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Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

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Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#421
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they had net income of -$570M (that's a minus sign in front) because their operational losses are staggeringly high.

What's the difference here? How can GAAP profit and net income be nearly a billion dollars in difference? I thought GAAP was standard accounting? What kind of operational losses are not included in GAAP

You left out the word "gross" but that word is important here. GAAP gross profit doesn't include operational cost, only product production cost. That's why it's gross and not net.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google chat, lol. Which one? Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?

Don’t forget about the new Google Pay, which has its own messaging feature for some reason

Tangential question, is the new Google Pay a completely separate product from the old Google wallet? Because a lot of the functionality seems to be the same but I get the impression it was probably re-implemented since a lot of that functionally was removed from Google wallet years ago.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#424
post #372

Anyone read the press release? Salesforce wants to use Slack as an input device driver. Imagine slacking with your customers, colleagues etc... need to create a DB entry? Slack command. Need to schedule some follow up, slack command. Need to track a bunch of tasks? Slack-Force integrations. I see an AI bot here to help get that data into Salesforce. To quote: "Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of e…

Last year I somehow ended up using the iOS imessage thing where I chat directly with a company and it was excellent. Never saw or heard of it again, but I would love to have a similar ability on slack.

I have to chat with like ~10 vendors on a weekly basis for short-burst communication and end up having a bunch of weird shared slack-room things. Salesforce could clean that up and it'd be a great b2b messaging system.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#425
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they had net income of -$570M (that's a minus sign in front) because their operational losses are staggeringly high.

What's the difference here? How can GAAP profit and net income be nearly a billion dollars in difference? I thought GAAP was standard accounting? What kind of operational losses are not included in GAAP

The distinguishing term here is not GAAP, it's gross vs. net profit. Both of which can be calculated under GAAP.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#426
post #382
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my god the absolute worst thing about slack are threads. Can we please not bring them to anything else? how do they provide any value whatsoever other than making it hard to realize someone responded to you? Signed, Someone who used IRC for decades

Personally, big fan of Slack threads. I use them daily in our team chat -- we can talk in the main chat about anything relevant to the whole team, and if someone has a specific comment on someone's message, they reply and create a thread while the rest of the conversation continues on. The nesting-within-a-larger-conversation aspect felt very intuitive to me. I've been in other Slack workspaces that didn't use thread…

Personally, I do like the concealed nature of threads within the main conversation, but I do not like how they are presented when opened. The whole "displayed on a narrow pane on the side" seems too cluttered to me. I'd much rather have it expand in the main conversation pane, maybe even create nested threads inside (kind of like reddit/HN).

Thread notifications are another pain point, as others have also noted. For some reason, all thread updates/notifications are clustered together in a separate tab called "Threads", regardless of what channels these threads belong to. If a thread (that I am following) belonging to a channel has an update, shouldn't that channel be highlighted? Now that I think about it, if that channel is highlighted and the user clicks on it, how is the user going to know which thread to check... all I can say is, threading in chat rooms is a non-trivial problem and while Slack gets some part of it right, there's still a ways to go.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#427
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder what's going to happen to free tier. Some integration into core Salesforce might make sense for reps / teams. Another useful product might be live chats based on Slack tech. Seems good fit, but I do wonder how well they are going to integrate.

maybe free tier was never sustainable and was only a tactic to increase user volume and thus increase Heroku valuation towards an acquisition.

[deleted]

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#428

I'm not a slack power user, but I feel that it's a bit like IRC but with a fancy (and slow) GUI wrapped around it. Certainly I am wrong, but how wrong?

As far as messengers go, IRC is about as far from Slack as you can get. Two main differences:

1. You can't send IRC messages to people who are offline (yes you can work around this with bouncers etc. but that's beside the point). You can send Slack messages to people who are offline.

2. Slack is a proprietary, centralized system. Slack, the company, decides who is allowed to participate, and at what cost. IRC is a federated protocol, where different servers can be part of the same network, or part of a different network. You can set up a server or client by yourself if you want.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#429

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.

Ive never used anything but slack at work and that's with 4 different organizations. Microsoft teams was tried and ppl just kept using slack regardless.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#430

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.

> Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software

Is that really true? I'm biased since I'm on the dev side, but everyone I know is using macbook pros, with very rare stragglers using windows or linux, and they use web clients for most stuff (e.g. gsuite, etc) rather than thick clients. I suspect with the push to working from home this will only accelerate.

This is a shame, since I like Microsoft Office products and am one of the few people I know who thinks VB is a great productivity tool, .Net is superior (in terms of language design) to Java, and Excel, Visio are better than anything else out there. But it's been almost a decade since anyone I know has needed to use that stuff in the office.

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