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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

#611

Post by notjustanymike »

fasteo wrote: post #493

>>> More than 88,000 Paid Customers, including more than 65 companies in the Fortune 100; and >>> We had 575 Paid Customers >$100,000 of ARR as of January 31, 2019, which accounted for approximately 40% of our revenue in fiscal year 2019. If my math is right, 40% of their revenue is concentrated in I also saw that this is a direct listing and not an IPO. Again, I can only see this as a risk, basically because no unde…

Most of the places I worked had 2 or 3 whales. 55 whales is actually pretty good.

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

#612

Post by jasode »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #580
zimbatm wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except people still release protocols. Just look at https://matrix.org/ IRC is an early protocol and wasn't designed for extensibility purposes. A new chat protocol just needs to replace it.

IRC was created in 1988. There have been several chat protocols created since then [1]. A few notable protocols that tick a lot of "modern" boxes: - Jami - Matrix - Signal Protocol - XMPP The better question: why aren't new and existing technology companies embracing these protocols and making them ubiquitous? Personally I think it's because companies have a vested interest in creating walled gardens. The more users…

>It's against their business interest to create a product that works with their competitors.

There's more to it than a simplistic "business interest" to explain it.

For example, the Signal protocol is free to use. No payments for patent royalties or software licenses required. Moxie Marlinspike's company Signal LLC (Open WhisperSystems) is a non-profit entity.

But notice that an organization that isn't pressured into making a profit and that's using an underlying free protocol -- does not want to federate with LibreSignal[0].

This an example of where the "openness of a protocol" runs into a hard reality of "closed wall of implementation". The protocols themselves can cost $0 but implementations (e.g. cpu+disk+bandwidth+staff) cost more than $0 which leads to complaints of it being "not really open".

If people do not examine the economic forces surrounding any protocol, they will always be perplexed why the internet is not as free & open as they think it should be. Even non-profit entities are not immune from economic forces.

[0] https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

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

#613

Post by Spivak »

vmurthy wrote: post #349
Spivak wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hear that. I wish I could deploy Nextcloud at my company. We have plenty of resources and storage. Not paying per user per month would be so so so nice.

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

#614

Post by CondensedBrain »

wildduck wrote: post #608
CondensedBrain wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActivityPub shows a lot of promise.

Also look at dat:// take a look. Beaker browser.

ActivityPub (AP) has the advantage of running on top of HTTP. You don't have to convince people to install a new browser. All the tools that communicate over AP run on familiar technologies. The hardest part is convincing people to make an account, so most growth is from people following friends--the key incentive--to Mastodon instances. It's not a big problem in practice. Monoculture concerns aside.

AP doesn't have to run on HTTP, but any alternative has the same problem as anything else that needs its own client. Even browser support for FTP is on the way out, and it used to be standard.

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

#615

Post by sb8244 »

hackerpacker wrote: post #605
granshaw wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols. Without money to be made there’s no funding. Without funding there’s no way to create great experiences. Without great experiences nobody will use the thing. Pretty straightforward, really

On the other hand, I don't think anyone accused slack, with multi-megabyte webpages and even worse mobile app, of being a great experience. I think I used it once, and said no more.

Do these things matter to most users? The non engineers at my work have never complained about slack.

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

#616

Post by pjmorris »

vntok wrote: post #597
pjmorris wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, as a counterexample, HTML and HTTP persist. Maybe things aren't as straightforward as they seem.

I don't get how your point is a counter example to the parent's argument? I think there is a lot of money to be made in building on HTML and HTTP. For one, a faster HTTP protocol directly means more cost efficiency in hosting and streaming content, better customer conversions, etc.

IMO, HTTP and HTML are counter-examples to the statement 'There’s no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols.' because they're open protocols that have attracted a great deal of money, and plenty of people creating and building on them.

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

#617

Post by Grue3 »

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.

Well, I've been saying Snapchat can't possibly be worth $29bn when it did IPO. And surprise, it lost most of this value. Snapchat is a lot like Slack - it's a feature, not a product. Once Facebook copied the feature, Snapchat was doomed. Same will happen with Slack (in this case I think MSFT will be its undoer).

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

#618

Post by it33 »

vageli wrote: post #576
ourcat wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mattermost is a fantastic open source alternative to Slack, nicely integrated with Gitlab. We used Slack on a few projects, but the thought of using a third-party to host corporate development discussion was an absolute no-no in the long run. It's staggering how fast people are to pay for something when there's a cheaper (or free) alternative out there, these days.

> Mattermost is a fantastic open source alternative to Slack, nicely integrated with Gitlab. > We used Slack on a few projects, but the thought of using a third-party to host corporate development discussion was an absolute no-no in the long run. > It's staggering how fast people are to pay for something when there's a cheaper (or free) alternative out there, these days. How can you characterize the price as free? Do…

Mattermost CEO here,

You're right that it does take some effort to self manage. We try to make it as easy as we can with a single Linux binary and lots of documentation.

One of the most common scenarios for Mattermost is deploying into a private network, that's invisible to SaaS services.

The software that runs manufacturing plants should never touch the internet. Neither should the backends of financial services companies, and many other industries.

Developers in those companies need to have some way to collaborate, and integrate with their DevOps toolchains and legacy backends, and Mattermost is getting increasingly popular there.

Every open source Mattermost server has all the core features of Slack, including Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, and Slack integrations via webhooks. Every Mattermost server can host hundreds of Slack-compatible teams, and every month over 10,000 servers are downloaded.

Also, if you've installed GitLab already, you just turn on Mattermost as a feature in omnibus. It's really simple to start. When you get to a few hundred users and IT needs to add some more admin and permissions there's some additional setup, but then you can go to hundreds or thousands of users from that setup.

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

#619

Post by randomdata »

vageli wrote: post #589
randomdata wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity. Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on…

> Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity. > Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rel…

> Voice chat is almost always faster for me as it is easier to have a discussion and potentially whiteboard.

Where I find the opposite. The ability to stop and craft a message that is precise gets the job done immediately, rather than the continual back and forth to confirm that each party understands what happens to be uttered in the moment that is inherit to voice chat.

> If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.

A personal one shared by everyone, I guess. Meeting length and frequency has increased substantially. And not only the meetings that I personally take part in, but observed company-wide.

I imagine familiarity is key. If you come from an environment where voice communication is the de facto method, you are going to get good at that style of communication through practice, and then anything else is going to seem less performant. In my case, we spent many years conducting textual communication and gained plenty of practice at it. Now, voice communication is the unfamiliar ground.

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

#620

Post by eloisant »

Sahhaese wrote: post #529
antirez wrote: post #488

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

We never got an instant messaging that works like email, for one.
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