[HN Gopher] Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
___________________________________________________________________
Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
Author : jmsflknr
Score : 424 points
Date : 2020-12-01 21:10 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.salesforce.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.salesforce.com)
| [deleted]
| qppo wrote:
| This is one of those acquisitions that makes me think there's a
| tech bubble. Hope I'm wrong.
| easton wrote:
| I'm somewhat surprised that Amazon didn't end up acquiring Slack,
| considering that the major thing they are missing compared to
| Microsoft is productivity tools. If they had purchased Dropbox
| and Slack they could've gotten a foothold rather quickly and
| slowed down one of Microsoft's major selling points (you already
| use Office, why not Azure?). Discord could be another interesting
| company in the chat space, as I'm sure they are considering an
| enterprise play (if they aren't they are insane, considering they
| have one of the more user friendly chat services and with SSO and
| a SLA they could probably charge $10 per user).
|
| (Yes, I know Chime exists. But I don't think I've ever heard of
| anyone using it, and Slack is still rather popular.)
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Amazon pays under market for acquisitions while sf pays above
| market. Unclear if slack would ever grow revenue to the level
| sf is offering at, nor if shrinking set of alternative high-
| payers like cisco/google/other will, so cashing out while they
| can at such a high level makes sense.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Amazon is more likely to buy Discord.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| They also need email. They should buy Zimbra.
| naringas wrote:
| however amazon is not really a tech-first company, their main
| business is retail (even if a lot of their revenue comes from
| AWS).
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| Retail is the lion share of revenue but AWS is over half of
| profits last I checked.
| 98codes wrote:
| Quite the other way, they're a cloud company with a gift
| shop.
| cafed00d wrote:
| I would say Amazon's main business is commerce. They want to
| be involved everywhere people are buying/selling things. AWS
| & Amazon.com are coincidences of them starting up around the
| same time as the internet.
|
| Before long, they'll own the entire feature for "oh, I need
| to buy cereal. Alexa buy me cereal. Ok, done. <few mins
| later>. I'm passing by the Amazon Go store on way home,
| Alexa. Can I return these shoes I bought last week and pick
| up my cereal there. Sure."
| codegladiator wrote:
| please stop with this meme ? meme is not tech first for
| whatever definitions of /tech first/ you have.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Tech first: Your main product is technology.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| If buying a business would put Amazon in the position of having
| to introduce a new end-user customer support burden, then they
| are unlikely to do so.
|
| Eero devices require this customer support, but that can be
| merged with their IOT support team for all other in-home
| objects. I think Amazon made an exception to their "user
| support is never our priority" choice because they know it's
| the only way to get a physical foothold in our homes, with
| Kindle and Echo, and I think the burden of Eero support was
| worth it to them for the mesh networking technology that has
| been harvested for Sidewalk.
|
| Slack customer support cannot be easily integrated with any
| existing Amazon support team that I'm aware of, and does not
| offer a world-changing advantage to that degree.
| foota wrote:
| Doesn't amazon have relatively good customer support for
| retail? Or are you specifically talking about AWS here?
| CharlesW wrote:
| Not in my experience, at least in the relatively-rare
| occasions where exceptions happen. I had an order which
| Amazon claimed to have been delivered but wasn't, and it
| took several days and multiple interactions to resolve.
| Just figuring out a way to talk to a human felt like an
| ARG.
| mike_d wrote:
| The take away is that your issue was resolved. While it
| might not have been a satisfactory experience, you
| received resolution.
|
| If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook,
| you'd still be streaming into the void.
| CharlesW wrote:
| The question was whether Amazon has "relatively good
| customer support for retail", which it doesn't in my
| experience.
|
| If we move the goalpost to "have I been able to resolve
| problems", then yes -- after 30 minutes of research into
| how to hack Amazon customer support in order to talk with
| a human, followed by multiple phone and chat interactions
| with generous on-hold time, I can share that Amazon
| support for retail technically exists and is excellent
| except when compared to 95% of other customer support
| experience I've ever had.
|
| > _If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook,
| you 'd still be streaming into the void._
|
| Ooof, I believe you. I'm Facebook-free, but maybe it's
| time to start looking for another email provider.
| deckard1 wrote:
| Yeah Amazon is really hit-or-miss.
|
| I've had good experiences. But when you have bad
| experiences, they can be really bad. I ordered a TV on
| Amazon (Prime) and it was scheduled for delivery in 3
| days. Because it's a large shipment truck delivery, they
| give you a window. Like Spectrum/Comcast. So I sat home
| all day and... nothing. I checked my messages and almost
| the exact time the delivery window was closing they left
| a message saying "could not deliver will try some other
| time" basically.
|
| It took a month and about 15 customer service reps before
| a single person could tell me where my TV was. I'm not
| exaggerating. They had no clue what happened to a $1,000
| purchase. It fell into their bureaucratic black hole like
| some scene from a Monty Python skit.
| temp667 wrote:
| I have had good support retail side (granted, I'm not
| expecting much on my $20 item). On AWS I've had very good
| support.
