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.

Comments

Re:why not use mattermost or any of the others

[piojo]

The main reason to use one of those proprietary programs is if it gives all the features you need and other programs don't. Some of the ones that are important to me:

- can send code without it being parsed to smileys
- can attach files to a message (and can paste an image from the clipboard) and have an attachment preview visible in the chat client
- being able to edit sent messages for a few minutes
- notifications must be compatible not only with everyone's OS, but with everyone's personal attention/focus traits
- system should receive and hold messages while a user is offline
- tagging a user by name should get their attention somehow
- program should be able to search through message history
- markdown formatting is a plus

For work, even a single missing feature is a problem.