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Businesses The Almighty Buck

Team Collaboration App Slack, Valued at $9 Billion, Draws Attention of Amazon (bloomberg.com) 79

Posted by msmash from the everyone-wants-a-slice dept.
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.
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Team Collaboration App Slack, Valued at $9 Billion, Draws Attention of Amazon More

Team Collaboration App Slack, Valued at $9 Billion, Draws Attention of Amazon

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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".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

      by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Thursday June 15, 2017 @03:15PM (#54628399)
      They should have called it Git... oh, wait...

  • IRC LUDDITES (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15, 2017 @03:13PM (#54628377)

    Every loser who ever coded an IRC client, kill yourself now. You're just not APP ENOUGH to be FUCKING BILLIONAIRES.

    • 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]

    • 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!

    • 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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        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.

      • As someone who used to post on usenet and sysadmin BBSes and write mods to eggdrop bot for IRC (although i'm close to, but not over 40 -- did this as a kid) I can tell you that Slack is a thing because it most resembles instant messenger clients, runs in a web browser, has a lot of apps -- and a really great selection of emojis. It's meant to facilitate communication with millenials! :)

        It's really about design and UX. Slack is easy to use for non technical people (think marketing teams perhaps), and has

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Itc is alive and well thank you very mouch, check out freenode, there are qite a few buissy channels there, but yes it does not have the numbers it used to

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        damed typos I never spot before it's to late, not to mention twitch, iirc their chat backen is irc, so all the chatters on twitch arte irc users
    • I don't understand how an IRC client (and server bots?) is worth $9e9.
  • Git was written over a weekend, and Slak probably the same. Why are we not all billionaires?

    • 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?

    • Because we didn't start out as millionaires?

    • You don't get billions for a good idea, or for implementing that idea. You get billions for building company out of it, raising capital, doing marketing, building a solid customer base, whipping up some hype, hiring the right kind of staff, finding effective managers and appointing a good board, and have the business smarts (or the right people) to scale your service up as more people sign on. Then, when you have millions of eyeballs and a company able to offer your service in a reliable and sustainable m

      • 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)

    by think_nix ( 1467471 ) on Thursday June 15, 2017 @03:52PM (#54628721)

    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.

  • 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.

  • WTF? 9 billion for IRC ?! (Score:3)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Thursday June 15, 2017 @05:03PM (#54629185)

    How many fucking times does IRC need to keep getting re-invented?

    /sarcasm Oh wait, it was Hip enough ?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • 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: (Score:2)

      by sad_ ( 7868 )

      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.

    • 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

  • Since they are open source I think that they should cost more :)

  • 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.

  • 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 bid at $13.7B may temper appetite for a pricey Slack acquisition near term. Of course, could be bold and borrowed a bunch to extend shopping spree but think Amazon will slack off a bit on this deal again near term.

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