selling Heroku to IT was a huge pain in ass as the key decision makers mostly make résumé-driven buying and engineering decisions. Did Salesforce neglect Heroku or allow it to operate independently? It’s a matter of point of view. The reality is that Heroku saw itself more and more irrelevant vis à vis its competitor and without the funds to compete. It’s only hope for survival is to become more and more relevant to Salesforce customers while largely out-competed but the big 3 for everyone else.
bloblaw 4y ago
Salesforce is a sales and marketing company that was founded (and is led) by a brilliant sales and marketing person in Marc Benioff. They are not now, and never have been, and engineering focused company. The creation of the Salesforce platform itself is (or was) based entirely on Oracle tech...and it was SOLD extremely well because it solved business problems. Salesforce has failed to innovate outside of releasing the CRM as a SaaS product back in 1999...which is why they have bought innovation, and then integrated it poorly...see Heroku, Slack, Mulesoft, Tableau, Quip, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc. https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/06/18/salesforces-tableau-acquisition-admitting-organic-innovation-failure/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/06/18/sale... I worked there for a short bit. Most frustrating experience of my career. It was the epitome of rest and vest well before COVID. Extreme lack of urgency, little attention to quality, and a huge focus on sales and marketing. Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business...so long as Salesforce can't buy that company, integrate it badly, and disillusion all the employees that made it great.
- funstuff007 4y ago
  > Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business. This statement undervalues the lock-in Salesforce has. One should probably make migrate-from-Salesforce tool and sell to all the new VC funded CRM shops. You could be selling shovels during a gold rush.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products? I know Close.io is particularly useful for salespeople, but I'm not sure of any that could touch the dominance of Salesforce in the enterprise.
    - macspoofing 4y ago
      >Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products? Hundreds, if not thousands.
indymike 4y ago
Salesforce has spent an insane amount of money on real estate. I think the return to the office has nothing to do with productivity or even management style and everything to do with the big towers with SalesForce on top. The irony in this is that Salesforce literally set sales free from the office back in the late 90s and early 00s. When 9/11 hit, I didn't miss a beat: I did presentations with WebEx (we did the voice part with a conference call) and logged everything in my through-the-browser CRM at blazing ISDN speeds. But it worked well enough that at least enterprise software sales evolved to a have-laptop-will-travel culture. Slack was a huge part of the work from home revolution of 2020.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  why can’t they sell the buildings/get out of the leases/let them expire/don’t renew them/lease them out to somebody else?
  - mike_d 4y ago
    You have a bucket of widgets, and so does everyone else to varying degrees. Each widget is really worth a dollar, but you paid $12 on average for yours because widgets were in demand at the time. Nobody really needs all their widgets right now, so there is little to no demand. You can either keep holding your widgets and keep them at a $12 valuation on your books, or sell them for an $11 write down. If enough people sell their widgets at $1 then everyone's widgets are magically worth $1 too, and everyone is fucked. Bay Area commercial real estate right now is like holding a bunch of jumbo mortgages in 2007.
  - indymike 4y ago
    Very few buyers for large amounts of office space right now. Commercial vacancy is high.
  - WhyNotHugo 4y ago
    They're trying to push for this "back to the office" mentality. You can't convince other that this is a good idea and then lease out your offices if you're not using your office yourself. I'm not sure about this particular case, but in similar situations with other corporations, a key detail was that management had investments in office real estate, so the push to "back to the office" was more about personal pockets than anything else.
a13o 4y ago
If you're getting acquired pay attention to whether the buyer needs your product, or your vision. That'll tell you how quickly your pre-aquisition culture will be stamped out.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  I've done a few acquisitions, one of them they just couldn't believe we only wanted some ip and not their vision no matter how explicit we were. I think it's hard for some people to see themselves that way, everyone is the hero of their own story as some say. another it was a lot more obvious, esp after who we didn't keep. But I still spent some time at the pub with their leads talking and trying to pivot them mentally.
  - InspiredIdiot 4y ago
