I posted this in the watercooler chat at work (we use slack) and got the option to install the Salesforce plugin for Slack.
Because of course.
Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
#262Well, Slack, it was nice knowing you. I wonder who Discord will get bought up by when it replaces Slack after a year or two of Salesforce mismanagement? It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now. Start small, get big fast, get sold, get ruined. I realize I am presupposing Salesforce will ruin Slack - but it's hard to see how they won't , unless they take the approach Microsoft took with Github and keep it a…
Slack never really fulfilled its promise as a stand-alone company, so not sure what you’re afraid of now. Very unreliable at times eg latency, missed out of video calling, did not take advantage of WFH boom at all, document search was bad.
I don't know if I'd agree that it never fulfilled its promise. It's got a lot of market share and its core product - text chat and messaging - remains pretty solid, despite some missteps.
I haven't had that level of unreliability issue with text, though I _definitely_ have with calls.
I would agree that Slack had an opportunity to compete with Zoom and others because of COVID that it seems to have relatively squandered. Slack calls are still less reliable and usable than Zoom calls for many purposes. You can't dial in with a phone, you can't mute other people's video or even audio (though I'm not sure Zoom offers client-side video muting either), Slack's screenshare is less reliable and doesn't have as many options for limiting what you share, and so on.
So I guess I'd say it fulfilled its core promise: "decent enterprise real-time communications", but it's the failure to innovate or even keep up with competing services in some important areas that's the issue. Maybe that's splitting hairs?
Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Create a new login system, make the white theme default and call it "Discord Business". Done.
And integrate business twitch streams please, with company email footers always reading ‘don’t forget to sub to my stream’. Let the twisted fantasy play out where the business world lives like esports streamers and wow raiding guilds.
What will be the corporate version of the famous "Leeroy Jenkins" moment in WoW?
Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
#264Salesforce is rising as a formidable foe to Microsoft.
No they aren't. What is the SF equivilant to O365, Azure, Office, and Windows?
Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
#265Soooo, I bought a very small number of Slack shares at the market open today with no idea this was coming down the pike oh well
This has been much discussed the last bit of time, on what basis are you buying shares in a company..?
Yeah this is a fun little lesson for me. I’d been thinking through the summer that we need to expand what we do with our money and had been dithering, put together a short list of companies (like kid summer) and slack was one of them. I faffed about, put it off and then last night just decided “you know what, just place some trades and pull the plaster off” so I bought like 50 shares across a handful of companies - I own 3 slack shares so I’m not all that bothered.
I’ve risked very little money in my first share purchases - I couldn’t even buy a new low end mountain bike for what I’ve got at risk.
Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
#266I hope this acquisition does not pass regulatory oversight. This is how it starts. Very soon, we will have another competition-killing, anti-competitive behemoth on our hands like we did with FANGM and then we will suddenly ask ourselves how it all happened. THIS. Right here. Is how it happens.
If anything this deal helps increase competition in the collaboration/productivity space, since it was clear that Slack couldn't compete with Microsoft on its own.
Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
#267For me the fascinating headline here is the 86% gross margins. FY2020 gross revenue at Slack was $630.4m, GAAP gross profit $533.2m [1].
SaaS apps are comically, stupidly profitable at scale. That's educational.
[1] https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-announces-fourth-quarter-a...
Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
#268Well, Slack, it was nice knowing you. I wonder who Discord will get bought up by when it replaces Slack after a year or two of Salesforce mismanagement? It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now. Start small, get big fast, get sold, get ruined. I realize I am presupposing Salesforce will ruin Slack - but it's hard to see how they won't , unless they take the approach Microsoft took with Github and keep it a…
Just curious, what Salesforce aquisitions ruined a product? The only ones I know of are Heroku, Quip, and Tableau. I don't see any mention of Salesforce other than optional integrations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions lists a ton of companies I'm not familiar with that look like they were mostly absorbed. Beyond that, I'm not sure, but it's more of a reputational judgment I'm making.
I'm not sure I can think of a time when an acquisition or merger ever made a product better for the users.
Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one that is built into every GSuite/Workspace account. For free. Google Chat.
The mobile Google Chat still doesn't let you switch accounts, like Hangouts supports. Perplexing, given how much people in the Google-sphere context switch.
Isn't the mobile GChat integrated in the Gmail app?
Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
#270Whatever 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…
Enterprises don't want federation. They want an easily searchable information repository much more than they want strong E2EE. They also don't see open source as an advantage. Matrix was focused on things that deter enterprise customers while Slack built a machine for locking them in.
Enterprises may not want federation until they encounter a practical problem that just happens to be solved by federation. E.g. company/team acquisition, need to merge the chat ecosystems; don't want to disrupt the acquired team but you also need to have people in the rest of the company interact with existing channels etc. If both companies uses slack, the integration between such multiple accounts is possible.