Team Collaboration App Slack, Valued at $9 Billion, Draws Attention of Amazon (bloomberg.com) 79
Amazon is in the running among a handful of companies looking to acquire the popular chatroom startup, reports Bloomberg. From the article: San Francisco-based Slack could be valued at at least $9 billion in a sale, the people said. An agreement isn't assured and discussions may not go further, said the people. Buying Slack would help Seattle-based Amazon bolster its enterprise services as it seeks to compete with rivals like Microsoft and Alphabet's Google. The company's cloud-hosting unit, Amazon Web Services, in February unveiled a paid-for video and audio conferencing service -- Amazon Chime -- that lets users chat and share content. Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode: Slack, the popular business communications company, is in the midst of raising $500 million at a $5 billion post-money valuation, an effort that has attracted several potential buyers interested in taking out the company ahead of the funding. Those include Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce, several of which have previously shown interest in acquiring Slack. Bloomberg reported the interest by Amazon today, with a $9 billion sales price.
Shit name (Score:2)
Slack, really? Where I come from it means stupid, as in "You dopy get, you're as slack as a bag of knackers".
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Slack, really? Where I come from it means stupid, as in "You dopy get, you're as slack as a bag of knackers".
You come from my imagined scene from a BBC sitcom canceled after one episode in 1978?
Re:Shit name (Score:5, Funny)
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and so was AIM... why not use it? Slack is over-hyped turd.
IRC LUDDITES (Score:3, Funny)
Every loser who ever coded an IRC client, kill yourself now. You're just not APP ENOUGH to be FUCKING BILLIONAIRES.
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I would nominate Kik. Those bastards broke the Internet.
https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code/ [qz.com]
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The same thing goes for those that wrote an NTTP client. The next big thing is going to be a pretty wrapper on NTTP with moderation, images, etc.
It's what Reddit and Voat users claim they want, completely unfiltered distributed discussion.
There's an API! You can write Bots! It's distributed! No central government can take it down! Free Speech!
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can someone (ideally someone over 40 who actually remembers text-based usenet, and not the binary stuff, but real people using it for real communication) explain WHY slack is a 'thing'?
we have it at work. we refuse to pay for it and history scrolls away, held hostage, essentially. we discuss things that should be saved for later (why did this feature get added? why was that bug such a big problem and what was the fix? company stuff that is useful to have for future searches by newhires). and yet, we al
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Sure. Because it's an app, and everything old is new again, as an app.
Slack is okay as a chat platform. Being able to divide different groups into different chats is nice. Having to create a new account each time is not.
Of course, except for some trendy colourful graphics, it doesn't really do anything a private IRC server wouldn't.
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It's really about design and UX. Slack is easy to use for non technical people (think marketing teams perhaps), and has
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Because you have so many "family" photos and videos, right? Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
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While I agree that the 9 billion valuation is ludicrous, I use slack at work and I can verify it has great search capabilities (one of its best features), does not have round corners (at least the desktop client I use), there is no slowness in the UI that I can see, and everybody seems to love it at work. And you can easily hook things to it, like continuous integration systems, monitoring systems etc so devops seem to enjoy working on it.
I don't know if there's anything similar, i.e. evolved IRC for compan
Re:Dotcom bubble v2.0 is here (Score:4, Insightful)
Good on your workplace for buying you a top of the line PC.
When I used slack, it caused the browser to consume 30% of the CPU. The desktop client did the same (no surprise, since it's one of those Electron-based wrapped web apps), so the same way Visual Studio could take 30% blinking the cursor, so could Slack. I managed to get it down to a managable 10% or so by turning off every friggin' option that decorated text, replaced text with emojis, etc
Luckily when my involvement in that project was over, slack went into the recycle bin (they used it to collaborate). Still didn't see why a glorified chat client needed to take 5-10% of the CPU in the end, when my IRC client, connected to multiple networks consumed 0% regularly. And no, for security purposes, they did not have the IRC gateway enabled.