|
| Also paying user of google products and GSuite - support
| not great on the gsuite side, but retail order for Google
| Wifi etc pretty OK.
| hbosch wrote:
| > ... I think Amazon made an exception to their "user support
| is never our priority" choice ...
|
| Amazon is virtually the singular FAANG company that not only
| has customer support, but has generally very good customer
| support.
| ruffrey wrote:
| AppleCare and the Apple store Genius Bar are readily
| accessible, too.
| filoleg wrote:
| >Yes, I know Chime exists. But I don't think I've ever heard of
| anyone using it, and Slack is still rather popular.
|
| I think even Amazon realized how awful Chime is, given that
| they, as a company, switched to Slack just a few months ago.
| nopzor wrote:
| i heard this, but all my meetings with amazon folk are still
| on chime. plus, slack audio and video capabilities are imo
| sorely lacking.
| alangibson wrote:
| Chime has the best noise canceling of any service I've used.
| On the other hand, I've only ever used it to talk to Amazon
| employees at their request. That says a lot about adoption.
| variaga wrote:
| Amazon is a big place and I can't speak for all of it, but
| while IT announced that slack was "available" a few months
| ago, I don't personally know anyone that has actually
| switched to using it. Everyone still uses Chime.
|
| That may just be a peculiarity of my department, but saying
| "Amazon as a company switched to slack" is definitely
| overstating what happened.
| dryrunes wrote:
| I think my team switched over the day slack was allowed.
| wil421 wrote:
| Know someone at Amazon in the kindle space and I say them
| using slack when we went to lunch today. He said his team
| uses it for a lot.
| spike021 wrote:
| My org definitely has switched for the most part. But I'm
| sure it's a phased-rollout.
| DigitalBison wrote:
| This is super org-dependent -- my entire org has completely
| switched to Slack, I only use Chime for meetings now
| (except for the occasional recruiter or someone outside my
| org who will ping me on Chime).
| variaga wrote:
| So that's the thing.
|
| Switching to slack was brought up in our org and most
| people were at best noncommittal, because the option
| wasn't really "chime vs. slack", it was "chime vs. chime
| AND slack".
|
| We'd still all need chime for meetings and interacting
| with any groups that hadn't switched.
| spike021 wrote:
| It's actually pretty smooth since you can do `/chime` in
| a Slack channel or DM and it automatically starts a Chime
| call. Otherwise I just keep Chime open for scheduled
| meetings.
| [deleted]
| bhahn wrote:
| I work at a company that spends a lot of money at AWS, and
| one of the many support channels we have now is through
| shared Slack channels.
|
| I can imagine that the main driver behind IT announcing
| Slack support was for their customer-facing staff to be
| able to provide support for their customers.
| filoleg wrote:
| >I don't personally know anyone that has actually switched
| to using it. Everyone still uses Chime.
|
| It must be just your org/team, because a few of my friends
| working there in entirely different orgs had their teams
| switched to Slack fully within the week of announcement.
| Not claiming you are wrong though, because my sample size
| of 3 people/teams is purely anecdata.
| brenryd wrote:
| Discord could be interesting as Amazon has already shown
| interest in the gaming / streaming / online community space
| with their Twitch acquisition.
| mike_d wrote:
| Google needs to buy Discord, do the gluey bits to integrate
| it into GSuite, shut down all its other chat offerings, and
| then let them do their thing.
| chippiewill wrote:
| What Google heard is: buy discord, glue it into everything
| and then shut it all down after 2 years.
| xapata wrote:
| I'm imagining a meeting a few years back, at Google:
|
| "Ok, you know our motto, 'Don't be Evil'"
|
| _Heads nod._
|
| "What if ... what if ... what if we simplify that?"
|
| "How so?"
|
| "Just cut off the first word, 'Be Evil.'? Simple,
| elegant."
|
| "I like it!"
| s3r3nity wrote:
| Given some of their moves with Google Workspace tying
| together Gmail / Meet / Chat, I doubt they could get away
| with this without significant antitrust issues.
|
| They still haven't fully closed on their Fitbit
| acquisition, so I'd expect they'd have a tough hill to
| climb for a Discord or a Slack.
| young_unixer wrote:
| One could copy-paste Discord, replace all occurrences of
| "gaming" for "enterprise" and it would be a much better
| business communication platform than Slack.
| dmlittle wrote:
| I don't think this is true. You can't really join/leave
| channels on Discord (yes I'm aware you can use roles to
| give permissions but it's not the same).
| wincy wrote:
| And replace all instances of "Discord" with "Harmony" and
| you have the perfect Enterprise chat tool!
| tinyhouse wrote:
| | you already use Office, why not Azure?
|
| Not sure why using Office would be a reason to prefer Azure
| over something else. Can you elaborate? Are there some useful
| integrations one can benefit from?
