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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

#171

Post by chrisco255 »

fastball wrote: post #100
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You can think a 5-person team can build highly performant native apps for a number of different platforms in a matter of months?

Yeah, pretty amusing to hear all these arm-chair quarterbacks on how easy it is to build a rich, real-time chat app like Slack but with native tech. Not only do you have to have all the basic functionality, like emoji reactions, link preview cards, inline images, video, message actions, mention preview, threads, channels, avatars with presence, file attachment upload, etc but you also have to consider that Slack is a moving target. They can't stop shipping new features. They have Microsoft Teams to compete with, which is also an electron app by the way.

Sorry about everyone complaining about CPU, but Slack won the chat wars in part because they were early adopters of Electron, and got plenty of developer productivity benefits out of using the web stack to build on.

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

#172

Post by chrisco255 »

throwawaymath wrote: post #119
phailhaus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And honestly, how hard can it be? Excuse me? You think 5 people can 100% replicate Slack natively within "a few months"?

That's not what they said. A significant fraction (probably the majority) of Slack's functionality is server-side, not client-side. Even if the client were to be rewritten from scratch, you would not need to replicate 100% of Slack. But you also don't need to re-implement the entire client. You need to do a significant architectural change for performance improvements, not a complete overhaul. Reasonable people can d…

On the contrary, Slack's clients are thick, complex applications and they are non-trivial.

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

#173

Post by moistoreos »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #31
maxehmookau wrote: post #17

Still 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...

But Electron man. Electron. (sarcasm)

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

#174

Post by russdpale »

chrisco255 wrote: post #166
russdpale wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron apps are for amateurs and small start up teams. Once you are into the 7b valuation range, you need to put on big boy pants, and make big boy software that runs as advertised. No video functionality even needs to exist for it to run terribly. I have never used the video feature, and it causes my entire 4-5 year old system to chug. I can't even consider using it on an old linux machine. People shouldn't have t…

VS Code is an Electron app written by the $800B Microsoft. Maybe you've heard of them?

Yeh and don't look now but... its also becoming a bloated mess. Notepad++ is a native application and it blows vscode out of the water for speed. Though obviously it does not have ide-esque features of vscode. Furthermore, there is no paid version of VS Code, and if there were, and it ran like dogs ass, I would say the same thing. They need to put on their big boy pants and make a big boy native application.

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

#175

Post by icc97 »

tootie wrote: post #134
dgritsko wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This blog post is pushing 10 years old and it's about StackOverflow, but it's still extremely relevant: https://bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few particularly choice bits: >"There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not t…

My point isn't that cloning is easy. More that it has already been done multiple times and Slack has very little lock-in. And enterprise software has less network effect. Our IT department could dictate use of Microsoft Teams next month and it would probably be fine.

It had been 'done' by IRC 20 years ago, Google had already been heavily in the space with their linking to Gmail and Hangouts and previous attempts with things like Wave.

Yet somehow Slack has come in and taken a massive share of the market in a matter of 5 years.

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

#176

Post by deadbunny »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #145
deadbunny wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's also been latched onto by a lot of articles about the alt-right/Charlottesville, they were apparently using it for a while before they got banned there - and Discord have been subpoenad and things. Nothing that's Discord's fault (actually I don't think it's even encrypted?) but I can see why it'd get a bad look professionally based on that sort of coverage.

That is ridiculous. As you say they got banned. If them being on the platform annoys you that much didn't Discord do exactly what you wanted?

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

#177

Post by laurentb »

chrismeller wrote: post #167
marcinzm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better. But compliance may be. For example, Slack charges a lot of money and requires a lot of users for actual HIPAA compliance (as in signing a BAA, everything else is marketing fluff). Teams, from what I can tell, comes with a BAA out of the box.

Slack charges what, $12/user/month for the full version with compliance and auditing included? Yeah, that's $12 more than you were spending, but companies that care about compliance really shouldn't be that cash-focused (I know, I know). It's hard to deny Teams when it's already bundled with 365 that we're spending $25/user/month on, but if anyone has ever used both it becomes _immediately_ obvious that it's worth th…

to be clear, Teams comes with one of the lowest O365 packages at a meagre $5/user/month (if i'm not mistaken on the price)... that's a big difference against Slack.

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

#178

Post by paulie_a »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #158
fastball wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can think a 5-person team can build highly performant native apps for a number of different platforms in a matter of months?

Start with Mac, find some good metrics that indicate that a lot of your users are on Mac and go from there. (parse your user agents for instance) Once it's proven itself, you can try Windows and some other options as needed (probably mobile).

Why would someone start with a minor platform? Mac is consistently 5-6 percentage of the market and has been for decades. They honestly have never been a player.

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

#179

Post by debacle »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #68
debacle wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HipChat, flowdock, yammer, etc.

I look at Slack and think, how hard can it be? Then I look at the graveyard of crappy competitors and think, ok maybe there's something special about Slack.

Flowdock was better than slack, just couldn't compete.

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

#180

Post by marcinzm »

chrismeller wrote: post #167
marcinzm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better. But compliance may be. For example, Slack charges a lot of money and requires a lot of users for actual HIPAA compliance (as in signing a BAA, everything else is marketing fluff). Teams, from what I can tell, comes with a BAA out of the box.

Slack charges what, $12/user/month for the full version with compliance and auditing included? Yeah, that's $12 more than you were spending, but companies that care about compliance really shouldn't be that cash-focused (I know, I know). It's hard to deny Teams when it's already bundled with 365 that we're spending $25/user/month on, but if anyone has ever used both it becomes _immediately_ obvious that it's worth th…

>Slack charges what, $12/user/month for the full version with compliance and auditing included?

The $12/user version does NOT include a signed BAA which means it is not HIPAA compliant for all intents and purposes. Like I said, anything without a BAA that says it's HIPAA is useless marketing fluff designed to confuse people. Only the Enterprise Grid product is eligible for a BAA and I believe even then there's some large minimum contract fee.

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