What is the good alternative to Slack now? Cheaper / OS / self-hosted etc?
Discord is great. Pitched to gamers, but could easily function in a work setting.
Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
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Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
#102We went from Hipchat to Teams and now Slack.
Hipchat was solid. App was great to use and did not consume many resources. Integration with other tools was ok. Of course things like Atlassian were nice. Webhooks, API worked for me. Even writing simple notifications worked.
We then switched to teams because we already use Office 365 and the guy in charge likes MS. Enough said. Teams and Office 365 has weird UI experiences and it feels sluggish. Did not like it t all.
At the moment we use Slack. You can switch from workplace to workplace. Slack is viral. You need to have it. All the integrations. UI is more polished than Teams but overall I am not a fan. It feels sluggish like Teams at times.
Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
#103Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and has various compliance certs already. 7.1B seems a bit high when competing with MS.
We honestly tried to like Teams but ended up with Slack, I think partially since everyone (including me) was already using it for other projects.
Remember MS tried to push Yammer to businesses as well, so not everything they do works out.
Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
#104This is one of those recent tech success stories that just leave me scratching my head. I simply can't understand the value Slack is bringing and why would anyone pay for an absolutely metoo product. They are either deviously smart or the market is in full bubble mode.
After Facebook and Instagram I pretty much gave up and stopped trying to figure it out. Maybe I’m a dinosaur but I don’t get the appeal of most software products that have come out in the last decade. It seems the formula is simply: 1. Spend investor money faster than your competitors. 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 o…
I can understand Facebook and Instagram, they can make money by using strong network effects. It's essentially the same thing Microsoft did, monetize a common platform and exploit the lock in effect.
But Slack largely lacks that. A startup might setup a free Slack instance, then run into its limitations and pay for extra service. But aside from some institutional inertia, nothing stops a company from switching. You don't need Slack to reach your public, unlike say Facebook. It's a chat tool, an average one, and you can easily migrate out of it. As a repository for essential business knowledge, Slack is not a good solution and could even be harmful compared to things like a wiki or documents stored in a revision control system.
And as a pure SaaS offering, there is no way in hell Slack is worth $7 billion. You can replicate its functionality for less than $100 million, and get native, fast apps. There must be something else, but I just don't see it.
Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
#105Has anyone considered using Discord instead of Slack? They seem very similar.
Discord has a huge image problem. I won't touch it with a 10ft stick or even mention it in a professional environment. Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus.
Cut them some slack.
Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
#106Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.
And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...
> And honestly, how hard can it be?
Excuse me? You think 5 people can 100% replicate Slack natively within "a few months"?
Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
#107That's a crazy evaluation, is that company really worth 7.1Instagrams? It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story. Especially since it's built on top of electron, which I'm still trying to accept as a real platform for application development, and not the '3d printer' of the software world. I hope they don't use this money to feature-swamp the app, and instead focus inward on per…
It's used by companies to not only communicate, but also used by management level employees to pry on conversations/gossip. Personally know of a well known company where a group of managers used Slack for snooping on those they manage(d), and subsequently fired those they found criticizing them/higher-ups.
Not saying that this is surely what makes it valuable, but could see a management team deciding to use it as a means of improving productivity, where they could take logs and tie them into a system for gauging sentiment. Not saying it's right at all, but could see the value others could see in that
Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
it is $7B after all. There's no actual $7B involved here. At least, not in the 'buy the Angkor Wat and turn it into a data center' sense.
> There's no actual $7B involved here. Valid point. Thankfully buying a few regional servers is manageable with $437m. :)
Not sure the investor said anything remotely looking like : "Here is nearly $500m, please use this money to install tons of servers in a region that generates a small percentage of your revenues because their infrastructure is subpar."
Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lets assume well paid developers of $150.000 yearly, 5 man for 3 months is less than $187.500 is wages. Lets be generous and say we double that to account for other expenses. It's $375.000 for a feature that will be a reasonable sales argument.
Let's throw these money and work hours to electron contribution! It will make every electron app faster
I think Google is already throwing enough money at Chromium for all of us (Electron runs on top of Chromium AFAICT).
In my opinion, Google's expectation is that you run one instance of Chromium per machine. Electron wants to run one per application. Hence performance woes.
Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
#110Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.
Their video offering is laughably bad but I'd bet that isn't because of electron. Otherwise I'm surprised people hate the electron app so much, on my 2014 mbp it works just fine.