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Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a compelling pitch, but when it comes to actually using low code/no code solutions... well, it's a conversation that we re-visit every few years for a reason. Everyone needs last-mile customization that requires coding and therefore some technical ability.

Sure, of course. OP was asking how Salesforce got so huge when it has a medium-negative reputation among tech folks, and that was my answer: Management loves to hear "this will save $$$ on software"

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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could copy-paste Discord, replace all occurrences of "gaming" for "enterprise" and it would be a much better business communication platform than Slack.

Message threading would make it better though.

They're inching towards this it seems, they've been incrementing rolling out revisions to the new reply UI for the last couple of weeks.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my biggest complaint about Discord, and the reason I rarely check the few servers I'm on. There are three channels out of 80 I'm interested in. Just let me leave them!

You can mute channels and hide them, or mute sections, or mute chanells and collapse the sections they are in. There are lots of ways to get channels you don't want out of your face.

This isn't scalable. My employer has many many thousands of channels on our slack instance. Opt in is so much better than opt out at that level

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#604

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.

The chat inside Salesforce was horrible. They get a good one with very little churn. Plus they have voice and video calling.

You can integrate this into the SF platform and your get a good defense against other players (MSFT, SAP, Oracle).

If I can schedule a customer call and register it inside salesforce it would be great. Today I have to enter all manually on their interface :-(

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the details but an earlier message said "70x revenue". It is hard to think of a reason not to sell at that multiple.

Slack is valued higher than Kroger, which runs 2,700+ grocery stores in the United Stages. Apple and Sweden have about the same valuation right now. Apple is worth 30% more than Saudi Arabia.

> Apple and Sweden have about the same valuation right now

Sweden doesn't have valuation, so you can't compare them.

Apple has valuation which is measured in dollars. Sweden has GDP which is measured in dollars per year. The units are different, so the numbers aren't comparable.

I guess one can say "Sweden produces about one Apple's worth in a year", or "Saudi Arabia produces about one Apple's worth in a year and a bit". This however makes owning Sweden/Saudi Arabia look better than owning Apple by a shot.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#606
post #517
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they fuck up Slack, everyone will move to MS Teams. That is, unless some start-up dreams up some kind of revolutionary paradigm shift in how people communicate online. Maybe something in the AR space ~10 years from now.

Remember that MS Teams forced themselves into the market by pushing it onto their existing customers, not because it's a worthy competitor. Now Slack can play that same game too.

Shouldn't that have given Salesforce some leverage in the deal? Slack needed them more than Salesforce needed Slack

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#607
post #115
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely S3 is a pebble compared to Dropbox?

You're probably backwards there. Edit: in 2016 Dropbox stored 400PB ( https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/magic-pocket-infrastruct... ), in 2018 S3 was storing multiple exabytes ( https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Amazon-S3-across-all-region... ) I suspect multiple exabytes is a low ball.

>You're probably backwards there.

Probably -- came back to my comment 24 hours later and realized I mixed up DB and S3 in the sentence.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#608
post #579
post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is infuriating. And users report similar problems with audio in Windows too... Unfortunately your killall workaround does not work for me. I have to restart my laptop every time I have a Teams meeting -.-

That's odd. I'm using Linux Teams client in a Docker container, and it gets many days of uptime (and many voice calls per day) between restarts (for unrelated reasons). No problems with integrating with host pulseaudio server. I'm quite a happy user of Teams, the only thing I'm missing is ability to share my desktop with giving control to a remote caller - but I only needed that maybe once or twice over this entire y…

Thanks for the feedback. The Docker container is a good idea! Let's see if it fixes my audio issues.

Note that outside of audio being disabled on a regular basis (and there being no way of setting it back up properly), I am also happy with the product. It beats Skype Business, which I could never get to work on Linux.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps true for a standalone app, but very different for a social one like Slack. You have to use what others are using.

Is that true? For a social app where every user pays, sure, but Slack is generally paid for by a central business/group/organization. If the users in the organization are sufficiently unhappy with Slack, a functional organization should be unhappy with Slack, and if the organization is unhappy it can migrate everybody elsewhere overnight, with minimal social impact.

If the users in the organization are sufficiently unhappy with Slack, a functional organization should be unhappy with Slack

Nice theory but overwhelmingly disproved by the existence of SAP.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#610
post #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.

But you have to take into account the cost of switching/migrating. And possibly lock-in.

So if your customer makes the effort to leave your SaaS, then you know that they were really very much not satisfied.

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