    You're lucky if they want either the product _or_ the vision. Quite often they simply want the team or the void left by the market position the acquisition used to have. Of those two, the acquirer wanting the team is better but if they want nothing but the team odds are the team has little reason to stay other than golden handcuffs.
btbuildem 4y ago
Just another CEO ghoul, captured by real estate interests, doing the board's bidding. It's fascinating that these dogs are willing to chew off their own legs for scraps from the sunken cost table. I lost respect for our CEO entirely when he decreed the new RTO policy (justifying it with, and I paraphrase, "because I said so"). The company "promotes innovation", and their idea of moving forward is to "go back to how things were". It's pathetic. They didn't even dare to do layoffs when everyone else was slashing staff, because they have such a hard time hiring anyone. It's good to see that the rank and file understand this, and (at least in satellite offices) mostly ignore the RTO decree, calling the C-suite's bluff.
- dang 4y ago
  Can you please edit out swipes and personal attacks from your comments here, and also please not fulminate on HN? You can make your substantive points without any of that, and that's what we're going for here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - btbuildem 4y ago
    Thanks, I got carried away. I can't edit but it looks like the comment was flagged, so hopefully it's buried/invisible.
    - dang 4y ago
      It happens! Thanks for the kind reply.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> he wrote in the #all-salesforce Slack channel that employees hired during the pandemic had “much lower productivity.” He followed that by soliciting feedback: “Is this a reflection of our office policy? Are our managers not directly addressing productivity with their teams?” Or, hear me out, maybe it's a reflection of the fact that the pandemic was a truly enormous disruption to people's lives and psyches and society as a whole, and that people living through generational disruption to their lives and communities have much lowered productivity? And that this indeed may take a while to recover from? Crazy to suggest?
- ntonozzi 4y ago
  He’s not saying that everyone had lower productivity through the pandemic, but that those hired during the pandemic and working remotely had much lower productivity.
  - moomin 4y ago
    I mean, there are many possibilities here. One is that no-one got onboarded properly (possibly because the people who were meant to be doing it were busy trying to demonstrate productivity). Another possibility is that he doesn’t know how to measure productivity in the new environment and the whole thing is sampling error.
    - rrdharan 4y ago
      Yet another possibility is that it’s an entirely credible, accurate and valid statement based on meaningful data.
      - KyeRussell 4y ago
        Honestly there’s a contingent of WFH-or-die tech people that are as much an unjustified stick in the mud as the elusive bums-in-seats-or-die middle management stereotype. Multiple years on from the widespread proliferation of WFH, I still see a large contingent of people who are completely unwilling to even consider that physical colocation brings something to the table that can’t be replicated online, even during onboarding where building that sense of social cohesion is most important, and a management style that would otherwise be considered ‘’micromanagement’ is more justifiable. Ultimately it seems like people (on all sides) aren’t willing or able to separate “I prefer this” from “this makes me a better worker”. Don’t get me wrong. Remote work has its advantages. I say this all as someone that works remotely. But I also say this as someone managing a remote-first team.
motohagiography 4y ago
Given how much remote work depends on Slack, is it a risk to manage that Salesforce could use their leverage on the product to undermine the viability of remote work in general, or become a gatekeeper for it? They literally bought the key remote work platform for about 1/3 less than Musk paid for Twitter. Standing up a competitor may be a challenge given the regulatory requirements of enterprise environments that use it. Imo, the most urgent play for Twitter may be to launch some features that would be a viable Slack competitor for startups and some part of that private chat market. What Twitter has that Slack doesn't is a foundation to become an identity provider. I've spent years in the identity space, and what stops them is they can never produce something anyone actually wants, and all their solutions need to be imposed, whereas turning twitter handles into identity tokens is some trivial hacking. I could beta it with a team of 5 devs and an engineering manager with a good relationship with devops in 8mos. Slack may become the next Outlook mail, which is the thing everyone hates but it's too integrated to switch from, and it's an anchor on pretty much everything.
- lotsoweiners 4y ago
  Wouldn’t Teams be the closer Outlook analogy? No one at my large government organization can use Slack and is expected to use Teams.
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142 points by taubek 4y ago

