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Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

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Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#131

Post by mercer »

phailhaus wrote: post #120
throwawaymath wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what they said. A significant fraction (probably the majority) of Slack's functionality is server-side, not client-side. Even if the client were to be rewritten from scratch, you would not need to replicate 100% of Slack. But you also don't need to re-implement the entire client. You need to do a significant architectural change for performance improvements, not a complete overhaul. Reasonable people can d…

No, it's pretty warranted. The 100% I was referring to _was_ just for the clientside. To rewrite that natively (since today it's in js on Electron) is not going to take a couple of months with five engineers.

I don't think it's entirely out of the realm of possibility that could be done, and a couple of months with five engineers was a conservative estimate. $375.000 for twice the devs or twice the number of months is still a shockingly low price to pay.

Hell, throw a few million at it and I can't see why Slack can't be implemented natively on at least iOS, MacOS and Android (especially if parts can still fallback on webviews).

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#132

Post by peterwwillis »

iambateman wrote: post #129
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...

But once you get to that organizational size, there are 3 project managers and a VP with an agenda and designers and design managers and a QA department which is backed up “for a bit” and a PR team who wants to make sure we get a good Q2’19 “win with the developer crowd”. So it takes a year, and $2.5M, to do what should take 3 months and $300k. * not saying this is the case at Slack, it’s just often the case at Every…

Exactly. A completely rewritten from scratch product would probably take 1 year to finish. 90% complete can be ready in a few months, but the last 10% takes much more effort. Then there's the QA division you need to build out to test it on the platforms and OSes you need to support your enterprise customers. Then there's the management structure to track the project. Then there's keeping it up to date with the existing service's changes as it's both in development and production. Then there's the migration to switch users to the new client, and the phasing out of the old client over time.

It's doable, but it's non-trivial, and probably only buys you the accolades of a small percentage of users on slower hardware. (And incidentally, almost every video chat app I use today runs the fans and slows down my system, but I can deal with it)

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#133

Post by amelius »

phailhaus wrote: post #98
amelius wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme to me. From Wikipedia: > A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud in which a purported businessman lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors using funds obtained from newer investors. Investors may be led to believe that the profits are coming from product sales, or other means, and remain unaware that other investors are the source of apparent profits. A Ponzi scheme is a…

No. Businesses whose success depend on network effects are not automatically Ponzi schemes.

Who said anything about network effects?

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#134

Post by tootie »

dgritsko wrote: post #96
randomsearch wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Critiquing easy, making hard.

This blog post is pushing 10 years old and it's about StackOverflow, but it's still extremely relevant: https://bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few particularly choice bits: >"There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not t…

My point isn't that cloning is easy. More that it has already been done multiple times and Slack has very little lock-in. And enterprise software has less network effect. Our IT department could dictate use of Microsoft Teams next month and it would probably be fine.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#136

Post by fipple »

phailhaus wrote: post #120
throwawaymath wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what they said. A significant fraction (probably the majority) of Slack's functionality is server-side, not client-side. Even if the client were to be rewritten from scratch, you would not need to replicate 100% of Slack. But you also don't need to re-implement the entire client. You need to do a significant architectural change for performance improvements, not a complete overhaul. Reasonable people can d…

No, it's pretty warranted. The 100% I was referring to _was_ just for the clientside. To rewrite that natively (since today it's in js on Electron) is not going to take a couple of months with five engineers.

Does improving performance require a rewrite? Is this the best you can get from Electron?

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#137

Post by phyzome »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #110
maxehmookau wrote: post #17

Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.

Their video offering is laughably bad but I'd bet that isn't because of electron. Otherwise I'm surprised people hate the electron app so much, on my 2014 mbp it works just fine.

Counterpoint: I've found it to work better than Google Meet. But maybe that's not saying much.

(Is there any video conferencing software that doesn't suck in some way?)

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#138

Post by Avshalom »

iambateman wrote: post #129
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...

But once you get to that organizational size, there are 3 project managers and a VP with an agenda and designers and design managers and a QA department which is backed up “for a bit” and a PR team who wants to make sure we get a good Q2’19 “win with the developer crowd”. So it takes a year, and $2.5M, to do what should take 3 months and $300k. * not saying this is the case at Slack, it’s just often the case at Every…

well they just raised $427, so yeah they should still probably be able to find the scratch.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#139

Post by theWheez »

phyzome wrote: post #137
eagsalazar2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their video offering is laughably bad but I'd bet that isn't because of electron. Otherwise I'm surprised people hate the electron app so much, on my 2014 mbp it works just fine.

Counterpoint: I've found it to work better than Google Meet. But maybe that's not saying much. (Is there any video conferencing software that doesn't suck in some way?)

Zoom has been my best experience. Plenty of features, smooth video for the most part. Enough that I use it exclusively for business at this point.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#140

Post by flyinglizard »

phyzome wrote: post #137
eagsalazar2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their video offering is laughably bad but I'd bet that isn't because of electron. Otherwise I'm surprised people hate the electron app so much, on my 2014 mbp it works just fine.

Counterpoint: I've found it to work better than Google Meet. But maybe that's not saying much. (Is there any video conferencing software that doesn't suck in some way?)

BlueJeans. Always great.
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