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Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#291

Post by op03 »

JoeOfTexas wrote: post #65
subsubzero wrote: post #29

Kinda bummed by this news. I know a bunch of people over at Slack and I'm sure none of them are excited about being acquired. I still don't understand how salesforce has gotten so big where they can acquire $25B healthy companies which really don't fit into their eco-system.

Their sales teams have been locking in all major corporations. I have no idea how they cornered a market so fast. They are living like kings right now.

Cause gaining Enterprise market share has nothing to do with tech and everything to do with scaling a sales team.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#292

Post by ebg13 »

abalashov wrote: post #288
ebg13 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. I expect mass layoffs basically immediately.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#293

Post by FridgeSeal »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #38
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #30

Can't wait to see which Slack alternative wins after everyone jumps ship.

Teams seems to be doing surprisingly well. Considering how many businesses have it "included" with their Office subscriptions, it just has to be good enough to avoid someone wanting to pay extra for an outside service. If Lync was half as good as Teams is now, companies like Slack never would've gotten off the ground.

I am absolutely not going back to using Teams: it was a slower, buggier, poorly-designed and consistently weird application.

Google isn't capable of putting together a useful chat and then keeping it alive for a meaningful amount of time to save their lives.

Discord seems to be on a streak trying to re-invent their image as a competitor in the space, and having used it for enough gaming related things, I'd definitely consider it for work.

Zulip seems to garner a lot of positive attention as well.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#294

Post by ipsum2 »

goatherders wrote: post #264
productceo wrote: post #4

Salesforce is rising as a formidable foe to Microsoft.

No they aren't. What is the SF equivilant to O365, Azure, Office, and Windows?

They don't have to be exactly matching Microsoft 1:1 to be a competitor. But Office/O365 -> Quip, Azure -> Heroku, Windows -> Lightning Platform (a bit of a stretch)

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#296

Post by callahad »

callahad wrote: post #253
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #121

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 joined Element about a month ago (we're hiring! https://element.io/careers ) and now that I'm on the inside, I'm genuinely optimistic about our trajectory. We're not taking over the world overnight, but we are steadily growing. From a business perspective, data sovereignty and end-to-end encryption seem to be really potent differentiators for certain market segments, especially government. To wit, the French govern…

As an aside: Having come to Element from Mozilla, it's really weird to work somewhere with multiple large, paying customers. It gives me hope that we'll be able to maintain the runway we need to reach critical mass, one use case at a time.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#297

Post by Arathorn »

vector_spaces wrote: post #271
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #121

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…

Element / Matrix are great in principle, but it's probably not helping that there are fatal bugs in the iOS app that break core functionality (see [1]). Outside of that, it has major issues with accessibility in general -- user facing documentation is non-existent, for example. Users on my server complain sometimes that they feel they need to have a degree in computer science to do simple things. I feel like Element'…

I'm fairly sure that bug was fixed 11 days ago by https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/pull/950, released in Element iOS 1.1.1 on Nov 26th.

In terms of improving documentation and usability, we're on the case, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270858

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#298

Post by benhurmarcel »

stingraycharles wrote: post #114
colinmhayes wrote: post #68

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?

https://chat.google.com

It's a team chat, included into Google Workspace (G Suite). It's not terrible, and not great. It runs in the browser and integrates with Gmail; is really slow; has 1-to-1 messages, groups, and rooms; rooms have threads to organize conversations, but you can't see a list, you just end up scrolling a lot.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#299

Post by benhurmarcel »

oweiler wrote: post #168
colinmhayes wrote: post #68

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.

At least they have threads, but yes the way they do it is pretty terrible. I wish they took some inspiration to Zulip.

Also it's really slow.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#300

Post by quicklyfrozen »

rabidrat wrote: post #250
quicklyfrozen wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :-))

That's a moat, not network effects. A network effect would be if your friends at other companies get value from joining Slack while you're on it. But there's not (except maybe sharing integrations/bots).

I'm assuming that third parties are a lot more likely to join an external channel on a platform they're already using (and are more likely to be responsive as well).

I think all the existing integration are examples of an indirect network effect -- companies wouldn't invest in providing them if there weren't already users on the platform.

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