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Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#521

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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.

Heroku kept getting more and more complicated. I remember when you could just push a Rails app to Heroku and everything would just work. That kept getting more and more challenging.

I found it very easy for pushing a nodejs app recently. Can't speak to rails.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#523
post #340

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Captive users don't really count.

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

Slack is expensive, nobody randomly buys it for every employee

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#524

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.

It makes absolute sense - Slack wasn't going to survive as an independent. Their anti-trust efforts against Microsoft + Teams seemed to go nowhere. - Salesforce is one of the only companies that can go to-to-toe with Microsoft in the enterprise - 80%+ of the Fortune 500, 150k+ customers, 200k+ people at their conference each year - Salesforce already know your org chart so can roll out slack to anyone already on forc…

Some decent points. 80% is good to see. The problem is I don't see anyway companies drop Microsoft. Everyone already has teams or chat for free, are they going to pay for slack now? Assuming slack moves to the same model, buy the salesforce suite and get slack, how much added value is slack really providing? Will companies be willing to pay more now that slack is included even though they already have chat apps? I'm not super knowledgeable on salesforce, but afaik only sales people have the subscription, so will companies have different chat apps for sales and everyone else? Seems like it would be easier to just put the sales people on teams with everyone else. Is slack a big enough perk that it would stop companies that are considering dropping salesforce? Is that worth 28 billion? That's really the only use I see. I agree this is a great move for slack, questioning how salesforce is able to leverage slack here when everyone else gives their chats away for free.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#525
post #499

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> 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?). Are you suggesting an enterprise is going to leave Office for Dropbox and Slack? Cause that's not happening.

Small businesses aren't nearly as attached, and the Office experience sucks on mobile and web. There's definitely a market for someone who can get that right, and I don't think that someone is Microsoft. I say this as someone who is irrevocably attached to Excel (and to a lesser extent, Word and PowerPoint), I don't think Microsoft is currently willing to cut off the entire ecosystem of software based around Office o…

Can you explain the shortcomings of both Google suite and MSO on mobile/web you mention?

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#526

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...

The subscription model is a true modernized return to the good old ways of creating a product that sells because it’s good quality. How? If a user is not satisfied, they will stop paying. Slack has all the incentives to improve their product, especially in the face of competition.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#527

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Are the video meetings worse than chat threading?

They don't work at all in Firefox, so... for any Firefox users, yes.

Threading that didn't work at all would actually be better than the threading that exists.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#528
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Slack is expensive, nobody randomly buys it for every employee

They totally do, especially at big companies. You need to show that you made a difference, and rolled out new communication platform for the whole company, not just for 5%.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#529

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You nailed it, Google product managers, specially in Cloud lack the Enterprise expertise. They need to get that a company with IT staff already went through updating NT to Windows 2000 and then 2008 and deploying Linux and Active Directory and Exchange 5.5, 2k..etc...many MS products which were de facto for any large Company, if you can't integrate with it you will never have a solid footstep into the Enterprise worl…

My large disappointment with Google's Cloud Platform offering was lack of commitment to parity features. I am sorry but the concept of "Beta release level" is a complete misfire/mismatch for what an enterprise needs. For example, you cannot, on one hand, advertise that you have a competitive feature (Google Functions competing with AWS Lambda), but then, on the other hand, turn around and label it beta and basically…

I'm confused by your argument. Beta is the stage before GA: if it's GA, it's not Beta by definition.

This is all obsolete anyway, since GCP has announced they're moving to two stages: Preview or GA. That's it.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-gets...

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#530
post #335

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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 c…

> 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.

How does that help with noticing threads that someone created while I wasn't looking?

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