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Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

nytimes.com

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Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#71

Post by davnicwil »

shay_ker wrote: post #60

It'd be really interesting for Slack to go the Atlassian or Microsoft route - acquire companies that solve adjacent problems, and then bundle the products to enterprise customers. The sales get harder to ignore, and it'd make Slack as a company even stickier. A couple things come to mind, like file sharing, calendar & room management, project management (around tasks, mainly), VoIP integration for sales calls, and ma…

I think this is their strategy, and I think what's more they will want to solve these things vertically 'on top of' slack as plugins and apps. They started filling the pipeline for this a while ago by literally funding startups building such things. Acquiring some of the more popular ones is surely one of the goals, should this work out.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#72

Post by sha666sum »

kaushikt wrote: post #36
collyw wrote: post #31

Slack is overrated and over priced. Its not like messenger platforms are difficult. We have had msn messneger, yahoo messenger, whatsapp, rocketchat, facebook messneger, messenger, gchat, skype. Slack doesn't do anything particularly special.

I disagree. Slack is not just about chat, they are about communication. We moved from Skype to Slack and it was incredibly different for us. Open channels meant - more transparency and anyone can join and contribute. All those hella bots are extremely handy. Overall, i would say we became more transparent, focussed and it made communication across a single company SIMPLE.

You just unironically argued that chat applications are not about communication, while Slack is. This makes no sense, as chatting is communication.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#73

Post by bradstewart »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #23
DylanDmitri wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams isn't going to directly take market share from Slack, but it forms a hard barrier limiting Slack's future growth. Large established organizations are switching to Teams, and finding it good enough that they'll never want to pay for Slack.

Never underestimate the power of workplace bureaucracy. At organizational size X, integrating with new Microsoft product Y, single sign on working and easy deploys to all office machines, support from Microsoft and Microsoft lackeys pitching new ideas to IT people, of course they're gonna pick teams.

> integrating with new Microsoft product Y, single sign on working and easy deploys to all office machines, support from Microsoft

Those sound more like great features than "workplace bureaucracy".

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#74

Post by judge2020 »

chucknelson wrote: post #2

I'm surprised investors aren't more scared of the competition, particularly Microsoft and its Teams product that is part of Office 365. Maybe it's not a huge deal because the overlap of Slack customers and Office 365 customers isn't that big?

Hangouts chat as well, GSuite integration: https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

It's one of the few products that's forced Google to create a desktop app (even if it still is CEF based).

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#75

Post by mytailorisrich »

danenania wrote: post #52
mytailorisrich wrote: post #15

Leaving aside the costs of their listing and related compensation (which are crazy high!) they made a $57m loss on $145m in revenue. Considering that they are a pure software company this is quite shocking and, to me, a sign not to touch them with a barge pole.

A business that’s doing great can have numbers that look like this if they’re investing heavily in growth. In that case, they’re losing money deliberately—if they wanted to, they could optimize for profits and be making money, but at the cost of growing slower and presumably sacrificing greater profits in the future. If you’re a shareholder, you probably don’t want that. I don’t know whether Slack is in this position…

They're a cloud-based software company. Where is this "heavy investment in growth" going to? It's not like if they needed huge capex expenditure to grow.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#76

Post by danenania »

scarface74 wrote: post #64
danenania wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A business that’s doing great can have numbers that look like this if they’re investing heavily in growth. In that case, they’re losing money deliberately—if they wanted to, they could optimize for profits and be making money, but at the cost of growing slower and presumably sacrificing greater profits in the future. If you’re a shareholder, you probably don’t want that. I don’t know whether Slack is in this position…

That’s always the excuse. It’s an outlier when it happens.

Well yeah, businesses that are failing/flailing will obviously want to spin the ‘investing in growth’ narrative rather than tell the truth. My point is just that you need to look deeper than revenue and losses to determine which is which.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#77

Post by ScoutOrgo »

collyw wrote: post #31

Slack is overrated and over priced. Its not like messenger platforms are difficult. We have had msn messneger, yahoo messenger, whatsapp, rocketchat, facebook messneger, messenger, gchat, skype. Slack doesn't do anything particularly special.

As someone that uses both slack and webex teams at work, I cannot emphasize enough how much better slack is. Maybe it's because webex teams is beyond awful, but I've used skype and hipchat before as well, so I feel like I can make a somewhat fair assessment.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#78

Post by danenania »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #75
danenania wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A business that’s doing great can have numbers that look like this if they’re investing heavily in growth. In that case, they’re losing money deliberately—if they wanted to, they could optimize for profits and be making money, but at the cost of growing slower and presumably sacrificing greater profits in the future. If you’re a shareholder, you probably don’t want that. I don’t know whether Slack is in this position…

They're a cloud-based software company. Where is this "heavy investment in growth" going to? It's not like if they needed huge capex expenditure to grow.

Sales and marketing.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#79

Post by KingMachiavelli »

collyw wrote: post #31

Slack is overrated and over priced. Its not like messenger platforms are difficult. We have had msn messneger, yahoo messenger, whatsapp, rocketchat, facebook messneger, messenger, gchat, skype. Slack doesn't do anything particularly special.

While I think slack is much more useful that any of the ones you mentioned due to 'unique' implementation but it's not hard to replicate. Plenty of communities already use free alternatives like Discord (despite it's focus on 'gaming' communities). I expect open source solutions (Matrix mostly), both self hosted and ran by low cost hosting providers, to start taking Slacks market share once they reach feature parity & a level of polish.

Re: Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

#80

Post by yakattak »

collyw wrote: post #31

Slack is overrated and over priced. Its not like messenger platforms are difficult. We have had msn messneger, yahoo messenger, whatsapp, rocketchat, facebook messneger, messenger, gchat, skype. Slack doesn't do anything particularly special.

To be honest, compared to all of those with the exception of maybe Rocketchat, it has way more features and integrations. I don't think it's a fair assessment to compare to to WhatsApp, MS Messenger, FB Messenger because those have no place in an enterprise environment.
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