There is no way Slack is worth $16 billion dollars. That's over 40x current revenue for a company that lost almost $400,000 a day last year.
Dude, when you see the valuations of other unicorns you're gonna be soo pissed...
Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
291–300 of 809 posts
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Uber did use HipChat instead of Slack, but mostly because Slack was uninterested in standing up servers for Uber. My understanding is that Slack basically ran a single server instance for each Slack team. Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional. It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages w…
" It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone."
That was my hipchat experience a few months ago. Thankfully I don't have to use it anymore
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
Why do you make it sound like some shady back-door deal? Our grey-beard entirely Linux using ops staff would drop Slack for MS teams at the drop of a hat to get that money back in the budget. You can only waste so much money when the entire office demands Office. Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will alwa…
Can confirm. Desktop Linux-using ops staff here, we're moving from dropbox to onedrive in the next ~month, and I'd switch from Slack to Teams if it didn't suffer from the same problem all MS IM products (UWP/Chromium Skype- & Lync-based alike) seem to face: intermittent failures to push notifications.
We route alerts through IM primarily, and are remote-first. I get that some folks here complain about their inability to ignore chat notifications, but there's a decent chunk of us that need to find our uninterrupted time where we can, not when we want.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stealing WeWork’s thunder... A smart move, though perhaps a little painful for all the existing plans the WeWork marketing department had.
WeWork is rebranding as "The We Company", so the word WORK is probably not their #1 choice https://www.fastcompany.com/90289512/exclusive-wework-to-reb...
That's terrible.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#295Anybody who thinks they know for sure that slack can't possibly be worth $16B should go back and read some threads from around the Facebook IPO (like this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320585). It's very easy to write reasonable sounding things - making accurate predictions about the future is much harder.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#296Just 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.
We're a small team of a bit more than 10 people and slack has definitely improved our lifes.
Before there was always someone moving around to talk to someone else or internal E-Mails which are equally bad.
We use slack sparingly and only have a few channels with many people. Most things happen in private channels. We always "idle-ping" other team members first and do not expect an immediate response.
The result is a much calmer office. People move around less and there is less chatter. And we still have the option to use group chat if required.
We even added a channel where new commit messages are automatically posted. A wonderful thing to keep informed about what's going on and you can take immediate action if you see something strange.
I think this all falls apart if our team size would increase. But I believe for teams with less than 25 people slack is perfectly fine. Above that size notifications probably start to be annoying.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
My company is already paying for Teams as part of our O365 Installation. We won't use it, simply because of the network effect the Shared Channels have created. We have shared channels with Integration Partners, Suppliers, Enterprise Customers... These are extremely valuable ways of communication once setup, especially with simple file-transfer thrown in, etc. Leaving Slack would mean slamming the door in the face of…
I don’t know a single enterprise client that enables external Slack users. People are far too careless with what they share in IM (like private SSH keys and IP addresses), and Slack history is a juicy target for hackers diving for secrets. Enterprise users usually just use it for internal messaging.
I'm in a chat or two as a "single channel" user only, and I'm external to that company. It's not uncommon and depends on the scale I think.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#298Just moved to Workplace by Facebook from Slack. Love it. Async communication via posts is way better than incentivized real-time for everything. edit: lol, this is downvoted? nice.
I am not sure exchanging one walled garden for an even higher walled garden is good practice.
Everything is a walled garden, if you're that paranoid just pipe everything into your own DB through API capture.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options. Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.
One little detail: the MS offering should work adequately. If Lync (Skype for Business) is any indication, building well-working enterprise messaging is hard. Unless cost-cutting is your central concern, you want your internal communication to use the best, least-friction tools. Here Slack has quite an advantage.
What advantages does Slack have over Zoom? Microsoft Teams seems to compete more with the latter than the former.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t this what threads are for?
I've only used discord -- do threads exist on slack? Or is GP right and lack of threads is a major downfall of chat apps, including slack?
Slack does have threads. Everyone at my company is quick to remind those who don’t use them.