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Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, nobody said this doesn't work out well for the founders. Just the product, and its userbase, and future business.

I wonder if and when the society will finally develop an immune response to this business pattern: a) get a large amount of people to tie their lives/businesses to a service you provide, b) sell out to a bigger fish, leaving these users high and dry.

That will be the year of the Linux desktop.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#402

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.

I'm pretty sure that nobody as Slack is going to be unexcited about a 50% stock bump. I've been on the receiving end of boring acquisitions, and I can assure you that the financial upside can excite people quite effectively.

My friends at Slack are all very excited.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#403

They started out trying to make an MMO, ended up making Flickr instead. Then they tried making another MMO, but ended up making Slack instead. I really hope they get cracking on another MMO soon.

Or try designing a really great office collaboration suite and end up accidentally making a killer game.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack uses Chime under-the-hood for meetings. So, people are still using Chime. This was announced at re:invent today.

The video meetings are easily the worst part of Slack. Even though Slack meetings are free and integrated, everyone at my org still uses Zoom with Slack instead.

Are the video meetings worse than chat threading?

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#405

They started out trying to make an MMO, ended up making Flickr instead. Then they tried making another MMO, but ended up making Slack instead. I really hope they get cracking on another MMO soon.

Or try designing a really great office collaboration suite and end up accidentally making a killer game.

My wife and I once spent TWO hours stuffing photocopiers into an elevator in Deus Ex.

So, getting close with that one.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#406

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…

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" aren't a monolithic group.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#407
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chat is now built into the gmail app which is much easier to switch on.

I see Meet, but not Chat, and none of my Chats show up in the Gmail app (iOS), and there's a separate Chat app (which doesn't do the account switching I mentioned). If Chat is built in, I don't see it yet.

My app has mail, chat, rooms, and meet tabs at the bottom.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#408

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.

Have you used Gchat for bots/search/threading? It’s awful. It is not a good chat app and hasn’t changed much in 4 years. It plays catchup with competitors. Teams is so far away from having good features and app integration; Everyone I talk to that used Slack hates it. It’s just that it’s free with o365 that it’s even used. Honestly, I want to remind people everyone said the same thing about Google buying YouTube and FB buying insta. Two large purchases that were so worth it for the companies.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quip has remained stagnant/degraded since purchase. I don't expect it to ever get any better than it is right now (which is a pretty mediocre product). Salesforce software feels like Atlassian to me - lots of stuff, pretty much all of which is just ok. I expect slack will similarly decay over time as another generic offering from them, but I guess we'll see.

Quip has gotten better, but unlike Slack it didn't start out already good, so the gains have been minimal. Part of it was lack of interest from the inside, where it competes with people just wanting to use or keep using google docs / github / confluence / a few holdouts on google sites and who will always complain about Quip. I suspect core Slack will remain about the same and the focus will turn towards Salesforce integrations that most Slack users won't know or care about.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one that is built into every GSuite/Workspace account. For free. Google Chat.

I have no idea what that is and I've used GSuite for decades.

gsuite hasn't existed for decades.
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