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Team Collaboration App Slack, Valued at $9 Billion, Draws Attention of Amazon (bloomberg.com)
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.
Then, for the love of productivity, extinguish it!
Slack, really? Where I come from it means stupid, as in "You dopy get, you're as slack as a bag of knackers".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Society is on the verge of losing its last shreds of humanity, the environment is dying and us along with it. When a stupid program can be valued at $9 billion it's time to think about economic collapse and starting again from the ground up with everyone on an equal footing.
Every loser who ever coded an IRC client, kill yourself now. You're just not APP ENOUGH to be FUCKING BILLIONAIRES.
Is this Slack the same piece of crap chat web service many of us have to use in work as it is free to use? If companies are not willing to pay for the service itself, who on earth would pay 9 billion for the company that produces it? The Slack is just a IRC without a search and a slow UI with progress spinners and round corners.
IRC called and they want their idea back.
When capitalist value creators are allowed to do whatever they want, chat apps are worth $9 billion.
i found that slack is unusable because it does not provide in-app porno, please repair your broken shitty app
Peak bubble?
Git was written over a weekend, and Slak probably the same. Why are we not all billionaires?
[($)]
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.
But of course, chat software is a disruptive technology.
How many fucking times does IRC need to keep getting re-invented?
My company (about 90% virtual) tried Slack for a month, and really didn't go anywhere with it. Then we came upon Jostle, and it really took off. Slack indeed just reminded me of an old-style IRC client from back in the 90s, but Jostle has some good features that we've taken advantage of - code sharing libraries being the best of the features.
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!
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.
I find that Slack is inferior to platforms like Bascamp for streamlining communication among groups. Bascamp also allows for securely extending access to outsiders and is far superior for things like keeping projects organized (including to-do lists, files, version-controlled documents, search, etc.). I'm not really a fan of Basecamp for several reasons, but I think it is better than Slack for anything except free-flowing chatter. For that matter, the fact that it doesn't facilitate "chat" at all is yet another improvement.
I haven't looked into it in ages, but 9 years ago Basecamp had an API that would allow integration with outside tools. Even without that, any tool that can generate an email alert can probably be set up to send alerts to Basecamp.
Apple actually improved the MP3 player in fundamental ways, tapping in to pent-up demand for things like vastly greater storage and music store integration.
I don't think that Slack genuinely provides a better anything except "chat". Which is fine on its own. But bolting on all the other stuff has vastly muddied the waters in my company. It can't do everything required, but people just love to tap away at Slack and let everything else slide. I guess it just seems faster, but that is usually the case when you are doing a half-a$$ed job.
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 (before they lost their way; and yes, its old but it WORKS and my plugins and the browser are locked in 'apt-mark hold' mode so they won't update on me) and about a month ago, I got a reject message from them saying my browser was 'too old' and would not work; asking me to upgrade. I will not upgrade for such a stupid reason! I installed a user-agent selector so I can fake-out any website that asks for my 'version'. guess what - yes, its back to working again. no issues, no problems, and my browser is still the good old version I've configured and love. their 'demands' for a new browser was stupid and bogus.
that's 2 strikes against them. I don't really love this company from what I've personally seen from their work-products. shame that we are stuck using their crap at work. I can't convince the powers that be to switch to an open source irc/usenet/etc system. sigh... ;(
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
What plugin/version do you use? All of the ones I could find that worked for my version of firefox had outdated (static) lists of version numbers that didn't quite go new enough to pass the stupid user-agent check I was stuck with.
As a HipChat user, I don't think it's possible for Slack to be as bad as HipChat.
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.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Previously, I downloaded and installed the Slack Windows application. Then I found that it had more telemetry built in than Windows 10, and no way to disable it, other than the obvious - uninstallation.
i just hate atlassians names: confluence, jira, bitbucket, hipchat. they are trying soooo hard and i just hate it for some reason.
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 they care about (eg. monitoring systems, todo lists, or any other system that might like a chat tool). Slack fits the bill nicely.
Now, is it worth $9bn? I doubt it, but then I don't value companies.
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.
It's not about what it can do, but instead how convenient it is. Having configuration in an account instead of a single client means no need of managing client separately, you can just open the Slack application or web client wherever you are. Snippets and files can be shared more conveniently. It can also replace email conversations as even less technical people can pretty easily use it.
If you already have a working IRC-based community, there are few if any benefits to moving over to Slack.
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 A to spontaneously propose some ideas to employees B, C and D. When we're all located in offices spread across the country, you can't just walk over to their desk or cube.
For organizing projects and creating a formal process for handling purchase orders (among other things), we adopted Podio as our platform. I'll be the first to say I hate a lot of things about Podio. Primarily, it's sluggish in a browser, plus it always feels like you're working in some kind of page designer/editor rather than a "production" web site. We started using it for computer inventory, linked to an employee database in it that H.R, maintains. The workflow itself is logical, but Podio is too clunky, IMO, at letting you do the actual input of the inventory or searches in it. But it works amazingly well for our purchase order process, letting us select the appropriate "approvers" with a single click, and having it shoot out the right email or push notifications to those folks that a new P.O. request was put in. They can approve them electronically and move right along.
But Basecamp? Unless it did a LOT of major upgrades in the last 4 years or so since we abandoned it? That wasn't working well for us at all.