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Amazon would have been frustrating, but I suspect less terrible
| than Salesforce. What a mess.
| qppo wrote:
| > if you already use Office, why not Azure?
|
| My gut reasoning is that cloud infrastructure is not the same
| product as office productivity and the two use cases are not
| the same, the purchasing decisions aren't made by the same
| people (except at scale, I guess, I'll concede that), and the
| boots on the ground building shit in the cloud take the path of
| least resistance where that logic would never apply.
|
| I don't really subscribe to the belief that a company should
| half ass a product or acquire something in a new market because
| they aren't already there, but I may be in the minority. Amazon
| has shown they can build a trillion dollar enterprise without
| caring about office productivity or chat, but they'll sell the
| shovels to anyone who wants to try and dig those holes.
| homarp wrote:
| First, you start with Office 365, then you put some stuff on
| One Drive, you add a little list in SharePoint online, then
| you use Teams to access all that. You move to Azure AD.
|
| And then you want to automate or do some nice charts, and
| there is Power platform just around the corner...
|
| and then you find yourself limited so you go Azure
| Functions... and then start one VM on Azure...
| s_dev wrote:
| Surely S3 is a pebble compared to Dropbox?
| foota wrote:
| You're probably backwards there.
|
| Edit: in 2016 Dropbox stored 400PB
| (https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/magic-pocket-
| infrastruct...), in 2018 S3 was storing multiple exabytes
| (https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Amazon-S3-across-all-
| region...)
|
| I suspect multiple exabytes is a low ball.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Plus, that 400PB Dropbox was storing in 2016 was - until
| around that same time, when they built their Magic Pocket
| system - itself stored on S3.
| TheFlyingFish wrote:
| I'm not as sure about that, given the extent of the chaos
| that ensues every time S3 goes down for half a day.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| At least now we know that slack is enterprise ready
|
| Finally!
| crsv wrote:
| Eh people will be salty about the Salesforce name but honestly
| their acquisition of Heroku hasn't caused me any pains regarding
| our experience with that platform. I'm as skeptical as anyone
| else, and I think there's more risk in a tighter "integration"
| making it a miserable experience. Might be a good time in the
| market for a new Slack competitor!
| iou wrote:
| The pacman continues...
|
| *********** tte ttottottotto
| draw_down wrote:
| Seems like an ignominious end for them. I hope this helps them
| take on MS, I guess.
| subsubzero wrote:
| Kinda bummed by this news. I know a bunch of people over at Slack
| and I'm sure none of them are excited about being acquired. I
| still don't understand how salesforce has gotten so big where
| they can acquire $25B healthy companies which really don't fit
| into their eco-system.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that nobody as Slack is going to be unexcited
| about a 50% stock bump.
|
| I've been on the receiving end of boring acquisitions, and I
| can assure you that the financial upside can excite people
| quite effectively.
| JoeOfTexas wrote:
| Their sales teams have been locking in all major corporations.
| I have no idea how they cornered a market so fast. They are
| living like kings right now.
| op03 wrote:
| Cause gaining Enterprise market share has nothing to do with
| tech and everything to do with scaling a sales team.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Low-code/no-code is a very compelling pitch to businesses that
| see software as cost center.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| It's a compelling pitch, but when it comes to actually using
| low code/no code solutions... well, it's a conversation that
| we re-visit every few years for a reason. Everyone needs
| last-mile customization that requires coding and therefore
| some technical ability.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Sure, of course.
|
| OP was asking how Salesforce got so huge when it has a
| medium-negative reputation among tech folks, and that was
| my answer: Management loves to hear "this will save $$$ on
| software"
| lostcolony wrote:
| Once a company realizes that it's not magical unicorns,
| they're too deeply embedded.
|
| Is it better to spend X every year to just make the
| Salesforce solution work (thereby not having to admit to a
| mistake, and mitigating personal risk), or spend 3X in one
| year to write something in house (that requires maybe
| 1/10th X to maintain/extend from then on, but which is
| riskier, and unlikely to show up on future evals such that
| they can claim credit and get a raise)?
|
| Corporations seem especially vulnerable to sunk cost
| fallacies.
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| Can't wait to see which Slack alternative wins after everyone
| jumps ship.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Teams seems to be doing surprisingly well. Considering how many
| businesses have it "included" with their Office subscriptions,
| it just has to be good enough to avoid someone wanting to pay
| extra for an outside service. If Lync was half as good as Teams
| is now, companies like Slack never would've gotten off the
| ground.
| fakedang wrote:
| Holy hell, Lync is one relic I haven't heard of in a long
| long time.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| We still use Lync aka communicator aka skype. the killer
| feature is screenshare and exchange integration. its actually
| really hard to get some team members to join us on mattermost
| because they don't see the point. :/ Looking forward to teams
| replacing mattermost and business skype going away.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I always found Skype for Business/Lync got confused if you
| had the software installed but weren't part of the
| business' domain. My experiences with SfB were: 1. I'm an
| outside contributor to a company using my personal machine.
