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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

#541

Post by rubyfan »

hellofunk wrote: post #451
bborud wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy. What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.

My personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards. This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.

The internet’s previous models were doomed to fail. Service providers did not have a reliable monetization scheme. Client apps for open protocols have rarely had wide adoption and longevity, especially anything you had to pay for. I can think of plenty of examples of paid client apps from the late 90s/early 2000s... email clients, web, irc, etc. that just aren’t around because not enough people would pay for the client to sustain their development.

Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.

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

#542

Post by Dirlewanger »

emtel wrote: post #295

Anybody 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.

Not really comparable. Facebook has been a full-blown ecosystem for end users even before their IPO. Slack is a productivity tool that your tech job forces you to use. I envisioned Slack's exit being a Microsoft/Amazon acquisition.

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

#543

Post by Myrmornis »

bborud wrote: post #392
Roritharr wrote: post #5

Well deserved. Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.

You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy. What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.

> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software.

You need to explain a claim like that.

On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?

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

#544

Post by boomlinde »

loeg wrote: post #302

It'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 can't say that I'm a fan of Slack, but in a sense, what they did to IRC (and associated tools like logging bouncers) is what Dropbox did to rsync. Take something that works for people willing to give it time and effort, centralize it, make it a bit flashier and minimize setup to make it accessible to more people.

The user experience for both these tools haven't been great for me, but streamlining them for casual computer users evidently has a lot of commercial value.

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

#545

Post by mehrdadn »

igbrdjk wrote: post #540
mehrdadn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never used Slack out of choice either. I've used it because I was forced to due to others' decisions. So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.

> So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over. I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments). But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.

Your exporter goes beyond the 10k limit for DMs on a free plan?

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

#546

Post by scarface74 »

markmark wrote: post #377
scarface74 wrote: post #137

They will be “successful” once they become profitable. Until then, they still haven’t proven that they have a business model where they can charge customers enough to cover expenses.

They could be profitable tomorrow by decreasing their advertising spend. Their current customers are absolutely profitable, they're just choosing to use some of that money investors are throwing at them to keep growing.

You’re making the assumption that they have no churn and that they don’t need to acquire new customers.

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

#547

Post by conanbatt »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #311
henning wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat Stay up? I was at a company that was on Hipchat, and we really liked it, but the amount of downtime got to be semi-unbearable. We switched to Slack and it had much better uptime.

Hipchat had service issues at the same time Slack was getting momentum. It was terrible timing for HipChat.

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

#548

Post by buboard »

ethbro wrote: post #538
buboard wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think federation has anything to do with it. There were no incentives to bring it to consumers though (in contrast e.g. to email), and by itself it is not easy to use for vast majority of end users.

The email protocols pre-date commercial access to the internet. So incentives were very different when it was created.

so does IRC. I believe even if it adopted IRC as a protocol, slack would still be successful, it's all about the UI being dumb-proof, friendly and capable and seemingly in-vogue. Discord, even more.

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

#549

Post by pteraspidomorph »

roel_v wrote: post #531
raverbashing wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that) Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack

I'll admit I haven't been on IRC in 20 years, but while I remember fiddling with active/passive FTP settings and port forwarding every week at the very least, I do not remember any times where I had similar issues on IRC (using mIRC and later various Linux IRC clients, mostly Xchat and BitchX) in the 1890's. I don't know how it would have worked though, thinking about it. (and I think from the above description of my…

When using DCC send in passive mode the sender listens on a local port (59 by default) and sends the receiver a CTCP message (an IRC protocol PRIVMSG message wrapped in \x01) containing their IP address in integer format and the port number. If the receiver accepts their client connects to the sender's open socket and the file is immediately dumped through the connection.

In theory there must be some scheme for forwarding the port through a firewall on the sender side, which might be setting the sending device as "DMZ". Or you can put the burden on the receiver by using active mode.

mIRC should really support UPnP by now but I don't think it does?

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

#550

Post by Certhas »

buboard wrote: post #526
avip wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not an inevitable result of federation and decentralization as governance? A camel is a horse designed by a committee , as the saying has it.

I dont think federation has anything to do with it. There were no incentives to bring it to consumers though (in contrast e.g. to email), and by itself it is not easy to use for vast majority of end users.

Federation prevents experimenting, iterating and developing the protocol forward.

Yes there are all sort of workarounds like protocol extensions and what have you not, but then you add massive new friction to the system ("No sorry my client doesn't do OpenVideoCall2.0 it only does LibreAVConference0.3"). That type of friction isn't that hard to deal with if you have a bunch of tech savvy people with time on their hands. But it is no longer appropriate for todays web that is used by everyone.

> Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It’s what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

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