Amazon and others sniffing around Slack Slack is attracting interest from potential suitors including Amazon that are reportedly eyeing up the white collar messaging and collaboration software slinger. The cost of such a buy could be as high as $9bn, loquacious sources told Bloomberg today, though talks are at the preliminary stage and there are no assurances an …
It'd be a good move. Slack is going to struggle as a pure play. Doing "just" chat is not enough to justify the massive price tag and they've got a tough battle to sell into big enterprises. That makes for a rough road to profitability. If they can walk away with eight or nine billion dollars right now they'd be mad not to do so.
We have to use it in work, the first time I loaded it up I had the urge to type !list and see if there was a copy of "Photoshop-2-0-Floppy-Disk-Rip-and-Crack.par"
The most annoying part was when they added our GitHub to the commands and it endlessly spammed the chatroom every time someone did anything with the repo.
In my day jobs, I can use a total of: Slack, Lifesize (which has chat), Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams and quite probably a couple of others (one place I worked at used IRC).
Out of all of those, Slack is pretty good, IRC is plain and simple but effective and the others are all awful. I wonder if the purveyors of the others though "we've got to be different, so lets take all the good stuff away"? They're so terrible as to be unusable - pick up the phone or send an email instead.
Since Slack has a large user-base, it's obviously ripe for a takeover. All those lovely users to assimilate into one's own crappy platform - too much temptation to bare, I expect. The thing is, if it goes anywhere near Microsoft, then there's no way it'll be allowed to carry on as it is, it'll have to be subsumed into an inferior product. If Amazon get it, then there's a chance it might stay quite good, at least for a while.
Either way, Slack, we love you, and we'll be sorry to see you go :-(
" Searchable Log of ALL Conversation and Knowledge."
One reason we have to moving over to Teams is that a lot of Slack's features are built to assume the "small group with a shared purpose where everyone can be trusted to fiddle with things" paradigm. Slack is certainly not for societies, i.e. groups big enough that people only know a small percentage of others, groups that must create "laws" to prevent random strangers abusing your shared infrastructure, and so on.
IMO Teams is one of the best apps to come out from Microsoft in a very, very long time.
IMO Teams is one of the best apps to come out from Microsoft in a very, very long time.
Doesn't really say much, does it? Wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft go after Slack as it fits their profile much better than say Amazon.
Valuation of $ 9 10^9 sounds ridiculous but then I think of Skype, Instagram and WhatsApp. That's somebodies pension pot about to be pissed away.
They targeted developers, not the enterprise. Where previously you might visit an open source team's public IRC channel, these days you'll visit their public Slack. It's free, easy to use, easy to integrate with other tools, lightweight, cross platform, secure and the search is excellent.
The question Slack as a company have never answered is the one you've just asked. They're struggling to break into the enterprise space. It's staggeringly expensive when you try and scale it out.
If MS or Amazon take them over then those 5M users will drop to 2M almost overnight.
Some of my dev friends love it. The moved to it when MS F****d up Teamviewer, skype and everything else. They are actively looking for a similar app that isn't part of a company that slurps your data or tries to sell you stuff based upon what you are talking about.
Why do these companies shell out loadsamoney and then proceed to alienate the users who made the thing popular in the first place????? NIH seems to go to their heads.
Is it because Amazon want to keep taking on Azure offerings and Slack gives them the messaging and collaboration tool that AWS could use to combat office 365?
And 5 million people that might be in the position of asking "which cloud is least worst" position, could be 5 million people easily swayed.
Makes sense they would be looking.
Slacks API is its main business strength - being able to link commands to dev and ops actions
actually having Amazon owning it could make a whole lot of current interfaces to do AWS stuff obsolete - it'll just work (instead we have our own robots to do eg route53, service status etc reports).
if you think Slack is 'just chat' you're not, as a business, using it right.
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