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

Atlassian is a Scourge

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's one company who can go lower than Microsoft in terms of support and product functionality, it's Atlassian.

A great step in right direction!

[Gravis Zero]

At this rate, Shitty IRC will be as good as IRC in the next decade! ;)

Re:A great step in right direction!

[AndroSyn]

Make everyone at your office use IRC with Microsoft Comic Chat.

That's pretty much what Teams is anyways, without being as much fun.

why not use mattermost or any of the others

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

     

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.

Re:Very Surprising Move

[UnknownSoldier]

Considering Patrick is broke (Why isn't this news?) he couldn't afford it:

I've been mulling over exactly how to tell you all this, and I guess this is as good a place as any. The store has been ripping me off horribly, and I'm very nearly broke. I have no evidence that they've ever done anything with donations besides line their own pockets. I've not been paid any money by them in two years. That was upon the 14.2 release (and followed another long period of time with no income). The 14.2 release generated nearly $100K in revenue. The store gave me $15K, and later said that I was "overpaid".

When I agreed to set up the store, it was structured as a company where they owned 60%, and my wife and I owned 40%. I had not yet escaped California and would have quickly gone broke there with a house underwater had I not taken the deal. And 60% seemed fair, since the idea was that the company would be providing health insurance, paying for the production of the goods, and handling shipping and related customer service. And when my daughter was born and needed surgery and continuing medical attention I could hardly jeopardize our insurance in the days before the ACA. I was between a rock and a hard place like many residents of the US. Since then, the store has ceased to provide any benefits, and shouldn't even be getting a 50/50 split in my opinion, much less looting the coffers for 81+% (anything they want to spend money on is an expense, apparently, while any expenses I have to support the actual project come out of the peanuts they toss me). I only found out about how bad it really was last year when I finally managed to get some numbers out of them. I thought the sales were just that bad, and was really rather depressed about it. Another side note - the ownership of the 60% portion of the store changed hands behind my back. Nobody thought they needed to tell me about this. At that point I'd say things got considerably worse for me.

This is sad news -- I guess he should have retained 51% of the store. :-(

Re:Huh...

[the_skywise]

Atlassian is pretty big in the cloud development space for bitbucket (as a Github competitor) and their Jira web based tracking system.

Try installing their stuff

[ZorinLynx]

All their services are based on Java+Tomcat and the installation process is clunky and annoying. Not to mention the Tomcat containers occasionally die and need to be restarted.

I find it mindblowing that large businesses depend on this stuff during day to day operations.

Jitsi Status?

[PineHall]

Jitsi, an open source audio and video platform for conferencing, was bought and further developed by Atlassian. Some code from Jitsi is in Stride. Was is part of the purchase? Are the Atlassian developers still working for Atlassian? Are they working for Slack now? Or have they been let go?

Check out Jitsi Meet, the open sourced video conference product.

Re:Anyone else

[Peter P Peters]

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.