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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.
Good on your workplace for buying you a top of the line PC.
When I used slack, it caused the browser to consume 30% of the CPU. The desktop client did the same (no surprise, since it's one of those Electron-based wrapped web apps), so the same way Visual Studio could take 30% blinking the cursor, so could Slack. I managed to get it down to a managable 10% or so by turning off every friggin' option that decorated text, replaced text with emojis, etc
Luckily when my involvement in that project was over, slack went into the recycle bin (they used it to collaborate). Still didn't see why a glorified chat client needed to take 5-10% of the CPU in the end, when my IRC client, connected to multiple networks consumed 0% regularly. And no, for security purposes, they did not have the IRC gateway enabled.