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Slack is Buying HipChat and Stride From Atlassian (bloomberg.com)
Atlassian is selling its corporate chat software to rival Slack Technologies and taking a small stake in the startup, as they face greater competition from Microsoft. From a report: Slack will pay an undisclosed amount over the next three years to acquire Atlassian's HipChat and Stride products, chief executives from both companies said. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield described both the payment and the investment by Atlassian in his company as "nominal" in financial terms but important strategically. He declined to elaborate on the former. The deal gives Slack, valued at north of $5 billion, more customers, most of whom pay a monthly service fee, and allows Atlassian to exit a business that failed to generate as much demand as expected. Combining the two businesses bolsters Slack at a time when Microsoft is pushing a rival product called Teams to some 135 million Office cloud customers. Microsoft introduced a free version of Teams this month in a bid to lure people who don't subscribe to Office 365.
why use a proprietary persistent chat thing like slack or hipchat?
why not use any of the open source equivalents.
Because it is "Hip"? or for some specific features.
Personally, I I have distaste for Atlasian. Especially how every trivial feature is brought by some expensive plugin from some questionably source. Compare to the breath of plugins available in Jenkins...
I'm an old fart who once wrote JCL from scratch, but am I the only one who went "Who, what, what, who?"
Allow me to try fill you (and anyone else) in.
Team Chat is a thing that when used properly within the right scope pretty much replaces the olde worlde email as the primary communication platform
Slack is the cool player in the team chat space. In Digital-land everything is Agile and Devops and modular and distributed, so open team chat is the best method to collaborate rather than email. These new team chat platforms are not just apps like IRC, Skype, Messenger etc, they have all sorts of useful new features such and integrations, APIs, Bots, wiki, document storage, search etc.
Atlassian is company that got popular in developer world for creating newer Agile type tools such as Confluence (wiki), Jira (issue tracking), Bamboo (CI/CD), and Bamboo (repo). Hipchat is their version of team chat.
Microsoft as usual realised late the Slack and Atlassian had a potential game changer that threatend Skype and Outlook/Exchange so created their product 'Teams' to try and do the same thing. Teams is a lot more shit, but MS have market power which a lot of the times means more than good products.
I assume that Slack and Atlassian saw this threat so have joined forces to try fight Microsoft.