Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack • Hacker News Board

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#121

Post by emmanueloga_ » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

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 open protocol seems to be Matrix, but it hasn't proven to be to their advantage, apparently. Only Element, Zulip and Mattermost are open source?

Honorable mention: IRCCloud was a "hot thing" for a while, but it seems like it wasn't enough to revitalize IRC. [2]

--

Appendix, initial releases:

* Slack: August 2013; 7 years ago

* Discord: May 13, 2015; 5 years ago

* Mattermost: October 2, 2015; 5 years ago

* Zulip: ca 2014, at least 5/6 years ago?

* Matrix protocol: ca September 2014; 6 years ago

* vector/riot/element: ca September 2016, 4 years ago

--

1: https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/30/element-acquires-gitter-to...

2: https://www.irccloud.com/

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#122

Post by ep103 » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #80

hienyimba wrote: post #31

I hope this acquisition does not pass regulatory oversight. This is how it starts. Very soon, we will have another competition-killing, anti-competitive behemoth on our hands like we did with FANGM and then we will suddenly ask ourselves how it all happened. THIS. Right here. Is how it happens.

right, which big tech acronym has Salesforce in it? gonna need a new one

Just add an S, right?

FAANG becomes FAANGS

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#123

Post by hobofan » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

kescher wrote: post #82

Salesforce, more like Buyforce. They are acquiring so many companies, it's not even funny.

That's just what CRM companies do, isn't it? SAP is also just a huge pile of acquisitions that's held together by some duct tape.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#124

Post by dang » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

The Salesforce-Slack stack so far:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25269934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25255231

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211262

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#125

Post by epaga » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

juvoni wrote: post #7

This is a major win for Discord.

Absolutely.

Our smallish company has used Discord all year long for our company communication and I could hardly be happier. They have an excellent bot API, a super clean yet playful interface, instant search and just don't feel/smell as "enterprisey" as Slack already felt (and that was well before now being acquired by Salesforce).

If Discord can maintain all those things and add a bit more Microsoft integration, they have a huge opportunity here.

(Either that or Microsoft can preempt the whole thing and acquire Discord).

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#126

Post by young_unixer » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

brenryd wrote: post #60

easton wrote: 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…

Discord could be interesting as Amazon has already shown interest in the gaming / streaming / online community space with their Twitch acquisition.

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

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#127

Post by aloknnikhil » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

tekacs wrote: post #97

For people looking for an alternative to switch to, we’ve been using Quill [0], which is pretty much a more slick, clean Zulip. It has a great approach to threads, where you can make them mandatory or optional on a per-channel basis (even when optional they have names and are more useful than Slack threads). They also support adding external parties to channels/threads by email or SMS and even more interestingly, the…

On first glance that page looks like something Apple might have put together. I genuinely thought this was from Apple.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#128

Post by amb23 » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

hienyimba wrote: post #31

I hope this acquisition does not pass regulatory oversight. This is how it starts. Very soon, we will have another competition-killing, anti-competitive behemoth on our hands like we did with FANGM and then we will suddenly ask ourselves how it all happened. THIS. Right here. Is how it happens.

Salesforce is already a monopoly if you go by volume of revenue earned from CRM. No one other than small/niche SaaS businesses competes directly for CRM business, and any new CRM startups can't get venture funding because it's considered an untouchable space by VCs. Every other large player they compete with in the CRM space (Hubspot, Zendesk, Oracle) offers a CRM as a side product to their main line of business.

This transaction shouldn't be the catalyst for regulatory action; regulators should have already taken action.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#129

Post by TheFlyingFish » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

s_dev wrote: post #77

easton wrote: 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…

Surely S3 is a pebble compared to Dropbox?

I'm not as sure about that, given the extent of the chaos that ensues every time S3 goes down for half a day.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#130

Post by spike021 » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

variaga wrote: post #100

filoleg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, I know Chime exists. But I don't think I've ever heard of anyone using it, and Slack is still rather popular. I think even Amazon realized how awful Chime is, given that they, as a company, switched to Slack just a few months ago.

Amazon is a big place and I can't speak for all of it, but while IT announced that slack was "available" a few months ago, I don't personally know anyone that has actually switched to using it. Everyone still uses Chime. That may just be a peculiarity of my department, but saying "Amazon as a company switched to slack" is definitely overstating what happened.

My org definitely has switched for the most part. But I'm sure it's a phased-rollout.