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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

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141–150 of 809 posts

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#141

It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got T…

Slack is a $16 billion dollar company on paper but still not profitable and showing no signs of profitability. It’s not like Slack is printing money.

They will be if they inject ads in between your messages (free version only).

"Rid Belly Fat NOW! Click Here!"

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#142

It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got T…

I think the pure-web play will end up being a better decision in the long run tbh.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#143

Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free. I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert…

Shout out to FlowDock, which has far superior threading!

We waited for ever for threading to come to slack... and when it landed we were so disappointed.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#144
post #21

So they are worth $1,600 per user? I don't understand how that is possible at all.

My company is in the middle of switching from Slack to Microsoft teams. The water cooler talk is that we're paying Slack $1000-$2500 per year per user.

It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.

I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels. But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but…

For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable. Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.

FWIW, The ReasonML, Rust, and Elixir language all have active communities on Discord. It really is pretty good for the use case.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#146

It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got T…

Do Microsoft and Apple really want native apps? I've got the opposite impression: they've tried very hard to herd desktop apps into Apple Store model. Third party vendors, like Adobe, are also forcing clients to adopt subscription schemes.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because the real future is web apps and has been for more than a decade now.

In the same way Linux is perpetually the future of desktop?

Not really comparable, the web already has massive adoption, just needs to get better at high-performance client apps. And with WebAssembly + PWAs, and WebGPU in development, it's getting very close.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian has a wider suite of products. I would say HipChat is the Slack alternative. Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello. And Atlassian is more developer centric whereas Slack is monetizing enterprise users.

HipChat is awful, and only an alternative in a very charitable sense of that word. > Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello. And thank goodness for that, because those are awful as well.

Trello is a decent product! (but not created by Atlassian)

Jira I've always hated... gawd. Just something about the way it does thing... so complicated. Hated that product.

BitBucket is what it is - almost never used the web interface.

Confluence is their other product... also not great and just a bit annoying to use for some reason.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#150

It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got T…

I don't even think they need to make a native app; I use plenty of Electron apps day to day, like VSCode, Atom, GitHub Desktop and they're all fine.

Slack however is borderline unusable. Ghost processes, background workspaces silently closing and not delivering notifications, processes pinned at 100% CPU, silent crashes, pauses while typing, and even sometimes character drops.

I've tried it on three laptops from two vendors all with 16gb of memory, 100% SSD and an i7.

I've got Mac user friends that tell me they've never had any of the above issues, and I believe them. I've used it on a Mac, though not as a daily driver, and it's fine.

It just feels to me like Windows is a second tier platform for Slack, where they're fixing the bare minimum to not lose market share.

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