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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

#691

Post by wuliwong »

mcv wrote: post #659
tallanvor wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard anyone call Jira the industry standard. There's way too much fragmentation in that market for anyone to be able to make that claim. Jira can work well or it can work very poorly. It really depends on what you're trying to do with it and what resources you're willing to pour into it. That's why some people love it while others hate it.

It looks like the industry standard from where I'm sitting. Of all the companies I've worked for in the past 15 years, both as employee and as freelancer, I think only 2 didn't use Jira. 3 if I count my private projects (I used Pivotal). In all that time, the only thing I've really heard people complain about, was when it was slow or down.

I'll see your anecdotal experience and raise you mine: in 9 years I've only worked with one company that did use Jira.

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

#692

Post by ken »

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.

> 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.

To me, that sounds exactly like someone defending AppleTalk, AOL, ICQ, or Minitel. Focus on usability, not interoperability. That's what people want, right?

When it comes to communications, what matters even more than user experience, in the long run, is being compatible with everyone, even your competitors. There will always be customers who don't use your system, so lacking compatibility or federation will be a thorn in your side for as long as you exist. I've run out of fingers to count the incompatible proprietary chat systems I've seen die off.

Even Google has killed off a few of their own, and Hangouts is next. Just being a young smart agile tech company does not make you immune.

In 10 years, I bet people will be communicating over email, IRC, POTS/SMS, plus 4 or 5 new tech startups created by people who are in elementary school right now. Nobody's arguing that $(proprietary_system) doesn't make you more productive today (that's the point!), but they always have a sell-by date.

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

#693

Post by moneil971 »

djsumdog wrote: post #666
notjustanymike wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've noticed this too. I worked for companies that had one big customer; possibly branching out with two or three others. But if that one big customer ever went away, the company would probably collapse. They really should have just been bought and made a subsidiarity: https://penguindreams.org/blog/tech-culture-shock-from-ameri...

Sometimes that is the strategy: create something cool and hope to get purchased. Having worked at a company that was likely one of Slack’s “whales”, it is a bonus to have feature requests weighted more heavily, but if a tool doesn’t keep everyone else using it happy - you run the risk of some other tool becoming the shiny new thing.

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

#694

Post by danny_taco »

dthedev wrote: post #638
jumbopapa wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the performance of the application is awful. You would think that a $16B company could move away from Electron and make native applications for their platforms.

It's never been awful for me. Even when running it on an iPhone 6S, it has always been nice and responsive.

It is native on iOS but not for desktop.

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

#695

Post by ptman »

mciancia wrote: post #635
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.

Sad thing is that matrix is not working really well

how come?

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

#696

Post by wuliwong »

mehrdadn wrote: post #25
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.

I don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even Facebook isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.

Slack has a completely different business model than Facebook. Facebook has no paid tier for its users, all the money comes from advertisers.

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

#697

Post by terminalhealth »

buryat wrote: post #679
terminalhealth wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, it is not worth $16B. It's straight forward existing ideas crowbarred into a modern webapp that really any 10-headed team of highly talented web programmers could come up with and implement within a month or so. So it is maybe worth 10 * $100 000 / 12 = $83 333, so it is overvalued by a factor of 192 000. Highly indicative of an economic bubble.

> a modern webapp that really any 10-headed team of highly talented web programmers could come up with and implement within a month or so infamous dropbox comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I know, valuation in tech is most often about reach, not so much about the technology itself. This raises the important question whether anything should be allowed to have as much reach.

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

#698

Post by ptman »

achingtooth wrote: post #590
SamuelAdams wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 might be because Slack has support, a great UI, lots of users, and 'just works'. A company I worked with tried to setup Riot and Matrix and they were having all sorts of problems. Even when they tried to use the Riot.im website there were bugs and features from Slack they needed that were missing. What Matrix and Riot.im is doing is still good though, I hope it takes off.

Matrix is improving all the time. 1.0 was just released

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

#699

Post by nirvdrum »

Myrmornis wrote: post #539
mcv wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single one of my clients uses Jira, and nobody I've ever met had a problem with it. It works, it's flexible, it's pretty easy to use. It's the industry standard, and for good reason, as far as I can tell.

Meet me. I'm not sure what you're talking about. Confluence is OKish. But Jira is absurdly bad. I'm talking about the UI for creating Issues and Epics etc. The front-end devs that wrote it simply didn't have the ability. The parser for entering markup such as preformatted code blocks just doesn't work a lot of the time. The newer "Visual mode" just doesn't work a lot of the time. It simply needs to switch over to mar…

Not that it really matters much, but a lot of the design issues you're highlighting are due to the age of the software and Atlassian's seeming commitment to not breaking backward compatibility. In particular, Jira predates Markdown, so the software adopted the text formatter of the day, which was textile[0]. This is where the `bq.` syntax comes from. Jira didn't invent it from whole cloth -- it was adopted because that was the standard of the day. Likewise, it predates StackOverflow by a good 7 years. Some of the JavaScript used is old enough to be a college freshman.

As and end user, you may not (and probably should not) care about the historical context of its design decisions. But it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers. They've simply placed a large premium on backward compatibility and are still around today in large part because of that. Having said that, they really should find a way to support both Textile and Markdown if for no other reason than Bitbucket uses Markdown and it's confusing as hell having to switch between the two syntaxes if your company uses both products.

[0] -- https://textile-lang.com/

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

#700

Post by adwww »

porker wrote: post #405
scarface74 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options. Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.

> What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” Or Salesforce Chatter. Enough companies handing Salesforce good money that adding this on makes sense.

I've never worked anywhere where Salesforce was available outside of select teams. In fact, last time I had access to it I kept finding my access had been 'lent' to another user because the per seat license was so expensive.
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