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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 $9 billion sales price.
Slack, really? Where I come from it means stupid, as in "You dopy get, you're as slack as a bag of knackers".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Every loser who ever coded an IRC client, kill yourself now. You're just not APP ENOUGH to be FUCKING BILLIONAIRES.
While I agree that the 9 billion valuation is ludicrous, I use slack at work and I can verify it has great search capabilities (one of its best features), does not have round corners (at least the desktop client I use), there is no slowness in the UI that I can see, and everybody seems to love it at work. And you can easily hook things to it, like continuous integration systems, monitoring systems etc so devops seem to enjoy working on it.
I don't know if there's anything similar, i.e. evolved IRC for companies, but I have to admit, despite my original hesitation (in my previous - smaller - company we just used an email-based system for written communication), it does seem to help productivity in a company with groups in different locations. But, again, 9 billion? WTH?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Git was written over a weekend, and Slak probably the same. Why are we not all billionaires?
[($)]
Because you have so many "family" photos and videos, right? Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
and so was AIM... why not use it? Slack is over-hyped turd.
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.
Hmm, I have not tried it in a browser and have not tried any old versions. So, three months ago I installed the MacOS desktop client on a reasonably spec'd iMac, and it does not even register a blip in my activity monitor's CPU graph. And the Windows guys are also happy it seems (our last "retro" was about comms, and slack got in the "good" list by everyone), so maybe it was some time ago that you tried it? Or it could be the Windows version and our windows guys are just not picky about such stuff so they don't notice - they are not developers after all :)
Qapla'!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Huh, I remembered something interesting, the reason I got rid of the Atom editor, which is also Electron-based it seems, is because it was sluggish and using a lot of CPU for just an editor (switched to Sublime). And this was on the same iMac :) So an Electron-based app does have the potential to be slow on my machine, but so far slack seems fast. Well, not compared to an IRC client not written in Java of course, but still ;)
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
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.
There's three potential buyers for Slack: the kind that will continue to offer the service for free while raping your data six ways from Sunday, and the kind that will start injecting ads or start charging an already captive audience for the service. The third kind is the company who will do both.
Companies who have come to depend on Slack will be more or less forced to pay whatever the new owners charge. That worked out rather well for Yammer when they started: offer it for free to employees, then start charging companies when they came to depend on it (or needed the premium admin functions to regain some manner of control). A colleague of mine compared it to Mafia tactics.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
How many fucking times does IRC need to keep getting re-invented?
I don't know if there's anything similar, i.e. evolved IRC for companies
Microsoft has one in Office365:
https://products.office.com/en...
It's like the illegitimate child of Slack and Sharepoint.
Best part is, the video on the product page hits all the right points:
[x] Diversity in the workplace
[x] Non-white, non-male, non-American narrator, possibly non-heterosexual
[x] Puts an emphasis on young beautiful people but throw in a couple of fatso and old turds
[x] Has both startup and enterprise scenes with vibrant energy
[x] Emotional, hopeful soundtrack
[x] Blonde chick with a leather jacket
lucm, indeed.
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.
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."
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.
Sounds like an opportunity to release a replacement. Complete with web scraper to copy over all your old... Slacks?
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.
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.