| And 2. My organization but whilst using another
| organization's hardware. In both cases, joining Skype for
| Business meetings was downright nightmarish.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I am absolutely not going back to using Teams: it was a
| slower, buggier, poorly-designed and consistently weird
| application.
|
| Google isn't capable of putting together a useful chat and
| then keeping it alive for a meaningful amount of time to save
| their lives.
|
| Discord seems to be on a streak trying to re-invent their
| image as a competitor in the space, and having used it for
| enough gaming related things, I'd definitely consider it for
| work.
|
| Zulip seems to garner a lot of positive attention as well.
| [deleted]
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I wonder if they will rename Slack to Chat Cloud.
| hienyimba wrote:
| I hope this acquisition does not pass regulatory oversight. This
| is how it starts. Very soon, we will have another competition-
| killing, anti-competitive behemoth on our hands like we did with
| FANGM and then we will suddenly ask ourselves how it all
| happened. THIS. Right here. Is how it happens.
| amb23 wrote:
| Salesforce is already a monopoly if you go by volume of revenue
| earned from CRM. No one other than small/niche SaaS businesses
| competes directly for CRM business, and any new CRM startups
| can't get venture funding because it's considered an
| untouchable space by VCs. Every other large player they compete
| with in the CRM space (Hubspot, Zendesk, Oracle) offers a CRM
| as a side product to their main line of business.
|
| This transaction shouldn't be the catalyst for regulatory
| action; regulators should have already taken action.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Why is it considered an untouchable space? Because CRM is so
| dominant? I don't understand what about the space would make
| it so capital intensive to compete against CRM in. They're
| internal tech is known to be very legacy and not cutting
| edge. A tech-competent startup could outmaneuver them.
| They're an Oracle 2.0, who at the time was also deemed
| unassailable, until Cloud and OSS databases ate their lunch.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| The general trend seems to be winner takes all single suppliers
| in each market segment. They have no direct competition so
| eventually become a tax on us all.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _They have no direct competition..._
|
| I don't understand this sentiment at all. Slack is a nicely-
| done, enterprise-y chat app with a lot of users, most of who
| liked the idea of not paying for anything. There are many
| competitors, including several open source options.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes there are lots of competitors, including ones
| specialized for various industries. In finance there is
| Symphony, which along with being less infantile and more
| straight-laced than Slack also offers integrations with
| financial information products like factset.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Right now but how many competitors does Facebook have or
| Google. Each operates in its own narrow niche and dominates
| it. Chat apps will go the same way thanks to the network
| effects.
| CharlesW wrote:
| I think you're right, but I don't think of that as the
| result of a lack of competitors. In the enterprise space,
| it's going to be Salesforce/Slack vs. Microsoft/Teams.
| paxys wrote:
| If anything this deal helps increase competition in the
| collaboration/productivity space, since it was clear that Slack
| couldn't compete with Microsoft on its own.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| Considering that Slack itself complained to the competition
| authorities that there is fierce competition from Microsoft and
| others, eating Slack's lunch, it seems hard. Salesforce can
| easily claim that the acquisition doesn't reduce competition,
| because Slack has a very small market share, or even that Slack
| would soon be bankrupt and needs to be saved.
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/22/slack-accuses-microsoft-of-a...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| right, which big tech acronym has Salesforce in it? gonna need
| a new one
| ep103 wrote:
| Just add an S, right?
|
| FAANG becomes FAANGS
| advisedwang wrote:
| This doesn't reduce the number of players in the "team chat
| system" market, so I doubt it will be blocked given the current
| FTC.
| romenrg wrote:
| $27.7 Billion. Really impressive.
| somehnguy wrote:
| Well, RIP Slack. Salesforce is a cancer that ruins everything
| they touch as far as I'm concerned.
| [deleted]
| corentin88 wrote:
| Congrats to the Slack's team.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Whatever happened to matrix.org/vector/riot.im/element.io? (side
| note: most confusing branding ever :-/). Element seemed to be
| picking up some momentum a few months back. There was recent news
| that they acquired gitter too [1]. These days I only hear about
| slack exodus and discord this and discord that, though.
|
| If I get it right, from all the group messengers that appeared
| around 6 years ago, the only one with an open protocol seems to
| be Matrix, but it hasn't proven to be to their advantage,
| apparently. Only Element, Zulip and Mattermost are open source?
|
| Honorable mention: IRCCloud was a "hot thing" for a while, but it
| seems like it wasn't enough to revitalize IRC. [2]
|
| --
|
| Appendix, initial releases:
|
| * Slack: August 2013; 7 years ago
|
| * Discord: May 13, 2015; 5 years ago
|
| * Mattermost: October 2, 2015; 5 years ago
|
| * Zulip: ca 2014, at least 5/6 years ago?
|
| * Matrix protocol: ca September 2014; 6 years ago
|
| * vector/riot/element: ca September 2016, 4 years ago
|
| --
|
| 1: https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/30/element-acquires-gitter-
| to...