It's hard to know what really happened here, but Butterfields comments as cited reflects an all-too-common mindset in company mergers regardless: “The problem has been, there’s no incorporation of the Slack culture into the Salesforce culture, and unless there is some element of that, then it’s not integration in any sense. It’s just the elimination". It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in large orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to cooperate, and promote the people who only know how to dominate.

LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
> It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in large orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to cooperate, and promote the people who only know how to dominate. This is an inherent trait of our modern result-driven system. Being able to dominate is a key trait for a successful executive in this culture, and anyone saying otherwise is just trying to sell books. As egalitarian as we might think our modern work culture is, the idea that leading by cooperation just isn't true. Successful executives at big companies are able to make it look like they lead by cooperation (and sometimes do cooperate in the process) while fully maintaining control. And many don't even try to pretend to be cooperative.
- parineum 4y ago
  > This is an inherent trait of our modern result-driven system. Is being result-driven modern?
  - shaneofalltrad 4y ago
    I believe it's a modern version of result-driven.
    - samstave 4y ago
      Results drive modernity
- stareatgoats 4y ago
  I'm not really as pessimistic as all that. True, in the companies I've worked for there was always a tendency for the domineering types to make it to the top, but there is definitely a spectrum involved, a bell curve that could conceivably be shifted more towards cooperation than currently if the zeitgeist favored that more. Maybe after some time with more women on the boards?
  - esja 4y ago
    In my experience the women who make it to these levels are no less domineering than the men, and often more so.
- ResearchCode 4y ago
  Don't think there's any evidence for that.
  - shaneofalltrad 4y ago
    I see it in most companies I work at, I see the most aggressive delegation minded extroverts climbing to the top and those heads down getting shit done stepped over much of the time or even considered less important because they are not playing the social game. We need a study to see this?
    - ResearchCode 4y ago
      That doesn't mean it's the best model. Successful in the sense of the career ladder, then maybe you're right. Successful as in productive or good for the organization or society, probably not. They are responsible for many of the biggest organizational failures.
- indymike 4y ago
  > It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in large orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to cooperate, and promote the people who only know how to dominate. I don't think it's that simple. As you move up, you lose touch with those below you because the problems that can get you fired come from your other executive peers and the C suite. Most of these problems are really hard to explain because they are kind of stupid. Someone's sleeping with the CEO and wants something. Another VP promised the company would do X for an investor who will withold investment if X doesn't happen. Everyone is terrified of a lawsuit because someone got liquored up and said something to the media at a conference. Our rock star, investor-placed, infallible CFO made a mistake and we have one third the cash we thought we did. And your job as executive is to make it happen even if it is stupid. So it comes across as domineering and very political: "We're not doing that, Dave. We're doing this. Because I said so." If the executive took time to explain: "We're not doing that, Dave. I had to make a deal with CMO Schmidt (who referred me to the CEO for my job and is married in to the owner's family) because he committed that we would be ready to release feature X at convention Y at last week's investor meeting. So, that integration with Z that will make us a bunch of money isn't going to happen. I know, it's stupid. But we're doing the stupid. And yes, that guy who makes 3x what I do is an absolute idiot." This is why I much prefer to work in companies where the owners are still working in the business and the whole team is "dealt in" on outcomes (i.e. in a startup, has options) and executives are looking to increase the valuation of options/shares instead of trying to max out some badly designed "multi-dimensional, goal-aligned incentive structure".
  - FormerBandmate 4y ago
    > This is why I much prefer to work in companies where the owners are still working in the business and the whole team is "dealt in" on outcomes (i.e. in a startup, has options) and executives are looking to increase the valuation of options/shares instead of trying to max out some badly designed "multi-dimensional, goal-aligned incentive structure". This is incidentally why stock based comp exists
