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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.
Every loser who ever coded an IRC client, kill yourself now. You're just not APP ENOUGH to be FUCKING BILLIONAIRES.
They should have called it Git... oh, wait...
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.
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.
I hear you, it's completely crazy these days.
Software that would have been shareware/freeware back in the 80's and 90's now comes with a corporate sponsor and ridiculous valuations. An IPO for a game like Candy Crush? WTF?!
What's so great about Slack that makes it worth 9 billion? Why aren't companies that use IRC worth as much?
You don't get billions for a good idea, or for implementing that idea. You get billions for building company out of it, raising capital, doing marketing, building a solid customer base, whipping up some hype, hiring the right kind of staff, finding effective managers and appointing a good board, and have the business smarts (or the right people) to scale your service up as more people sign on. Then, when you have millions of eyeballs and a company able to offer your service in a reliable and sustainable manner, then you will have buyers knocking on the door with billions in their pockets.
You still need a good idea, a bit of luck, and decent timing. But that's just the start of it.
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?
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!