Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 809 posts

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

#151

Post by Apocryphon »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #127
stevehiehn wrote: post #94

Crazy, sometimes I picture the creators of HipChat laying in bed staring the ceiling mumbling: 'but, but, we did thi..'

We tried HipChat for a whole day before bouncing. It was so bad. Had hilariously poor UX, using commands like \code to get a single line of monospaced text, iirc.

Weirdly enough, I had heard that HipChat used to scale better than Slack. Supposedly Uber used to use the former rather than the latter because once an org hit a certain threshold in thousands of users, Slack was no good. This was years ago, however.

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

#152

Post by narag »

cududa wrote: post #136
marcrosoft wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If it’s been the future for a decade, and that future isn’t here ... is it really the future of applications?

I would replace "the future" with saying that it's much more profitable for vendors and less convenient for users, so it's being adopted as fast as vendors can overcome users's resistance.

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

#153

Post by omeid2 »

nwienert wrote: post #131
toomuchtodo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a recipe for market share. Profitability and a realistic valuation is yet to be seen.

But I don't see anyone claiming a native app is the difference to profitability.

I don't think they do, most "office worker" computer resources are way over provisioned, at least in the developed countries.

Does resource consumption matters to me? yes, but that is because I compile stuff, run VMs, do simulations, like many other developers.

My grandma or dad at his office? they could do just fine with 1/10th of their resources.

This is not an argument for wastefulness, but the reality of business world and the value of computing resources.

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

#154

Post by ColinWielga »

Spivak wrote: post #50
Roritharr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded. They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.

I'm not sure they'll be able to compete against a worse but integrated solution like MS teams long term. No doubt it's worse but the bundle is cheaper with when you're already paying for Windows and Office. Same story with G Suite. MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.

My company just switched from Slack to Teams.

I think it is hard for cost conscious organizations with o365 to justify slack.

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

#156

Post by paulryanrogers »

fiblye wrote: post #113
not_a_moth wrote: post #52

The obligatory "but they have massive losses", > For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter-financ... I don't understand valuations.

My question is where the hell is that money going? That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It’s the GDP of some minor lower/mid-economy nations’ cities. Their losses are equal to half the entire GDP of Palau. Maybe I’m detached. But I don’t understand the cash flow in chat apps today. It’s absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and will easily be replaced in a few years, a…

Not a fan of Slack but they do have more than chat: voice and video, screen share, drawing on screen, shared control

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

#157

Post by lawnchair_larry »

narag wrote: post #146
dstaley wrote: post #110

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.

Those are still native apps. I believe parent is comparing to bloated Electron crap that requires an entire Chromium instance to put a GUI on what is basically IRC and text editors.

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

#159

Post by erichurkman »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #107
fpvracing wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on? I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist…

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…

And you still cannot leave a channel in Discord. You can mute, but that's not the same thing — it still clutters your sidebar, and still downloads contents from it.

Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot messages you get over time.

Discord bots are out of control. They remind me of the days of IRC and eggbot scripts and eggbot hosts: every channel went out and bought a cheap VPS or eggbot host to run their scrappy little bots. Except somehow worse and incredibly annoying.

I don't think Discord is ready, or even trying to be ready, for enterprise use. Not yet!

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

#160

Post by dstaley »

narag wrote: post #146
dstaley wrote: post #110

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.

What does a subscription have to do with native apps though? All of Adobe's apps are native apps even though they require a subscription license.
Post reply on HN