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As somebody who happily advocates Matrix[1], I'd be ecstatic if Slack would be bought by some giant and thus slowly made obsolete :) [1] http://matrix.org
Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something.
Turns out there's a market for ubiquitous software. Slack seems similar.
Another datapoint: Look how well the acquisition of Oculus turned out. Palmer now has money, which would've come eventually. He no longer controls Oculus, and hence can't impact the world. And in a twist of fate, Palmer has attracted public annoyance due to some political decisions, so he went from favorite underdog to just another wealthy person.
For ambitious people, this can sometimes be a worse fate than not being rich. Ideas require opportunity and timing, and opportunities like Oculus, Snapchat, and Slack are rare.
$9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world?
Fascinating. Amazon generally only does acquisitions of small companies for core technologies or teams; they've historically been great champions of the "not invented here" philosophy. This would be a radical departure from that pattern.
What's also interesting is that they have a product that is somewhat of a Slack competitor: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-chime-unified-commun... It was launched only 4 months ago. I wonder how it's doing today and how important Amazon thinks this space is for them and their platform. It's AWS branded too which is a bit odd.
Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's…
$9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather
affect the world?
Get real, they're not curing cancer they're providing a (great) chat service for businesses and organizations.
Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's…
That's a false dichotomy isn't it? You could have a large impact on the world with that sort of money.
Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO. Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something. Turns out there's…
$9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world? Absolutely. Get real, they're not curing cancer they're providing a (great) chat service for businesses and organizations.
Really believe that Microsoft should have bought Slack. It makes perfect sense for them and aligns with their vision to be the productivity center of everyone's workflow. Microsoft doesnt understand this space at all. Look what they are doing to Skype by making it more like Snapchat when their main use case is business related. Teams also feels so unfinished.
Yes I was definitely thrown for a loop with the new Skype that auto-installed on my phone. I'm a boring 37 year old developer that needs skype for business calls, why the hell does it now look like some teenager's social app?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world? Absolutely. Get real, they're not curing cancer they're providing a (great) chat service for businesses and organizations.
So is Snapchat.