I think Slack is a bit undervalued more than over valued. The market is big enough for Slack + Microsoft, Amazon Chime, G Suite and so many other players to coexist. Also Slack to me feels like a good enough messaging apps.
P.S: I hate it's knock-knock chime when engrossed in work and the fact that i have to keep the app running to get notifications.
Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
341–350 of 809 posts
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#342I wish them all the best. But I do hope they stay small in spirit and nimble. One of my favourite things about slack is /feedback and the fact that someone will get back to me within 24hrs. There is no product of this scale that has such a low barrier to feedback/questions/bug report.
Except in my experience they don't actually fix the bugs. For literally years the Slack app would get into a zombie state if your network changed in any way: switched WAPs, got on/off the VPN, switch from wifi to ethernet, etc. The app would still think it had a network connection but it actually didn't. The only way to fix it was with a hard refresh. To this day I still reflexively do a ctrl-r whenever my network ch…
Interesting, I'm on MacOS and in a similar environment (switching vlans etc.) and the socket just reconnects fine both on the web version and the 'app'.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
The site also is a heavy resource hog but you're right that it's overall less. There are plenty of lightweight clients that use the Slack API. I don't see why people complain so hard that the official client is heavy. Weechat with Slack is a dream feels like the good-ole IRC days.
The site doesn’t use any resources when I close its tab.
The desktop app doesn't use any resources when you close it either. What's your point?
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#344It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.
I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can reall…
Slack and IRC are incomparable. Slack has authentication, message retention and search, multimedia attachments, mobile application with notifications, conversation threads, etc.
You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#345To me the succes of Slack also shows how invaluable it is. Companies jumped to it very easily. Everybody just started using it. And the moment something better comes along Slack will be forgotten. I think this is different from Facebook. Company employees come and go so they don't value what they put on Slack very much. And for companies the history on slack is also not very important. Well that's how I see how Slack…
>shows how invaluable
Invaluable means very valuable. From the rest of your comment, I'm not sure that's what you meant?
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#346Earlier 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.
You think enterprise companies switch a product they’re already using with all the integrations to another (possibly inferior) product just because of price? That’s not usually been my experience
No, the switch to a product that is fully integrated with another more important product that they already use.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#347Maybe now they have some money they can finally afford make video chat work on mobile. We ended up switching to zoom for video chat because it worked on phones as well as computers and handled slow connections (US Australia) much better than Slack's electron chat.
I believe they announced a partnership with Zoom rather than competing against them.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#348It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.
That just shows how much IRC is worth.
IRC is just a protocol, it’s a bit like saying Facebook shows how much HTTP is worth.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#349Earlier 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…
> Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive.
A few weeks ago the startup I work for started using NextCloud as a stop-gap till we get O365 and OneDrive. It is ridiculously simple for us at-least to just copy over our entire Dropbox folder to the NextCloud one.
Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
My very-large project switched chat apps in one weekend (backed by a few weeks of prep by IT team). We had JIRA integration on day one, and one or two missing things within a week. It wasn't that big a deal. I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.
Chat history seems like the issue to me. My company has tons of institutional knowledge locked away in slack channels.
> My company has tons of institutional knowledge locked away
I think your company should start working on that problem ASAP.