|
| 2: https://www.irccloud.com/
| IceWreck wrote:
| I think you're missing out RocketChat
| miloignis wrote:
| I don't think anything's happened to Matrix, it continues to
| develop and grow at what, at least as it feels to me, a slow
| and steady pace. I tried it towards the beginning, after a few
| years, and am currently on it again, running my own homeserver,
| and it's been getting better and better each time. It's
| definitely still got a few rough edges, but it's both much more
| reliable and much more fully featured than in the past. E2EE is
| finally very easy on the flagship clients, which is a pretty
| great achivement on an open federated system.
|
| Anyway, I think it's still here and growing, but it pops into
| the HN consciousness every now and again. That doesn't mean
| it's popularity is similarly varied :)
| Arathorn wrote:
| Matrix is doing pretty well (although I might be biased, being
| project lead). For instance, the entirety of the German
| military announced moving over to Matrix using a fork of
| Element a few days ago: https://sifted.eu/articles/european-
| armies-matrix/, and there are several other (very) major
| governments beyond France & Germany who are switching to Matrix
| in order to get end-to-end-encrypted interoperable comms that
| they can run themselves. Hopefully we should be able to
| announce them in the coming months :)
|
| Meanwhile, we're about to finish the main milestones of making
| Gitter natively speak Matrix (planning to announce on
| Thursday), and on the FOSS side in general, Mozilla has
| successfully moved over entirely to Matrix for community facing
| work (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/03/03/moznet-irc-is-dead-
| long-l...), and a few other similar sized open source projects
| are in the process of finalising doing the same manoeuvre;
| watch which this space for updates.
| https://element.debian.social/ looks to be a thing, for
| instance :)
|
| In terms of naming, it's really not hard: Matrix is the
| protocol; the core team set up a company called New Vector who
| made a flagship Matrix client called Riot, but we then renamed
| both the company and the app to be Element in order to simplify
| things. Hopefully most people have forgotten the renaming and
| moved on by now.
|
| In terms of what's next for Matrix:
|
| * Loads of effort making Element more mainstream-friendly;
| going through improving the UX and making it consistent cross-
| platform and predictable for new users. The approach we're
| taking is to film new users using the service, and literally
| tight-loop fixing the thinkos that they trip over until they
| stop tripping over. It sounds obvious, and we should have done
| it years ago, but it's starting to make a big difference. The
| first wave of changes ship in the next 2 weeks.
|
| * Social login - implementing OIDC Connect to simplify
| onboarding if you're willing to hand over your identity to an
| existing identity provider
| (Github/Gitlab/Apple/Twitter/Google/FB)
|
| * We're in the middle of implementing Spaces - super fun
| feature to define arbitrary hierarchies of rooms; a bit like
| discord servers, or slack workspaces, or possibly a usenet
| hierarchy or IMAP folder tree depending on how you squint.
| We're hoping to get the first cut out by the end of the year,
| which is super fun.
|
| * We're also working hard on freeform threading (you too could
| implement HN/Reddit/Email/NNTP/Twitter on Matrix if you want!).
| https://github.com/matrix-org/cerulean has some details for the
| intrepid.
|
| * Peer-to-Peer Matrix is going great guns; we've just finished
| the first cut of a new P2P overlay network called Pinecone
| (based on Yggdrasil, but using source routing).
|
| * We've almost finished a wave of work to make 1:1 VoIP not
| suck; fixes are already shipping in Element on all platforms,
| but we're almost at the point where VoIP is robust and reliable
| rather than a quick proof-of-concept which we'd not had a
| chance to ever really polish.
|
| * Finally, lots of work queued up to make end-to-end encryption
| more usable. Particularly, chasing bugs where encryption fails
| (we just fixed a major one in iOS for instance, which shipped a
| few days ago, thanks to the Push service extension sometimes
| racing with the main Element process desyncing). We're also
| looking at simplifying the E2EE key recovery process and just
| switching to using the same password to both login and decrypt
| your messages, rather than separate login password & security
| passphrases as we have today.
|
| I could go on, but TL;DR: I think "the only one with an open
| protocol seems to be Matrix, but it hasn't proven to be to
| their advantage, apparently." is bogus. We'd just be another
| random open source chat webapp if it wasn't for Matrix; instead
| it's a global open network with 25+ million users and about
| 60,000 servers. So not yet as big as Email or the Web, but
| bigger than (say) bitcoin, and continuing to grow
| exponentially.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| After making an account a couple years ago I came back to
| Element a few days ago. Mostly, it's fine/good. It works as I
| expect text chat too, including the niceties we've come to
| expect by now.
|
| One thing that really stood out to me is that you can cross-
| sign your device certificates! That means your chat partners
| don't need to verify the signatures of all your device keys,
| but only one. Even though this is the only good option (in my
| opinion), the only other messenger that does this that I'm
| aware of is iMessage.
|
| I wish more people used it. Not just individually, but for
| their communities. There's a couple of good bridges which I
| intend to try, to bring my Signal/Telegram/... contacts all
| into one place, but you need not only the bridge, you also need
| to host your own homeserver and I haven't made the dive into
| all of that yet.
