Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

Which is something that people complain about, but isn't enough of a motivator to get anyone to switch. Skype for Business fits the bill of a lean messaging platform with similar features but it's just terrible. Mattermost is pretty cool but it's self-hosted which makes it a non-starter in shops that don't have IT staff. And all the other competing products are basically just Slack clones with less features.

So Slack is going to continue eating all your resources, because anyone who cares will switch to a leaner Slack client before they switch away from Slack.

> 2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there.

You are fooling yourself here. For all the snarky hate Slack gets around here, it's far better designed than any chat app I've had to use so far. It's for work, it doesn't have to be compatible with other chat apps (in fact, that would be a security issue). Searching through your history Just Works, integrations Just Work, and user-friendly features like reactions make it more fun to use (and prevent cluttering up chats with unnecessary chatter). The fact that Slack was able to destroy its established competitors should give you a hint that they're doing something right. People like using slack. My friends have made their own workspaces with it just to keep in touch, because it's so well designed.

"Integrations serve as a moat."

The depth of those integrations serve as the depth of the moat. If your integration is basically "I send and receive textual messages", which from what I see the vast majority are, you've got an integration which could be ported to a competitor in less than a week. A lot of the integration work is in the thing being integrated rather than chat-system specific things.

As you use more Slack-specific features the moat gets deeper, but you do have to stretch a bit before you're really "slack-specific". Rich text formatting, conference rooms at a basic level, etc. isn't "slack-specific".

(Be sure to read that first sentence of mine a couple of times before replying. It does not say "integrations are always trivial to port and are thus irrelevant", for instance. If I wanted to say that, I would have.)

"Atlassian throwing in the towel on HipChat and Stride."

I strongly suspect that Atlassian threw in the towel not because it was hopeless, but because a highly profitable company has a business imperative to avoid things that will merely be sorta profitable to them, or where profit will be harder than their other highly profitable activities. It's why Google doesn't simply do everything; put over-simply, for something to be worth Google doing, it has to be more profitable than putting another engineer on AdWords. When a company is valued at $7.1B, it validates the market, and even if there was no competition today, there most assuredly will be in two years!

(I work for a company not quite as high as Google in the "necessary profit per engineer" metric, but we've also divested "merely" profitable businesses because they were basically a drag on the rest of the company, and lacked sufficient strategic value to overcome that disadvantage.)

I'm guessing they don't care so much because most of their paying users are captive audience. If your work decides to use slack, it's not like you can't opt-out.

So they focus more on server-side features that ensure they'll be chosen in the first place.

> Discord has a huge image problem. I won't touch it with a 10ft stick or even mention it in a professional environment.

Because it's aimed at gamers?

> Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus.

It's a chat and VOIP system, seems to do those both very well. Not exactly complicated.