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Hmm, I have not tried it in a browser and have not tried any old versions. So, three months ago I installed the MacOS desktop client on a reasonably spec'd iMac, and it does not even register a blip in my activity monitor's CPU graph. And the Windows guys are also happy it seems (our last "retro" was about comms, and slack got in the "good" list by everyone), so maybe it was some time ago that you tried it? Or it could be the Windows version and our windows guys are just not picky about such stuff so they d
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Huh, I remembered something interesting, the reason I got rid of the Atom editor, which is also Electron-based it seems, is because it was sluggish and using a lot of CPU for just an editor (switched to Sublime). And this was on the same iMac :) So an Electron-based app does have the potential to be slow on my machine, but so far slack seems fast. Well, not compared to an IRC client not written in Java of course, but still ;)
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I don't know if there's anything similar, i.e. evolved IRC for companies
Microsoft has one in Office365:
https://products.office.com/en... [office.com]
It's like the illegitimate child of Slack and Sharepoint.
Best part is, the video on the product page hits all the right points:
[x] Diversity in the workplace
[x] Non-white, non-male, non-American narrator, possibly non-heterosexual
[x] Puts an emphasis on young beautiful people but throw in a couple of fatso and old turds
[x] Has both startup and enterprise scenes with vibrant energy
[x] Emotional, hopeful soundtrack
[x] Blonde chick with a leather
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Companies who have come to depend on Slack will be more or less forced to pay whatever the new owners charge. That worked out rather well for Yammer when they started: offer it for free to employees, then star
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Sounds like an opportunity to release a replacement. Complete with web scraper to copy over all your old... Slacks?
9 Billion ??? (Score:1)
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I hear you, it's completely crazy these days.
Software that would have been shareware/freeware back in the 80's and 90's now comes with a corporate sponsor and ridiculous valuations. An IPO for a game like Candy Crush? WTF?!
What's so great about Slack that makes it worth 9 billion? Why aren't companies that use IRC worth as much?
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Now imagine being able to mine and apply the data they have on that crowd (in a variety of ways), and cross reference it with other sources.
That data is useless. It has no advertising value whatsoever.
That's the problem Facebook has faced for a long time: advertisers don't care that you Liked the latest Steven Seagal movie. They want to know what you bought on Amazon, and guess what, Amazon already knows that so the Slack data is not going to help them improve their sales. Besides, natural language processing is moving forward but it's still too slow to be useful at that scale.
What Slack would do is add a large customer base to the productivity
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Because we didn't start out as millionaires?
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Further in the article it says:
Slack has 5 million daily active users -- 1.5 million of whom pay to use the service -- and had $150 million in annual recurring revenue as of Jan. 31.
So they book up 150m in revenue yearly. Their operating expenses are probably around 30m or so I;d guess so profit around 100m. Valuation is then x90 of profit. For what is essentially IRC/chat : a highly fungable service where the 5 million eyeballs pairs you have ($1800 per eyeball pair) are far from captured/entrenched and can flip to something else with minimal barrier. Sounds like a bad price to me.
Tech writers these days (Score:3)
TFA,
For those not familiar, imagine Facebook for the office and you are down the right alley.
No its not facebook for the office, that would be more like socialcast. Why does everything have to be about socialmedia these days ? The way we currently use slack where Im at is nowhere near facebook, and yes we have irc gateways enabled.
Ugh... Slack is nothing but a pretty chat client (Score:1)
I worked at a startup and they swore by Slack, yet we also paid for Hipchat which DID THE SAME GODDAMN thing!
I guess I just "don't get it" or maybe in a year or two we'll all be laughing.
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WTF? 9 billion for IRC ?! (Score:3)
How many fucking times does IRC need to keep getting re-invented?
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Right place, right time, right marketing? Dunno... (Score:3)
My company standardized on using Slack, not that long ago ... and now our sister company wants it rolled out too.
My initial impression was exactly what some of you are saying. Basically.... WTF?! It's just somebody reselling a webified IRC client all over again! But now that we've used it a while, I get the attraction to it.