| callahad wrote:
| I joined Element about a month ago (we're hiring!
| https://element.io/careers) and now that I'm on the inside, I'm
| genuinely optimistic about our trajectory. We're not taking
| over the world overnight, but we are steadily growing.
|
| From a business perspective, data sovereignty and end-to-end
| encryption seem to be really potent differentiators for certain
| market segments, especially government. To wit, the French
| government has a massive Matrix deployment under the name
| "Tchap", and the German military began rolling out a similar
| initiative called "BwMessenger" last month:
| https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger-...
|
| On the opposite end of the spectrum you've got Mozilla, who
| replaced their IRC network with open, federated Matrix and saw
| greater far greater community engagement as a result.
|
| October also saw a commercial entity (Famedly.com) begin
| sponsoring the development of a third-party homeserver
| implemented in Rust (Conduit). So we're starting to see
| glimmers of a potential ecosystem around the Matrix protocol
| independent of Element.
|
| We don't have the same pop culture buzz as Slack or Discord,
| but I absolutely think there is something of substance here.
| j1elo wrote:
| The latest open source project that caught my eye in terms of
| the chosen chat technology was Servo, which has chosen Zulip
| [0]. Hopefully, in a not too distant future, we'll start
| seeing more communities opting for Matrix?
|
| [0]: https://blog.servo.org/2020/11/17/servo-home/
| Arathorn wrote:
| Clearly we just need to get Zulip talking Matrix and we can
| all live together in one big {Zulip, Element, Gitter, IRC}
| happy family :D
| MattJ100 wrote:
| += XMPP, don't forget us ;)
| callahad wrote:
| As an aside: Having come to Element _from_ Mozilla, it 's
| really weird to work somewhere with _multiple_ large, paying
| customers. It gives me hope that we 'll be able to maintain
| the runway we need to reach critical mass, one use case at a
| time.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I run Matrix/Element on my self-hosted server (address in my
| profile) and it's great for chatting with people on the
| Fediverse (Mastodon/Pleroma/Peertube/etc.) as a lot of people
| in that world also use Matrix and have their addresses posted
| in their profile.
|
| Corporations don't want to spend the manpower to run something
| like this, considering Slack is relatively cheap and Teams just
| comes with their Azure/Office365 license.
|
| It's more for hobbyists and hacker types. If you want a nice
| mobile client for Matrix, try out FluffyChat. It supports room
| emojis!
| molsongolden wrote:
| The Lounge[1] is an open source IRCCloud alternative for users
| who are comfortable with self-hosting and want an always on,
| web GUI, access from anywhere, works on mobile, IRC client.
|
| [1] https://thelounge.chat/
| amatecha wrote:
| Literally just signed up on element.io last night. Still using
| IRCCloud cuz it owns :)
| vector_spaces wrote:
| Element / Matrix are great in principle, but it's probably not
| helping that there are fatal bugs in the iOS app that break
| core functionality (see [1]). Outside of that, it has major
| issues with accessibility in general -- user facing
| documentation is non-existent, for example. Users on my server
| complain sometimes that they feel they need to have a degree in
| computer science to do simple things. I feel like Element's
| complications around branding are a great metaphor for the
| Matrix ecosystem in general
|
| It's a shame -- I'm hopeful that the situation will be better
| in the next year or so, but if these issues aren't corrected I
| can't see how they won't forever be in the shadow of mainstream
| apps like Slack, who have much stronger sensibilities around UX
| and accessibility (dark patterns and lack of E2EE
| notwithstanding).
|
| [1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/issues/3762
| Arathorn wrote:
| I'm fairly sure that bug was fixed 11 days ago by
| https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/pull/950,
| released in Element iOS 1.1.1 on Nov 26th.
|
| In terms of improving documentation and usability, we're on
| the case, as per
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270858
| na85 wrote:
| I would love to see IRC make a comeback but the fact is IRC on
| mobile is a pain in the ass. Users want persistence and IRC is
| designed for the opposite.
| keyle wrote:
| I agree. We should evolve the IRC spec to support the modern
| requirements of common users. Then web clients are just an
| addition. Call it IRC2 or anything if it offends the original
| IRC nerds (which I'm part of)
| remexre wrote:
| Well, there's IRCv3... Problem with multi-device is you
| need some way of authenticating multiple TCP connections as
| the same logical user, at which point a lot of IRC's
| simplicity of implementation has been lost. Whether that's
| a worthwhile sacrifice is a different question though; I
| think it might be (as a young IRC nerd).
| samdixon wrote:
| That's somewhat the solution irccloud provides, however they
| need a mobile app. I think the biggest issue with irc is the
| backlog. It's somewhat nice to be able to easily search a
| companies chat history and find some context. The solution to
| that is correct documentation, however that problem is much
| harder.
