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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slack is nowhere near 1000 a user.

Well they work out their own deals per business. Their standard rate is 180$/user/year (without pay-up-front discounts) but that doesn't include SSO or terabyte storage per user. I'd be curious to know what add-ons a corp might stretch the budget for, I can't find details for what they charge for SLA

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

#252
post #37
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. I agree. There is no law against half-assed, bloated Electron based desktop software that can bring even recent hardware to its knees.

A chat client that takes multiple hundreds of MBs of RAM and sucks battery life prodigiously should be, if not illegal, at the very least a violation of unwritten international norms.

It's actually not the first to do this. Adium (AIM) and Colloquy (IRC) switched to WebKit theming in the 2000s, when computers were /really/ too slow to run it.

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

#253
post #233

Mattermost raises $50 million to advance its open source Slack alternative https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost-raises-50-mill...

Here's another one.

http://www.ircd-hybrid.org

You don't even need a client because you can read https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812 and then use telnet. Just remember to respond to PINGs.

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

#255
post #227
post #189

Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.

I don't really get this. Some people at my company get interrupted by slack all the time, and they complain about it. I disable all notifications except for @-mentions and DMs (and then I only have desktop notifications; mobile is disabled). If I'm expecting to not want interruptions at all, I go to DnD mode for a bit. And yet, when I tell people this, they just somehow claim they can't do what I do for some hand-wav…

Maybe because when you disable notifications you still get the god damned red dot/badge thing. They make it very hard to find out where to disable that.

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

#256
post #255
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get this. Some people at my company get interrupted by slack all the time, and they complain about it. I disable all notifications except for @-mentions and DMs (and then I only have desktop notifications; mobile is disabled). If I'm expecting to not want interruptions at all, I go to DnD mode for a bit. And yet, when I tell people this, they just somehow claim they can't do what I do for some hand-wav…

Maybe because when you disable notifications you still get the god damned red dot/badge thing. They make it very hard to find out where to disable that.

Disabling that is a feature built into your OS (well, at least on iOS and macOS)

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

#257
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All of which are nearly unusable. Voice performance is abysmal.

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

#258
post #189

Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.

Having broken things sent a webhook to an #alerts channel is so very excellent. Various channels for home and work and they have been great. I’m sure there are better tools out there, but this has really changed things for the better for me.

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

#259
post #139

>net loss of nearly $139 million Even that seems like a lot to spend, and that is just the loss... I wonder where the money goes. Granted it is a big impressive product but still it would be interesting to track expenses for a company as they approach unicorn status.

> I wonder where the money goes.

Cost of Revenue: $51M

R&D: $157M

Sales & Marketing: $233M

General & Administrative: $112M

[Source: their S-1]

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