back to article Even with a 49% uplift in sales and a 46% drop in expenses, Slack still can't turn a profit

Slack reported 49 per cent revenue growth for its Q2 ended July 31, but its stock nonetheless suffered a pounding in after-hours trading. The problem for Slack, even as it crept closer to actually breaking even, is that other companies, such as Zoom, have made hay during the pandemic. Slack should therefore have been in prime …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No need for Slack

    MS Teams comes bundled in with Office 365 and deeply integrates with Outlook and other vital business tools.

    It provides various video chat features, file storage (backed by SharePoint) and so on.

    Slack does what, precisely? Act like a more bloated version of IRC?

    1. malfeasance

      Re: No need for Slack

      The one thing that slack had over ms teams for a while, was the fact I could "join different organisations" slack workspaces in the same UI instance;

      That wasn't great in teams, possibly still isn't, but I haven't needed to use it in anger recently.

      Anecdotal evidence shows me that slack really suffers in the context of "it doesn't behave well with other applications; my other half is always complaining that slack sucks her CPU (5-10 different workspaces) and bandwidth.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No need for Slack

      One has to wonder why one would name a work tool with a synonym for "lazy".

      1. jelabarre59

        Re: No need for Slack

        One has to wonder why one would name a work tool with a synonym for "lazy".

        It might be attractive to members of The Church of the Subgenius.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: No need for Slack

          No. SubGenii use IRC.

          This is subject to the Sacred Doctrine of Erasability, of course.

      2. NeilPost Silver badge

        Re: No need for Slack

        Would it get lots if use - if not any keepers - renamed to Slag ?! (Acknowledge both male and female varieties).

  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Maybe, just maybe if Slack was actually a decent piece of software it would do better.

    But it isn't, probably never will be, and so won't.

    Slack is mediocre at messaging, and absolutely shit at video conferencing. I think the only reason people in larger companies use it is because it's marginally better at messaging than Teams (but light years behind in video).

    The feature I love the most about the Slack app is when it tells you a message is too long and if you want to view the whole thing you have to open it in a web browser. Pure class.

    1. iron Silver badge

      Hiding replies behind a link that "expands the conversation" is also a really useful trick. It's not like I want to be able to quickly see if my team mates had a relevant comment on my post.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Have the removed the debug schema from the Windows client yet?

    3. jelabarre59

      Slack is mediocre at messaging, and absolutely shit at video conferencing. I think the only reason people in larger companies use it is because it's marginally better at messaging than Teams (but light years behind in video).

      Maybe if it's interface weren't so shitty (and insufficiently-configurable) they might get more interest. And lets not speak of that abomination known as Threads.

  3. Drew Scriver

    Slack has been a pretty decent solution for our team

    We've used a slew of different messaging products over the years, but so far Slack has been a much better platform than the others.

    The feature set is quite extensive and the UI is relatively well-suited to collaboration. We also have hooks going and coming from various other tools like PagerDuty and Service Now. The extensibility is not bad either. The options for formatting code as well as the thread-feature are essential options for me that are missing in some of the competing products.

    There certainly are some shortcomings. Just to name a few:

    - images are not optimized / reduced

    - it's not possible to add people to an existing ad-hoc group chat

    - search is counter-intuitive

    My company uses both Hangouts and Slack at the moment, but the latter is by far my favorite.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Slack has been a pretty decent solution for our team

      One thing that amused me about Slack's image handling is that it doesn't strip EXIF data. It's something I've pointed out to a couple of people in Slack workspaces I'm in.

      I don't really have a strong opinion either way about Slack; it's not exceptional, but it's certainly not the worst thing I've ever used...

  4. mhoneywell

    Slack by name....

    You know the rest.

    This market is too crowded and too easy for a company like this to leave a lasting mark.

  5. batfastad

    Clients

    All of these modern messaging apps are missing the killer feature... a choice of client. Offering bloated web and mobile apps is fine for initial/occassional use but one of the strengths of something like XMPP or IRC is that there are hundreds of clients to choose from.

    One of the vaguely useful features of Slack for technical teams was the IRC bridge... then they killed it off. So you're stuck with the terrible UX of a bloated web app which is no good at messaging and before long some idiot attempts to turn it into a control plane/CLI for your infrastructure.

  6. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    No profit?

    Pros and Cons of Slack aside, what are they spending their money on? Say you start of with Java+Jetty code, PostgreSQL, and Redis as a proof-of-concept then tune it into a production app. Chat rooms are constrained in size well defined in Slack so horizontal scaling shouldn't be any big deal. Have somebody cobble together some open source C++ libraries for video (I assume that's what they're doing) and deploy that as another app. You end up with sales, chat server development, client development people, the C++ video server, UX designers, and maybe 100 mid-range servers. I don't see this totaling $256.11 million a year.

    The really dangerous thing right now is long-term unemployed software developers. Some of them might decide to re-architect Slack, Teams, Zoom, Facebook, etc. with an expected annual operating cost of $40 million a year.

    1. Anonymous Coward
  7. NeilPost Silver badge

    Worth fuck all

    Like Tik-Tok .... it’s worth fuck all.

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