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Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

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Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#111
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might be less interested in the app itself, and more interested in the giant corpus of conversation stored therein.

Is all data on slack just available for viewing? If it were so I think its customers would have raised this as an issue by now.

Public slack, yes. But you also have enterprise slack, which is hosted on an organizations' own machines. I imagine they don't have access to that data.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which brings the point, who would ever sign on to use Slack/continue to use Slack when Bezos & Co. could be scouring through your sensitive company conversations?

Is it very different from running all your sensitive company code on Bezos & Co servers?

I'll concede to that to a degree.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#114

Serious question..... but also more me fleshing out my thoughts on messaging apps.... What is the point in buying a messaging app? - instant messenger - ICQ - Skype - Yammer - WhatsApp They all seem to be popular for a short time and then fad away. What does owing one of these get a company? The case against owning them is that they all go out of favour and you only have a small window, say up to 5 years, where your…

I think of all of those WhatsApp has been the most successful both in terms of moat defense purposes and it still has the potential of turning into something like WeChat or LINE (or what they're doing with FB Messenger itself) with its own monetization. For Skype I think it was mostly about rounding out the office suite, MS doesn't want anyone else getting a toehold in workplace collaboration and expanding from there…

Agreed. These purchases seem to work the best when they're used for defensive purposes and to round out a product offering that already has a substantial userbase.

Whatever gadgets they might hang off the app, they're fundamentally a way for people to talk to each other. If you don't have the people, why would you need a slick implementation? As you mentioned, the app would go out of vogue and users would move on.

Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.

Which is ironic, because their properties would play a lot better with one than, say, Google or MS. And starting with something like Slack (bottom up vs top down) is an interesting move.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might be less interested in the app itself, and more interested in the giant corpus of conversation stored therein.

Which brings the point, who would ever sign on to use Slack/continue to use Slack when Bezos & Co. could be scouring through your sensitive company conversations?

If Amazon wanted to be evil they have a lot more to work with than just chat conversations...

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#116
post #70

Amazon's been a prudent steward of its cash and shareholder value. I'd be really surprised if it spent this sum over Slack & encourage Bezos to go get his head checked. Messaging platforms come and go. Many better ways to spend $9B for Amazon.

Slack would serve as an excellent Nexus between services such as AWS (take on enterprise more fully), Twitch (take on Discord), and retail customer service ops, not to mention as an internal tool probably.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#117

Serious question..... but also more me fleshing out my thoughts on messaging apps.... What is the point in buying a messaging app? - instant messenger - ICQ - Skype - Yammer - WhatsApp They all seem to be popular for a short time and then fad away. What does owing one of these get a company? The case against owning them is that they all go out of favour and you only have a small window, say up to 5 years, where your…

To be honest most of those faded because they let the product fade.

ICQ was a classic first mover that had explosive growth and continued to succeed in a relative way, but not relative to the overall market. AIM, Yahoo! and MSN messenger platforms knocked it off that pedestal, and the company seemed more interested in sabotaging its platform to squeeze ad revenue than making it more relevant or meaningful to their userbase.

Re: Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

#119
post #70

Amazon's been a prudent steward of its cash and shareholder value. I'd be really surprised if it spent this sum over Slack & encourage Bezos to go get his head checked. Messaging platforms come and go. Many better ways to spend $9B for Amazon.

Yeah, like drone delivery and literal rockets to the moon.
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