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Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now ...now?

Earlier you could just stick with the version you had on your CD or floppy and not care what the C-suits was up to on the company that made the software you used. So I guess it wasn't as obvious back then?

I still know quite a few people who still use their old version of WordPerfect. At some point it became feature complete for them and they've stuck with it ever since.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#332

So question: which of all the alternatives to Slack has text as a first class citizen? We don't use video or audio chat at all; just text chat, pinning important info to channels, swapping small files, searching chat history and a few plugins like reminders and github. May be important to mention that we have a lot of separate projects going on and we separate each in its own channel. We absolutely want mobile and de…

You could check out Discord - they’ve been pivoting pretty well into an all round Slack competitor with some slick features IMO.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Federation is also super useful if you're a multinational, since each geographic location could still operate autonomously in the face of an inability to route to the broader Internet. And with a protocol like Matrix, you're able to recover gracefully when federation is restored.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google chat, lol. Which one? Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?

Don’t forget about the new Google Pay, which has its own messaging feature for some reason

I can kinda understand that one since Venmo's chat feature is useful and I wouldn't want that stuff mixed with my regular messages.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#335
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.

I mean, you can't really disable notifications that exist for a feature and then complain that you're not notified when somebody messages you using that feature...

If it's truly async then just close slack until you're ready to talk, then open it back up and go through all of the red badges / white channels.

If you absolutely need to keep all notifications off and still want to read any thread replies, the very top channel in the slack app is called "Threads" and will show threads you've participated in or subscribed to, listed in chronological order based on most recent replies.

I have a lot of problems with slack (namely, performance and lack of solid video/audio calling), but threads are fine.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#336

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.

The thing I like about Teams is the way you can have collaboratively-editable documents localised to a particular channel by way of the Files tab, which is great for organisations that don't yet have an ingrained online Office 365 or Google Sheets culture.

Apart from that, I find it clunky, unwieldy, and it has that unfortunate soullessness that permeates many 'productivity' applications (exemplified by the sterile selection of reaction emoji).

For me: Slack has character, and works well.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you think that's what's led to Slack's success though, that enterprises don't want federation? I don't really think so. If Slack had exactly the same UX as it has but federated, I don't think that would have deterred very many customers. Maybe a few that have come on only after Slack already got so big.

It's not that federation per se is a downside for any particular customer. It's more that federation makes it a lot harder to make changes to your product, and it doesn't usually come with enough business upside to justify that cost.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#338

Well, 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.

I had forgotten that they bought Heroku. As far as I know, Heroku is still as cool as when I used to frequently use it. Time will tell how it goes with the Slack acquisition.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#339
post #14

I'm somewhat surprised that Amazon didn't end up acquiring Slack, considering that the major thing they are missing compared to Microsoft is productivity tools. If they had purchased Dropbox and Slack they could've gotten a foothold rather quickly and slowed down one of Microsoft's major selling points (you already use Office, why not Azure?). Discord could be another interesting company in the chat space, as I'm sur…

| you already use Office, why not Azure? Not sure why using Office would be a reason to prefer Azure over something else. Can you elaborate? Are there some useful integrations one can benefit from? Regarding Amazon buying Slack. My guess would be it's too expensive. If you look at Amazon's acquisitions history, you would see they almost never spend more than $1B. The one exception I recall is Whole Foods which they p…

Fewer vendors, unified billing/support/contract negotiations. These non-technical things are still integrations in a sense, that enterprises can benefit from.

It's nice to be able to get your email (Exchange), identity (Active Directory), productivity/office apps (Office), and underlying infrastructure (Azure), and even business intelligence/analytics (Dynamics) all from one place.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But lots of Slack users are captive as well (e.g., when CIO licenses Slack for )
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