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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

#771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another area it's very sticky is 'SlackOps' - i.e. putting your devops commands and notifications into Slack. Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.

We are all about Slackops! Trying to build a company around it https://slack.com/apps/AAQ1WT8MD-rigd

I wish you luck! This is a pretty smart wave to ride, I think. Having gone the DIY route setting up my own bots backed by lambdas etc, which was a fair amount of work, I will definitely say there's an obvious market opportunity here for an easy 'set up in a few clicks' solution that hooks into a bunch of the obvious services (CI, cloud, kubectl, etc).

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

#772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully". But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than…

I use Slack every day in the Desktop Electron app and the iOS app. Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive. OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a differen…

It wasn't claimed to be "beautiful", it was that it "works beautifully". And if it's not accessible, for a serious amount of people, it doesn't work. At all.

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

#773

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.

Nah, this is a super slanted view of things. Their business succeeds because they've made a best in class amazing thing, not because everyone begrudgingly wants to see their history, lol

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

#774

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.

Nah, this is a super slanted view of things. Their business succeeds because they've made a best in class amazing thing, not because everyone begrudgingly wants to see their history, lol

I'm not claiming they haven't made an otherwise great product, but if their business doesn't rely on this then why are they doing it?

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

#775

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.

That is a very hot take. You're under the impression that nobody thinks slack is a great user experience? What?

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

#776
With all these IPOs coming to market at nearly 50-60 times their earnings remind me of the dot com era. Bond yields are inverting just like before the previous crash in 2008. I see another wealth transfer on the horizon. The smart money is securing the bag.

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

#777
post #392

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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?

Search doesn't work in slack! Have to use chrome incremental search!

Price/sales = 42, bubble stock ...

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

#778
post #282
post #234

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We switched from Slack to Discord in our community and I prefer it. It feels faster to me, the Slack app on a Mac got really slow after a while. I wish Discord added Telegram style voice messages and it would be perfect. To be totally honest I still think forums like phpbb where much better but they didn't really transitioned to the mobile world. I miss them.

Tapatalk is pretty solid for forums on mobile.

Thanks I'll check it out!

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

#779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully". But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than…

I use Slack every day in the Desktop Electron app and the iOS app. Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive. OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a differen…

And people still mock my editor choice for being eight megabytes and constantly swapping.

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

#780
post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service? Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers. "Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it…

IRC is better than you're suggesting: * Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly. * DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's ins…

Jira is too flexible so the right way to do things is never apparent.
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