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Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#391

Post by crazygringo »

paxys wrote: post #111
colinmhayes wrote: post #68

I can't possibly see this going well for salesforce. Buying slack for 70x revenue is insane. Their entire market is going to be eaten by teams and google chat, if it hasn't already. Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software because everyone is already using office. And those that aren't are on g-suite. Slack's recent guidance was horrible too.

Google chat isn't a real competitor in the space. It has always been Slack and MS, and being #2 is a rapidly growing sector is still very valuable.

It certainly is when it comes free with G Suite.

A company that uses G Suite certainly isn't going to use MS, and usually won't choose to pay separately for Slack.

In what sense therefore could it possibly not be a real competitor? It's there, it works, it's fine. It's also relatively young and so we can expect it to improve significantly over the coming years, similar to how Meet has been improving over the past few years.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#392

Post by otterlicious »

dmlittle wrote: post #175
young_unixer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could copy-paste Discord, replace all occurrences of "gaming" for "enterprise" and it would be a much better business communication platform than Slack.

I don't think this is true. You can't really join/leave channels on Discord (yes I'm aware you can use roles to give permissions but it's not the same).

I've never used Slack but in Microsoft Teams there are Teams and Channels and they pretty much map 1:1 to Discord's Servers and Text Channels.

You cannot leave individual channels of a Team though you can mute them and you have even less permissions than Discord.

So maybe it isn't a 1:1 replacement for Slack but it certainly could compete in the field.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#393

Post by TeMPOraL »

brundolf wrote: post #214
gwright wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the details but an earlier message said "70x revenue". It is hard to think of a reason not to sell at that multiple.

Sure, nobody said this doesn't work out well for the founders. Just the product, and its userbase, and future business.

I wonder if and when the society will finally develop an immune response to this business pattern: a) get a large amount of people to tie their lives/businesses to a service you provide, b) sell out to a bigger fish, leaving these users high and dry.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#395

Post by mrgordon »

CharlesW wrote: post #186
blackrock wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams suck. Google Chat? What’s that? I’ll stick with Slack.

Unpopular HN opinion: Teams doesn't suck. It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.

I definitely prefer Slack. Here are a few reasons off the top of my head.

1. Many users have issues where the unmute button is unresponsive. Typically the workaround is to turn off incoming video feeds which isn't exactly ideal. This is a major turnoff.

2. Difficult to stay involved in multiple channels as described by another comment. I find it tedious to find what's happened if I've been away for a while.

3. Slack has bots that do various helpful things including leaving channels you don't use, asking you for your daily standup feedback if you don't have an in person meeting, referencing external content, etc. I assume Teams must have something similar but I've never seen them used which likely indicates its a lot easier to do with Slack.

4. Nicer UI as you allude to yourself

5. Slack works with several video chat options including their own (based on AWS tools I believe?) and Zoom. I actually prefer Slack video chat over Zoom or Teams for pair programming as its so easy to annotate the screen without clicking into a bunch of menus or being the meeting owner or something. You literally just start drawing on the screen and your coworkers see it

6. Excellent mobile app which is quite important for a chat client

7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually)

8. Not tied in to only Microsoft products

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#396

Post by Washuu »

brenryd wrote: post #60
easton wrote: post #14

I'm somewhat surprised that Amazon didn't end up acquiring Slack, considering that the major thing they are missing compared to Microsoft is productivity tools. If they had purchased Dropbox and Slack they could've gotten a foothold rather quickly and slowed down one of Microsoft's major selling points (you already use Office, why not Azure?). Discord could be another interesting company in the chat space, as I'm sur…

Discord could be interesting as Amazon has already shown interest in the gaming / streaming / online community space with their Twitch acquisition.

Twitch already purchased Curse Voice about four years ago and renamed it to the Twitch Desktop application. It was what Discord is now before Discord existed. That was already a losing battle when Twitch made the purchase though so they ended up stripping out all of those features. It would have made more sense for them to buy Discord back then.

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/Ending-Support-for-Voice-Ch...

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#397

Post by mvanbaak »

zests wrote: post #182
na85 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see IRC make a comeback but the fact is IRC on mobile is a pain in the ass. Users want persistence and IRC is designed for the opposite.

IRC is pretty much perfect. No "X user is typing" messages. No ads, no tracking, no javascript. No hidden instance of chrome running. The community even self selects in to my own interests.

Dont get why you are downvoted. You list exactly the reasons why we also use IRC.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#398

Post by jasonv »

colinmhayes wrote: post #278
jasonv wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mobile Google Chat still doesn't let you switch accounts, like Hangouts supports. Perplexing, given how much people in the Google-sphere context switch.

Chat is now built into the gmail app which is much easier to switch on.

I see Meet, but not Chat, and none of my Chats show up in the Gmail app (iOS), and there's a separate Chat app (which doesn't do the account switching I mentioned).

If Chat is built in, I don't see it yet.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#399

Post by emmanueloga_ »

IceWreck wrote: post #228
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #121

Whatever happened to matrix.org/vector/riot.im/element.io? (side note: most confusing branding ever :-/). Element seemed to be picking up some momentum a few months back. There was recent news that they acquired gitter too [1]. These days I only hear about slack exodus and discord this and discord that, though. If I get it right, from all the group messengers that appeared around 6 years ago, the only one with an ope…

I think you're missing out RocketChat

Oh!

Seems like it's been around at least since 2015, it is open source, and it supports audio and video chat. Pretty impressive... and yet, I truly forgot about it!

1: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/graphs/contributor...

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