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Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#181
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the whole point of notifications to make it apparent when someone has responded to your thread?

What notifications? They're all off, we talk 90% async. And it's impossible to see a thread that you don't know about in their UI.

If everyone's talking asynchronously, why not use email?

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#182
post #141

Whatever happened to matrix.org/vector/riot.im/element.io? (side note: most confusing branding ever :-/). Element seemed to be picking up some momentum a few months back. There was recent news that they acquired gitter too [1]. These days I only hear about slack exodus and discord this and discord that, though. If I get it right, from all the group messengers that appeared around 6 years ago, the only one with an ope…

I would love to see IRC make a comeback but the fact is IRC on mobile is a pain in the ass. Users want persistence and IRC is designed for the opposite.

IRC is pretty much perfect. No "X user is typing" messages. No ads, no tracking, no javascript. No hidden instance of chrome running. The community even self selects in to my own interests.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#183
post #47

"Salesforce to Acquire Slack for $27.7 Billion" Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/technology/salesforce-sla...

How is Slack worth 27 Billion dollars? No, really. That's an unreal price. Slack benefits little from network effects. Deployment has no fundamental secret sauce. This is a crazy number. This does not make sense.

The number may be crazy, but Slack does benefit from network effects. For example, my company has many bots/integrations with other systems, years of institutional knowledge, and connections with multiple external vendors.

Switching would be painful so there'd have to be some pretty compelling reasons. (And who's got time to recreate all our custom emojis? :-))

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#184
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says much more about the people saying that than anything. Salesforce is a reasonably good operating entity, I don't see any reason for Slackers to flinch. But consider that 'Slack' was a movement - literally the name, the original premise, there was a corporate/hip aspect to it. Which now it's not, just the opposite, because it's 'Salesforce'. So at least in part - 'it's not cool now'.

Agreed, the reactions I'm seeing here feel more more emotional than rational. (Which is totally legitimate. Emotions are a dominant factor in product "love".) If the product were to get worse, there are any number of effectively-equivalent (if not as lovable) substitutes.

It's 'legit' to feel a certain way, the opposite to make decisions about business and productivity that way.

The real trick is, to figure out all those things we do that we think are based on utility, but are not.

The Saab ad comparing their car to the Jets the make appeals to our 'every little boy wants to be a pilot' fantasy.

But the Ford ads that tell us how 'strong' our vehicle is going to be ... even though many of us will never, ever use them for this purpose.

Like the guy with 1000 different tools in his shed - he buys them 'because they are useful'. But really, it's the 'emotion/novelty' of utility, not actual utility.

At least 1/2 of the tech industry is driven by this, it's hilarious. We HNers, so neurotically passionate about whatever it happens to be ... are the most guilty.

Of course a lot comes out of purely speculative and creative use of technology, it's just that we should be better at discerning.

Slack, if it's bad, is probably because it's a noisy channel, not because it's Salesforce.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#185
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord could be interesting as Amazon has already shown interest in the gaming / streaming / online community space with their Twitch acquisition.

One could copy-paste Discord, replace all occurrences of "gaming" for "enterprise" and it would be a much better business communication platform than Slack.

And replace all instances of “Discord” with “Harmony” and you have the perfect Enterprise chat tool!

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#186

I can't possibly see this going well for salesforce. Buying slack for 70x revenue is insane. Their entire market is going to be eaten by teams and google chat, if it hasn't already. Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software because everyone is already using office. And those that aren't are on g-suite. Slack's recent guidance was horrible too.

Teams suck. Google Chat? What’s that? I’ll stick with Slack.

Unpopular HN opinion: Teams doesn't suck.

It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#187
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't amazon have relatively good customer support for retail? Or are you specifically talking about AWS here?

Not in my experience, at least in the relatively-rare occasions where exceptions happen. I had an order which Amazon claimed to have been delivered but wasn't, and it took several days and multiple interactions to resolve. Just figuring out a way to talk to a human felt like an ARG.

The take away is that your issue was resolved. While it might not have been a satisfactory experience, you received resolution.

If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#188

I can't possibly see this going well for salesforce. Buying slack for 70x revenue is insane. Their entire market is going to be eaten by teams and google chat, if it hasn't already. Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software because everyone is already using office. And those that aren't are on g-suite. Slack's recent guidance was horrible too.

Of all the messengers I've used Chat is by far the worst. Especially threading is almost unusable.

I don't think that matters really. Maybe companies that are already using slack won't switch, but if you're using chat, which is free, are the executives really going to decide that it's worth paying to switch to slack? I think it's unlikely. Hard to see where the market is other than startups that are already using slack. Slacks revenue is currently nowhere near enough for this valuation and I can't see it getting where it needs to.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#189
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it had been Microsoft buying them I would have been like, well, they've done ok with GitHub so far. And I begrudgingly feel that way as someone who reviles their flagship OS and office products.

How do you feel about Heroku then? Salesforce purchased them about 8 years ago.

I've never used it. But I did use a CRM product a while ago that got purchased by SalesForce, and it was a disaster.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#190

I can't possibly see this going well for salesforce. Buying slack for 70x revenue is insane. Their entire market is going to be eaten by teams and google chat, if it hasn't already. Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software because everyone is already using office. And those that aren't are on g-suite. Slack's recent guidance was horrible too.

Honest question: what is Google chat? I only know Hangouts, I did not know they had a Slack/Teams app as well? Or is this the very old app that was integrated into Gmail back in the day?

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