71–80 of 809 posts
It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B for that is a complete insanity. This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales
obligatory "Dropbox is just a trivial ftp server plus SVN" [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Slack takes a problem users have ("my coworkers keep bugging me with stupid questions") and makes the problem worse, because now your coworkers can see that you're online and demand instant answer :)
Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free. I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert…
https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/
I do agree that product iteration has been slow. That's been a big problem for Slack, and it's my biggest speculation on their valuation. As someone who has seen inside the company (don't work there), their engineering teams have a ton of technical debt they've been making their way through and trying to set right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
My company is already paying for Teams as part of our O365 Installation. We won't use it, simply because of the network effect the Shared Channels have created. We have shared channels with Integration Partners, Suppliers, Enterprise Customers... These are extremely valuable ways of communication once setup, especially with simple file-transfer thrown in, etc. Leaving Slack would mean slamming the door in the face of…
Is 16B really too high of a valuation when Atlassian is double the market cap at 32B? Both have similar products (collaboration/productivity) and are extremely sticky.
Atlassian has a wider suite of products. I would say HipChat is the Slack alternative. Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello. And Atlassian is more developer centric whereas Slack is monetizing enterprise users.
> Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello.
And thank goodness for that, because those are awful as well.
Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free. I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert…
It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.
Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free. I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert…
How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on? I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist…
Discord has better options for channel control.
Slack has better integrations with software development tools
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.
Choose your customers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Free is there to be a sales demo without deadlines with a casual shrug for people who aren't going to pay, I wouldn't ever use slack if it wasn't my intention to play and slack wouldn't miss me. Choose your customers.