#1 is the overall realization that in corporate America, email has reigned supreme for the last decade plus. People can literally spend a productive 8 hour day camping out in Microsoft Outlook, scheduling meetings or appointments, updating to-do lists, and of course reading and responding to hundreds of emails. The mail system has become a virtual filing cabinet for many users, with dozens and dozens of nested sub-folders created, housing all the email messages and attached files they found relevant. That creates multiple dilemmas for businesses. They have to fend off the ever present threat of malware coming in via email, for starters. But they also get stuck paying all of their employees for lots of time spent deleting mail to keep mailboxes from filling up. Mailboxes that DO fill up caused bounced messages, often at the worst possible times (employee in the middle of large projects requiring a lot of correspondence and working with large file attachments coming in regularly). There's total information overload in most people's mailboxes, so important messages don't always get read promptly, or get missed completely.
Slack promises a solution to much of this. It drastically cuts down on how much mail goes back and forth internally in the company once people get used to using it. No reason to email a co-worker or a group of them when you can just send the message in the appropriate Slack channel. Everything ever typed into Slack, including attachments pasted into channels, is preserved indefinitely with full search capabilities on it. (When a channel is deleted, it's never really just deleted. Rather, it's given an archived status so you can still reattach to it any time and search its content.)
#2 is the fact that Slack focused pretty heavily on integration with outside programs. It's not just a chat room for PEOPLE, but an aggregator for alerts and notifications generated automatically by other programs and services. We created several channels just for I.T. staff that collect notifications about such things as our CrashPlan backups and upcoming maintenance alerts by our phone system provider. These can be easily configured to alert our phones with push notifications out of Slack too. So it's a one stop shop or clearinghouse to reign in all of that chatter from the cloud services we use.
And lastly? Slack seems to offer enough flexibility so channels can be created with appropriate security permissions so outside vendors or even clients can be invited to participate in discussions without revealing everything else discussed in the system. When we started out email migration project, we invited the consultants to a special Slack channel so all of us can hash out details or ask/answer questions without ever resorting to email chains.
I get that Slack didn't do anything that's super innovative... but so often, it's not about being first. Apple didn't invent the concept of the MP3 music file OR the portable MP3 music player, but they sure did run with those ideas and build a hugely successful online music store and music hardware sales model from it!
re: Basecamp? Really? (Score:2)
Our company used Basecamp about 5-6 years ago, and gladly phased it out. The fact that it doesn't facilitate any free flowing chat communications was a huge negative for us. I understand needs vary -- but we adopted Slack precisely because we saw how much misc. chatter took place inside email, cluttering up mailboxes. Our business does marketing and facilitating shows and events, with lots of creative types working on various projects or ideas. There's always going to be a need for an easy way for employee
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still not seeing anything that irc doesn't/can't do, over 20 years ago we already had irc bots that did anything you could think of.
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Personally, I find Slack to be very usable. Contrast to Microsoft Teams, Lync, Skype for Business or Lifesize (all 'enterprise' chat systems) - they all suck at chat in various ways. Lync is sort of okay, but the version I used to use didn't have tabs. Teams is so godawful I can't imagine anyone using it for long. Skype for business looks like one of those website chat boxes, and Lifesize is similarly awful. None of those products has any easy way for ordinary users or developers to integrate with something
Whats Matrix.org and Riot value? (Score:2)
Short summary of slack (Score:1)
IRC but invite only channels. Works in browser without plugins.
API allows text commands to invoke external services like Google hangouts. Also allows bots ( again like IRC) to post in channels.
wanted to install the phone app, but then I saw.. (Score:2)
the kinds of privs the app demands.
no fucking way! I forget the specifics but it wanted WAY too much privs for just a stupid chat app. we use slack at work and I'd like to be tied in (its a startup and it would be helpful to have a fast way to hear the broadcasts and multicasts that happen on the 'channels'); but I just won't give in to apps that demand stupidly excessive privs.
I can use the website version.
oh and that reminds me, their web programmers are brain-dead, too. I use an old version of firefox
Whole Foods $13.7B (Score:1)