| amatecha wrote:
| IRCCloud has had iOS and Android apps since 2016. :)
| samdixon wrote:
| Ha, then mark that problem solved :)
| zests wrote:
| IRC is pretty much perfect. No "X user is typing" messages.
| No ads, no tracking, no javascript. No hidden instance of
| chrome running. The community even self selects in to my own
| interests.
| prophesi wrote:
| Obligatory shoutout to https://thelounge.chat/
|
| Self-hosted an instance two or so years ago and have never
| run into issues, besides the occasional kick to my reverse
| proxy. You can create accounts for your
| friends/family/coworkers, the web app is fast/clean on
| mobile, and chat logs are persistent.
| [deleted]
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Enterprises don't want federation. They want an easily
| searchable information repository much more than they want
| strong E2EE. They also don't see open source as an advantage.
|
| Matrix was focused on things that deter enterprise customers
| while Slack built a machine for locking them in.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Do you think that's what's led to Slack's success though,
| that enterprises don't want federation?
|
| I don't really think so. If Slack had exactly the same UX as
| it has but federated, I don't think that would have deterred
| very many customers. Maybe a few that have come on only after
| Slack already got so big.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Enterprises may not want federation until they encounter a
| practical problem that just happens to be solved by
| federation. E.g. company/team acquisition, need to merge the
| chat ecosystems; don't want to disrupt the acquired team but
| you also need to have people in the rest of the company
| interact with existing channels etc. If both companies uses
| slack, the integration between such multiple accounts is
| possible.
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| > the only one with an open protocol seems to be Matrix, but it
| hasn't proven to be to their advantage
|
| I guess it depends on what you mean by "their advantage".
| Designing and promulgating an actual open federated protocol is
| way harder/time-consuming than doing the same for a closed
| proprietary one. So taking this approach has only hurt their
| flexibility and speed-to-market for features.
|
| However, if done right, an open protocol can be way more
| advantageous to the global community as a whole! IMHO Matrix
| started out as just another crazy moonshot. "Let's make
| something like email and xmpp only better." But, fast-forward
| to now and they have built a very usable chat ecosystem with
| multiple server implementations and many clients.
|
| My hope is that things like this Slack acquisition (and the
| inevitable cooperate shenanigan that will follow) will continue
| to push individuals and companies to invest in open federate-
| able alternatives.
| Triv888 wrote:
| I started using it when it was riot.im but it didn't work any
| better when they renamed it element and it made it just a bit
| harder to find while it was not really that popular already...
| I think they just tried to cash in a bit instead of a lot (or
| shot themselves in the foot)
| ivraatiems wrote:
| Well, Slack, it was nice knowing you. I wonder who Discord will
| get bought up by when it replaces Slack after a year or two of
| Salesforce mismanagement?
|
| It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now. Start small,
| get big fast, get sold, get ruined.
|
| I realize I am presupposing Salesforce will ruin Slack - but it's
| hard to see how they _won 't_, unless they take the approach
| Microsoft took with Github and keep it as a totally separate
| business unit. Even then, there's often meddling (see e. g.
| Facebook with Instagram and Oculus).
| turtlebits wrote:
| Just curious, what Salesforce aquisitions ruined a product? The
| only ones I know of are Heroku, Quip, and Tableau. I don't see
| any mention of Salesforce other than optional integrations.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions lists a
| ton of companies I'm not familiar with that look like they
| were mostly absorbed. Beyond that, I'm not sure, but it's
| more of a reputational judgment I'm making.
|
| I'm not sure I can think of a time when an acquisition or
| merger ever made a product better for the users.
| throwaway837 wrote:
| Slack never really fulfilled its promise as a stand-alone
| company, so not sure what you're afraid of now.
|
| Very unreliable at times eg latency, missed out of video
| calling, did not take advantage of WFH boom at all, document
| search was bad.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I don't know if I'd agree that it never fulfilled its
| promise. It's got a lot of market share and its core product
| - text chat and messaging - remains pretty solid, despite
| some missteps.
|
| I haven't had that level of unreliability issue with text,
| though I _definitely_ have with calls.
|
| I would agree that Slack had an opportunity to compete with
| Zoom and others because of COVID that it seems to have
| relatively squandered. Slack calls are still less reliable
| and usable than Zoom calls for many purposes. You can't dial
| in with a phone, you can't mute other people's video or even
| audio (though I'm not sure Zoom offers client-side video
| muting either), Slack's screenshare is less reliable and
| doesn't have as many options for limiting what you share, and
| so on.
|
| So I guess I'd say it fulfilled its core promise: "decent
| enterprise real-time communications", but it's the failure to
| innovate or even keep up with competing services in some
| important areas that's the issue. Maybe that's splitting
| hairs?
| m463 wrote:
| > I realize I am presupposing Salesforce will ruin Slack
|
| It's statistically likely to happen.
|
| It's interesting to read through lists like this and see what
| happened:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_...