- 8note 4y ago
  I don't know if you should call that results driven. Results tend to come from cooperation and collaboration. What you might be looking for is that were in an attribution-driven system and culture?
imwithstoopid 4y ago
well Stewart always had the choice of going it alone and building out Slack as its own brand, but he took the $$$ he had the same experience with Yahoo buying Flickr so its not like any of this should have surprised him...he still consented to the acquisition of Slack no difference here from the WhatsApp guys who took a ton of money and then pooped on Facebook...be happy you got the money and understand that you agreed to be acquired
- gonehome 4y ago
  I’ll defend Brian Acton a bit here - he refused to sell WhatsApp until it got up to a ludicrous 19B$ for 30 full time employees? Few people are tested to that amount and then it becomes a legitimate question of opportunity cost (he gave 50M$ to signal after the sale). Even with that Meta has been a decent steward of it imo despite obvious conflicts of interest. 19B$ of character is more than most. Slack failed to compete with Microsoft and then the CEO sold it to one of the worst possible acquisition companies in the industry (maybe only behind oracle?) not unlike his flicker sale, it’s not the same. I have a lot lower opinion of him (to the point I’d be less likely to join a company he’s running).
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    >>Slack failed to compete with Microsoft I dont know that is a fair characterization, by most accounts Slack is a better product, however Microsoft has a vertical integration and with the strong push to bring most orgs on to Microsoft 365 it is hard to compete with "free" in the sense that Teams is included in the suite products you are already going to pay for anyway.... I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand alone product each company had to buy per user that it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.
    - gonehome 4y ago
      Slack had an in to expand and capture what eventually became 365, but they didn’t do it and Microsoft caught up and captured it.
    - 4y ago
iancmceachern 4y ago
Exactly. Big companies can't innovate, they can't get out of their own way enough to get something all the way through. The way it goes: 1.Company with great leadership gets investment (angel, VC, government, etc.) to do something great. 2. Great leadership takes the time and effort to a - understand what is needed and how to recognize talent in those areas and b - gets that talent onboard, even if it's expensive and time consuming to align their desires with the companies 3. A great team, with great leadership, does great things. 4. Great things are profitable, so the company is sold to a big soulless company, or becomes a big soulless company over time 5. Many of the people with true passion and skill leave because they can. They generally leave because the toxic environment in big soulless companies hurts them and takes away what makes them individually so great. 6. Company is left with a shell. They manufacture and sell a product, but all the people who made that product from first principles, the people who can do it again, have been alienated,insulted, or otherwise fell victim to the toxic culture and had to leave to preserve their humanity. Source: I've been through this cycle 3 times, one with a company that went IPO and is big now, one time with St. Jude/Medtronic and one time with J&J. Edited to correct a spelling error
- eftychis 4y ago
  You can also add my personal anecdota in the pot. Same experience. (I know there is self selection sampling here that needs to be adjusted for.)
- fatfox 4y ago
  Big soulless company will fail to replicate success of original founders due to lack of genuine vision for the acquired business. Will try to shoehorn acquired business into mega corps core competencies and remove whatever made it uniquely successful.
- 8note 4y ago
  4.5 the big company has different constraints that the small company did not have
  - fatfox 4y ago
anon2358 4y ago
The simplest explanation is that the small team of people who ran Future Forum probably just didn't want to deal with Benioff and Salesforce's bullshit anymore. Either that, or they got laid off in one of the recent rounds of cuts.
WhyNotHugo 4y ago
> The problem has been, there’s no incorporation of the Slack culture into the Salesforce culture, and unless there is some element of that, then it’s not integration in any sense. It’s just the elimination. Considering that the CEO is pushing for "back to the office" mentality and against remote work, I'd say it's pretty clear that this is just elimination of Slack. Slack is a key tool in remote work, it basically stands against what they're pushing for.

