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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.
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.
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.
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.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.