Salesforce reportedly poised to scoop Slack for billions Salesforce is reportedly deep in talks to buy Slack, according to The Wall Street Journal, which says a deal could happen "in days". Slack shares spiked on the news, meaning Salesforce would likely need to bid $20bn or more to acquire the collaboration challenger. Why does Salesforce want Slack? A purchase would expand the …
This is probably the exact same type of grab that Microsoft envisioned with LinkedIn, going on between Salesforce and Slack today.
And yea... my employer voluntarily pays for Slack, because anything but ad-hoc screen sharing between colleagues on Teams, sucks ass.
Maybe Salesforce has just figured out it will be easier to buy than build?
Pretty much sums things up and is why US corporations have slashed R&D so much. Outsourcing product development like this is much more expensive even though Slack's revenues hardly justify it, but seeing as the money is largely being transferred between pension funds, no one really seems to care.
And why are they fluctuating?
Probably doesn't have anything to do with the data they just released showing a 62% effective rate with two full shots, but "just happened" to have a 90% effective rate when given a 50% dose followed by a full dose given a specific demographic.
Sounds like something that'd come out of a homeopothetic (sic) "study". :)
It makes a kind of biological sense. First dose is a meh! but let’s take notice kind of nudge to the immune system. A larger booster speaks of an escalating infection which requires a major response.
They genuinely fucked up and decided to make it a found experiment rather than trash that arm of the study and serendipitously found something interesting.
We haven’t really done RNA vaccines before, they are front and centre now because they can be faster to market than protein based vaccines. So we don’t really know how best to use them. This result gives us hints.
As a Biomed scientist I find it interesting and also biologically plausible for the reasons mentioned.
I wasn't going to mention vaccines but if you look at the list of companies with advanced phase 3 trials, you'll see Big Pfizer is largely conspicuous by its absence. Yes, Pfizer is there but that is because it partnered with BionTech, which actually did the research for the platform.
When it comes to dissing innovation, Big Pharma is probably worse than IT because of the even cosier relationship it has with regulators. Remember Remdesivir? $ 4500 a pop and now considered to have no significant benefits. Compare this with the out of patent dexamethasone and Astra Zeneca's proposed pricing $ 5 per vaccine and you can see why. Why take on the risk of developing something new at such low prices when you can buy a company that has a new heart pill ($00s per month), or cancer drug ($000000s per treatment)? This is also one of the main reasons why US healthcare is so expensive and has such poor outcomes: vaccines are socialist by definition.
Why take on the risk of developing something new at such low prices when you can buy a company that has a new heart pill ($00s per month), or cancer drug ($000000s per treatment)?
Why? Because first world governments around the world are shoveling money faster onto this bonfire than anything else going on these days.
I mean, you could take a look at Biogen, who recently (re)came out with some dodgy analysis for their Alzheimer drug study on "aducanumab"... they're probably wishing they had a vaccine platform so that they could grab some of that sweet gubment monies.
Yes, there is a lot of money being thrown at this. But costs per treatment are very low – AstraZeneca's will be around $ 5 per treatment, or 1/1000th of those for Remdesivir. Compare that with the juicy recurrent returns for statins, etc. and it's easy to see why Big Pharma still doesn't like vaccines.
All the more credit to those companies like Biontech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, et al. for putting the work into platforms that allowed for the rapid development of vaccines and, even more importantly allow for production at scale. This goes back to the scares around the so-called avian and swine flu a decade ago and depends upon the continuous advances in DNA analysis and manipulation.
ICQ was pretty close originally... until public IPs became scarce... and RFC 1631 etc. took over... plus whatever eventually happened to that program. I still recall my seven digit ICQ code to this day.
I remember being able to send a message to someone, then checking to confirm whether I had established a socket with the receiver using the netstat command (and thereby disclosing their IP address) to confirm the connection.
My company uses Slack but it looking at moving to Teams. I'm not saying either is better but I wonder if this if a reflection of other companies and where we're heading. The argument is we pay for Teams as part of our Microsoft licensing so why are we also paying for Slack.
Could be a future sue ball for anti competitive behavior I guess in the future. Not like Microsoft to do that sort of thing of course ;)
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