malermeister 4y ago

Salesforce keeps killing everything that made Slack good.

jmspring 4y ago
You will love canvas ... (not).

j-bos 4y ago

Maybe I misread, and I'm definitley being trite, but, is the tldr that this research group consistently found evidence that remote work is good, and thus the evidence must be stopped?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

flappyeagle 4y ago

At some point it will make sense to start a new slack/teams replacement. We’re close.

CameronNemo 4y ago
Anything missing from Matrix (and clients) from your POV?
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  It’s not better than slack in any way that matters to a corporate user
- oblio 4y ago
  Can I send a scheduled message even if my client is down, with Matrix?
  - Arathorn 4y ago
    we’re working on scheduled msgs currently (it’s hard because you don’t know what devices will be i the room by the time the msg sends, and so who to encrypt for)
malermeister 4y ago
I think Mattermost might fit the bill?
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  It does not. It’s basically worse slack.
  - imwithstoopid 4y ago
    its free-as-in-beer which is all 99% of orgs want it also provides 99% of the functionality most orgs actually care about

barbazoo 4y ago

> “I believe this is what's best for Slack,” Elliot wrote And again no data, no evidence whatsoever. I'd expect the companies making such big decisions like RTO to be more data driven and transparent.

DogLover_ 4y ago
Even if the data was there. Is it worth it if employees are much happier with remote work? It should really not be a binary question whether the productivity is higher or lower.
- elbigbad 4y ago
  I guess the somewhat cynical question-answer to that question is: As a business, is their mission to be productive and make great products, or to make employees happy to the detriment of the company’s productivity?
  - DogLover_ 4y ago
    Sure, if you are only using thinking shortsighted. I doubt they consider what effect remote has on retention and company reputation and how those factors could affect productivity.
    - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
      I'd assume remote work greatly lowers retention. People are way less "attached" to their company when working remotely.
      - cwilkes 4y ago
        Counterpoint to that: if you can work remotely you won’t leave for a company that requires your butt to be in a seat in the office.
  - blitz_skull 4y ago

madboston 4y ago

Its funny that the tools that actually allow you to work remotely are pushing their own employees to come back. The leadership sure has some vision right there (vision for more money and nothing else but that's not shocking).

zainhoda 4y ago
Exactly. If I were in charge of Slack I would double down on 100% remote and also not allow any other third-party remote collaboration tool. The team would be forced to build out all the remote tooling they need and then eventually incorporate it into the core product.

softwaredoug 4y ago

The eternal story of “we’re going to acquire you but leave you alone” that turns out to almost never be true.

digdigdag 4y ago
Ten years in IT, I've been part of roughly 4 acquisitions across a few jobs. Each time the line delivered to the employees is more or less the same: "don't worry, we don't intend to change anything. It's business as usual". Then a few months in, the warning signs begin. New HR documents to sign. New benefit schedules. Then there's some turbulence from above -- talks of upper management getting reshuffled. New org charts. A few months after that, there's new customers to support, new SLA guidelines, new meetings for us to attend. _Then_ it's your organization that starts getting sacked. It's all just a cynical dog whistling to get people to stay complacent and continue turning the cog while they pull the rug out from under you. Thankfully I've become adept at the skill of jumping ship when I see the first leaks, if you know what I mean.
- imwithstoopid 4y ago
  why jump at the sign of a first leak? you can usually get another full year of slacking off at full pay while the parent company dithers around unless you see truly greener pastures elsewhere, getting acquired is one of the best gigs in IT
  - livelielife 4y ago
    for some people a job is just a job, and any job is potentially ok. some other suckers like myself, we need something more out of our jobs; it sucks to be like this; it makes us easier to exploit.
    - itronitron 4y ago
      I've never been more miserable than when I have been paid to show up and do nothing.

speakfreely 4y ago

Salesforce is a plague on every company it buys. They completely ruined Heroku and I expect it won't be long before Slack starts to suffer.

samwillis 4y ago
This is a common meme about Heroku, but when you look at the timeframes it's not quite true. Heroku was founded in 2007, acquired by Salesforce in 2010 well before its innovation and growth began to decline. Many of their biggest products and innovations came after the acquisition. That's not to say it was then neglected by them later on!
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  They had existing momentum which dwindled and was never recharged
  - justeleblanc 4y ago
    Must have been some incredible momentum, built in three years and lasting for a decade.
- holografix 4y ago
  Heroku’s downfall had little to do with Salesforce and much to do with AWS, Google and Azure muscling in to the PaaS market. Once K8s got wide adoption Heroku was over. Selling Heroku to IT was a huge pain in ass as the key decision makers mostly make résumé-driven buying and engineering decisions. Did Salesforce neglect Heroku or allow it to operate independently? It’s a matter of point of view. The reality is that Heroku saw itself more and more irrelevant vis à vis its competitor and without the funds to compete. It’s only hope for survival is to become more and more relevant to Salesforce customers while largely out-competed but the big 3 for everyone else.

