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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

#621

Post by ccantana »

beatgammit wrote: post #398
askafriend wrote: post #361

Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success. All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us more productive. I would hate to go back to what came before it. IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.

What's wrong with the UX of IRC? IRC is a protocol, not a specific client, and it supports a wide variety of server and client plugins. We had a really nice IRC going productively for a year or two, but we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text). The nice thing about IRC is that everyone…

> What's wrong with the UX of IRC?

One sentence later:

> ...we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text).

Clearly something was wrong with the UX if only one person was willing to use it?

This place is a parody of itself sometimes.

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

#622

Post by snarf21 »

boomlinde wrote: post #544
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 co…

This is the point. People keep saying "it is just IRC" but the thing they forget is it is IRC+ with practically no setup. If you want Enterprise or consumer adoption, you must make it easy. Just like what you said with Dropbox. Install client, data automatically available everywhere I log in. That is the product and it actually solves a problem people have.

However, as we have already seen Dropbox has already been commoditized and is looking for a reboot. I see the same thing happening with Slack. It will be the king for a while but it has no moat.

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

#623

Post by cheez »

Sahhaese wrote: post #609
bpicolo wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why aren't new and existing technology companies embracing these protocols and making them ubiquitous? Because they don't want to be at the behest of protocol maintainers to improve their product? Their goals and the goals of maintainers would never align. Open source is great, but open source moves at slow pace compared to what a revenue-driven company can. There's a reason that most of the big open source project…

Open source moves at a slow pace now , but look at HTML between 1994 and 1998, that was a fast-moving and exciting time.

It looks like 1-to-N protocols can grow organically without significant investment (HTTP, hypertext), but N-to-M (chat, social media) cannot.

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

#624

Post by jerf »

Sahhaese wrote: post #609
bpicolo wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why aren't new and existing technology companies embracing these protocols and making them ubiquitous? Because they don't want to be at the behest of protocol maintainers to improve their product? Their goals and the goals of maintainers would never align. Open source is great, but open source moves at slow pace compared to what a revenue-driven company can. There's a reason that most of the big open source project…

Open source moves at a slow pace now , but look at HTML between 1994 and 1998, that was a fast-moving and exciting time.

Which was driven by Netscape, a revenue-driven company.

Complaints about corporations capturing HTML are not new; Google is merely the latest in the line. (That's not to diminish the fact that it's still bad every time. It's just this isn't the first time.)

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

#625

Post by chillacy »

dTal wrote: post #565
bouk wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC has terrible UX, and Slack beat it because the experience is better.

That's not an intrinsic problem with IRC-the-protocol. The only technical issue with it is the lack of server-side channel history scrollback which makes it inconvenient for users who aren't connected 100% of the time. This could have been entirely solved with a single extra server command - "/fetch-channel-history". But I suppose no one was convinced of the need. If you wanted to make a modern, user-friendly chat ap…

By the time slack published the RFC and got a few people on board someone else would have launched and taken all its customers

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

#627

Post by ebiester »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #528
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…

I predict that, one year from now, few people will be talking about Slack and, two years from now, Slack will be teetering on insolvency.

Those 50 largest customers are unlikely to move away within the next two years, and neither are most businesses. I can see someone worry about growth, but they're not going away in 2 years.

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

#628

Post by efficax »

fastball wrote: post #26
zild3d wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2018 revenue was $400 million, ~doubled the previous year - Slack isn't a company with just a ton of free users and no monetization

40x still seems like an insane multiple.

It's a great time to IPO

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

#629

Post by monsieurbanana »

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.

I've met only a few programmers IRL that complained about slack, and even then it was for ideological reasons, not user experience reasons. Everyone else, most programmers and all non-programmers I know like the user experience.

I haven't had any real issues with desktop or mobile apps either.

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

#630

Post by tallanvor »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #439
cush wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing 12 months ago Teams. It's come a long way.

Some of my co-workers switched to Teams. They show up as offline on Skype for Business. I haven't moved to it yet because I require a chat application that works and allows people to contact me.

People showing up as offline doesn't affect the ability to send them messages, though.

Teams has it's own issues, but messages getting delivered isn't one of them.

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