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Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

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281–290 of 659 posts

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#281

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.

Google chat sucks so bad that googlers want to use slack instead

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#282
post #244
post #97

For people looking for an alternative to switch to, we’ve been using Quill [0], which is pretty much a more slick, clean Zulip. It has a great approach to threads, where you can make them mandatory or optional on a per-channel basis (even when optional they have names and are more useful than Slack threads). They also support adding external parties to channels/threads by email or SMS and even more interestingly, the…

This does not appear to be open source? It doesn’t even have a pricing section.

It's not open source and it's free for now, presumably for the duration of the beta.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so tired of hearing this argument. The amount of revenue generated by customers who use only Microsoft Teams without an Office365 subscription is exactly $0 [1]. MS gives you exactly 2 options to get teams: 1. Free 2. Included as part of Office365. Teams is currently eatings Slacks lunch, but the lunch was paid for by a corporate IT guy who switched to Office365 so he could lay off some IT admins and save some mo…

I don't understand. What argument are you tired of hearing? Teams has more users than Slack. Doesn't matter how/why they got them.

Captive users don't really count.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We use Teams at work, and for that it works quite well. Calls and desktop sharing work well, the channels do what they do, integration with OneDrive and the wiki thing is nice etc.

But then I got a member of a different Team, for one of our customers, as part of some integration work. And boy is that a CF.

Unlike Discord you either have this team or that team active. Notifications from the other are horribly unreliable, and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client.

So as such, "Teams" really should have been named "Team".

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#285
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's "Google" and "a messaging product", the two are like oil and water. What are you talking about? Messaging products are so integral to Google's vision that they can't stop making them.

The problem is they can't settle down on something. I can't even tell you what their current messaging product is right now. Google Wave is dead. Google Facebook^HPlus is dead. I think Hangouts is dead? The thing in my GMail gives me notices that it's going away. Is it Google Voice? Why would I use a product with the name "Voice" to type "Text" to people, especially when it used to be a phone substitute. Certainly no…

it was sarcasm

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#286
post #97

For people looking for an alternative to switch to, we’ve been using Quill [0], which is pretty much a more slick, clean Zulip. It has a great approach to threads, where you can make them mandatory or optional on a per-channel basis (even when optional they have names and are more useful than Slack threads). They also support adding external parties to channels/threads by email or SMS and even more interestingly, the…

On first glance that page looks like something Apple might have put together. I genuinely thought this was from Apple.

The aesthetics have a certain feel that makes them seem Apple-ish, yes. I feel that when I use it day-to-day, too. :)

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#287
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.

Yeah Amazon is really hit-or-miss.

I've had good experiences. But when you have bad experiences, they can be really bad. I ordered a TV on Amazon (Prime) and it was scheduled for delivery in 3 days. Because it's a large shipment truck delivery, they give you a window. Like Spectrum/Comcast. So I sat home all day and... nothing. I checked my messages and almost the exact time the delivery window was closing they left a message saying "could not deliver will try some other time" basically.

It took a month and about 15 customer service reps before a single person could tell me where my TV was. I'm not exaggerating. They had no clue what happened to a $1,000 purchase. It fell into their bureaucratic black hole like some scene from a Monty Python skit.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#288
post #276

For 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...

Except they had net income of -$570M (that's a minus sign in front) because their operational losses are staggeringly high.

Yes, but that's the aspect of the cost structure that the acquirer is most equipped to tweak.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#289
post #204

how is it that a chat app is worth $27B?

With 86% gross margins, I'm not entirely surprised it's seen as a good proposition: https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-announces-fourth-quarter-a...

With operating losses at 93% of total revenue, bringing FY2020 net income deeply negative, I'm still surprised.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#290
post #63

I'm a bit confused by what this means for WORK shareholders. "Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020." Lets say you own 100 shares of WORK. Does that mean you get both 1.…

100 shares of WORK will be converted to $2679 and 7.76 shares of CRM. Where did you get 43.84 from? The current value of WORK doesn't matter, it's the closing price on 11/30. The stock price will effectively be pinned at that now since nobody will want to trade at another price.

> The stock price will effectively be pinned at that now

Won't it fluctuate with Salesforce's value?

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