bloblaw 4y ago

Salesforce is a sales and marketing company that was founded (and is led) by a brilliant sales and marketing person in Marc Benioff. They are not now, and never have been, and engineering focused company. The creation of the Salesforce platform itself is (or was) based entirely on Oracle tech...and it was SOLD extremely well because it solved business problems. Salesforce has failed to innovate outside of releasing the CRM as a SaaS product back in 1999...which is why they have bought innovation, and then integrated it poorly...see Heroku, Slack, Mulesoft, Tableau, Quip, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc. https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/06/18/salesforces-tableau-acquisition-admitting-organic-innovation-failure/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/06/18/sale... I worked there for a short bit. Most frustrating experience of my career. It was the epitome of rest and vest well before COVID. Extreme lack of urgency, little attention to quality, and a huge focus on sales and marketing. Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business...so long as Salesforce can't buy that company, integrate it badly, and disillusion all the employees that made it great.

funstuff007 4y ago
> Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business. This statement undervalues the lock-in Salesforce has. One should probably make migrate-from-Salesforce tool and sell to all the new VC funded CRM shops. You could be selling shovels during a gold rush.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products? I know Close.io is particularly useful for salespeople, but I'm not sure of any that could touch the dominance of Salesforce in the enterprise.
  - macspoofing 4y ago
    >Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products? Hundreds, if not thousands.

indymike 4y ago

Salesforce has spent an insane amount of money on real estate. I think the return to the office has nothing to do with productivity or even management style and everything to do with the big towers with SalesForce on top. The irony in this is that Salesforce literally set sales free from the office back in the late 90s and early 00s. When 9/11 hit, I didn't miss a beat: I did presentations with WebEx (we did the voice part with a conference call) and logged everything in my through-the-browser CRM at blazing ISDN speeds. But it worked well enough that at least enterprise software sales evolved to a have-laptop-will-travel culture. Slack was a huge part of the work from home revolution of 2020.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
why can’t they sell the buildings/get out of the leases/let them expire/don’t renew them/lease them out to somebody else?
- mike_d 4y ago
  You have a bucket of widgets, and so does everyone else to varying degrees. Each widget is really worth a dollar, but you paid $12 on average for yours because widgets were in demand at the time. Nobody really needs all their widgets right now, so there is little to no demand. You can either keep holding your widgets and keep them at a $12 valuation on your books, or sell them for an $11 write down. If enough people sell their widgets at $1 then everyone's widgets are magically worth $1 too, and everyone is fucked. Bay Area commercial real estate right now is like holding a bunch of jumbo mortgages in 2007.
- indymike 4y ago
  Very few buyers for large amounts of office space right now. Commercial vacancy is high.
- WhyNotHugo 4y ago
  They're trying to push for this "back to the office" mentality. You can't convince other that this is a good idea and then lease out your offices if you're not using your office yourself. I'm not sure about this particular case, but in similar situations with other corporations, a key detail was that management had investments in office real estate, so the push to "back to the office" was more about personal pockets than anything else.

a13o 4y ago

If you're getting acquired pay attention to whether the buyer needs your product, or your vision. That'll tell you how quickly your pre-aquisition culture will be stamped out.

grogenaut 4y ago
I've done a few acquisitions, one of them they just couldn't believe we only wanted some ip and not their vision no matter how explicit we were. I think it's hard for some people to see themselves that way, everyone is the hero of their own story as some say. another it was a lot more obvious, esp after who we didn't keep. But I still spent some time at the pub with their leads talking and trying to pivot them mentally.
- InspiredIdiot 4y ago
  You're lucky if they want either the product _or_ the vision. Quite often they simply want the team or the void left by the market position the acquisition used to have. Of those two, the acquirer wanting the team is better but if they want nothing but the team odds are the team has little reason to stay other than golden handcuffs.

btbuildem 4y ago

Just another CEO ghoul, captured by real estate interests, doing the board's bidding. It's fascinating that these dogs are willing to chew off their own legs for scraps from the sunken cost table. I lost respect for our CEO entirely when he decreed the new RTO policy (justifying it with, and I paraphrase, "because I said so"). The company "promotes innovation", and their idea of moving forward is to "go back to how things were". It's pathetic. They didn't even dare to do layoffs when everyone else was slashing staff, because they have such a hard time hiring anyone. It's good to see that the rank and file understand this, and (at least in satellite offices) mostly ignore the RTO decree, calling the C-suite's bluff.

dang 4y ago
Can you please edit out swipes and personal attacks from your comments here, and also please not fulminate on HN? You can make your substantive points without any of that, and that's what we're going for here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- btbuildem 4y ago
  Thanks, I got carried away. I can't edit but it looks like the comment was flagged, so hopefully it's buried/invisible.
  - dang 4y ago
    It happens! Thanks for the kind reply.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> he wrote in the #all-salesforce Slack channel that employees hired during the pandemic had “much lower productivity.” He followed that by soliciting feedback: “Is this a reflection of our office policy? Are our managers not directly addressing productivity with their teams?” Or, hear me out, maybe it's a reflection of the fact that the pandemic was a truly enormous disruption to people's lives and psyches and society as a whole, and that people living through generational disruption to their lives and communities have much lowered productivity? And that this indeed may take a while to recover from? Crazy to suggest?

ntonozzi 4y ago
He’s not saying that everyone had lower productivity through the pandemic, but that those hired during the pandemic and working remotely had much lower productivity.
- moomin 4y ago
  I mean, there are many possibilities here. One is that no-one got onboarded properly (possibly because the people who were meant to be doing it were busy trying to demonstrate productivity). Another possibility is that he doesn’t know how to measure productivity in the new environment and the whole thing is sampling error.
  - rrdharan 4y ago
    Yet another possibility is that it’s an entirely credible, accurate and valid statement based on meaningful data.
    - KyeRussell 4y ago
      Honestly there’s a contingent of WFH-or-die tech people that are as much an unjustified stick in the mud as the elusive bums-in-seats-or-die middle management stereotype. Multiple years on from the widespread proliferation of WFH, I still see a large contingent of people who are completely unwilling to even consider that physical colocation brings something to the table that can’t be replicated online, even during onboarding where building that sense of social cohesion is most important, and a management style that would otherwise be considered ‘’micromanagement’ is more justifiable. Ultimately it seems like people (on all sides) aren’t willing or able to separate “I prefer this” from “this makes me a better worker”. Don’t get me wrong. Remote work has its advantages. I say this all as someone that works remotely. But I also say this as someone managing a remote-first team.

motohagiography 4y ago

Given how much remote work depends on Slack, is it a risk to manage that Salesforce could use their leverage on the product to undermine the viability of remote work in general, or become a gatekeeper for it? They literally bought the key remote work platform for about 1/3 less than Musk paid for Twitter. Standing up a competitor may be a challenge given the regulatory requirements of enterprise environments that use it. Imo, the most urgent play for Twitter may be to launch some features that would be a viable Slack competitor for startups and some part of that private chat market. What Twitter has that Slack doesn't is a foundation to become an identity provider. I've spent years in the identity space, and what stops them is they can never produce something anyone actually wants, and all their solutions need to be imposed, whereas turning twitter handles into identity tokens is some trivial hacking. I could beta it with a team of 5 devs and an engineering manager with a good relationship with devops in 8mos. Slack may become the next Outlook mail, which is the thing everyone hates but it's too integrated to switch from, and it's an anchor on pretty much everything.

lotsoweiners 4y ago
Wouldn’t Teams be the closer Outlook analogy? No one at my large government organization can use Slack and is expected to use Teams.

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