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electr...
| dheera wrote:
| > Start small, get big fast, get sold, get ruined
|
| Why does every business have to be a $100G business? Can we
| support a model in which we have a lot of $100M businesses that
| are doing great things and delivering quality instead of
| quantity?
|
| Investors seem to not like that idea, but customers would love
| that idea. It's unfortunate that our markets are not optimized
| for customers.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| > It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now
|
| ...now?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Earlier you could just stick with the version you had on your
| CD or floppy and not care what the C-suits was up to on the
| company that made the software you used. So I guess it wasn't
| as obvious back then?
| ivraatiems wrote:
| That and software wasn't a service, so you weren't chained
| to the price points and plan levels that executives
| decided. If Salesforce decides to force everybody using
| Slack to get Salesforce instead (which seems not unlikely),
| there's no recourse. We can't just say "well, we have a
| perpetual license, so we'll do what we want."
| Spivak wrote:
| I still know quite a few people who still use their old
| version of WordPerfect. At some point it became feature
| complete for them and they've stuck with it ever since.
| ajkjk wrote:
| It was sad then, too.
| dang wrote:
| The Salesforce-Slack stack so far:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25269934 <--
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25255231
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211262
| kingbirdy wrote:
| > The transaction is anticipated to close in the second quarter
| of Salesforce's fiscal year 2022
|
| It seems like it will be a little while before Salesforce can
| start integrating into Slack at least
| superfamicom wrote:
| Having gone through many corporate chat transitions, I'm curious
| where we are headed next or when it will circle back. We already
| use Salesforce products so I don't see Slack going away unless
| something much better comes along.
|
| MSN / AIM, IRC, Google Chat, Campfire, HipChat, Slack / Discord,
| ???
| runawaybottle wrote:
| I think these chat apps lack business context. Gitlab and
| GitHub don't have real time chat, that would be a start. Then
| on top of that, to have context driven chat (a chat that is
| about a merge request, a branch). Or in Jira, to seamlessly
| chat on a ticket with those involved. That stuff doesn't exist
| yet. We have the primitive version of context-less chat which
| is great for context-less conversation (normal social
| interaction). In business, we have something very specific to
| talk about so would like to see a new idea in this space.
|
| The place where this does seem to be evolving is in customer
| support. When you chat with a representative, they have a lot
| of context. Your account, order, possible issue, etc.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Don't forget Lync / Skype for Business!
| 310260 wrote:
| I'd prefer to forget it.
| mkurz wrote:
| "Salesforce to Acquire Slack for $27.7 Billion" Source:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/technology/salesforce-sla...
| raverbashing wrote:
| How is Slack worth 27 Billion dollars?
|
| No, really.
|
| That's an unreal price. Slack benefits little from network
| effects. Deployment has no fundamental secret sauce.
|
| This is a crazy number. This does not make sense.
| quicklyfrozen wrote:
| The number may be crazy, but Slack does benefit from network
| effects. For example, my company has many bots/integrations
| with other systems, years of institutional knowledge, and
| connections with multiple external vendors.
|
| Switching would be painful so there'd have to be some pretty
| compelling reasons. (And who's got time to recreate all our
| custom emojis? :-))
| rabidrat wrote:
| That's a moat, not network effects. A network effect would
| be if your friends at other companies get value from
| joining Slack while you're on it. But there's not (except
| maybe sharing integrations/bots).
| quicklyfrozen wrote:
| I'm assuming that third parties are a lot more likely to
| join an external channel on a platform they're already
| using (and are more likely to be responsive as well).
|
| I think all the existing integration are examples of an
| indirect network effect -- companies wouldn't invest in
| providing them if there weren't already users on the
| platform.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| It's pretty obvious that Salesforce is going after the same model
| as Microsoft - bundling enterprise software to create a stronger
| moat against competitors offering unbundled, standalone versions,
| and to strengthen the value prop when selling to customers.
|
| Will be fascinating to see this rivalry pick up steam as time
| goes on.
| davio wrote:
| My previous megacorp switched from Slack to Teams for that
| reason. Save millions annually for essentially the same
| product.
| nottorp wrote:
| So question: which of all the alternatives to Slack has text as a
| first class citizen?
|
| We don't use video or audio chat at all; just text chat, pinning
| important info to channels, swapping small files, searching chat
| history and a few plugins like reminders and github. May be
| important to mention that we have a lot of separate projects
| going on and we separate each in its own channel.
|
| We absolutely want mobile and desktop _clients_ , not a "web UI"
| that happens to sort of work on all platforms.
|
| Could the hive mind give me some names of alternatives to
| consider?
| geocrasher wrote:
| I posted this in the watercooler chat at work (we use slack) and
| got the option to install the Salesforce plugin for Slack.
|
| Because of course.
| theNJR wrote:
| I'm a bit confused by what this means for WORK shareholders.
|
| "Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will
| receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common
| stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of
| approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of
| Salesforce's common stock on November 30, 2020."
|
| Lets say you own 100 shares of WORK. Does that mean you get both
|
| 1. $4,434 in cash (100 * 43.84 current value of WORK)
|
| and
|
| 2. 7.76 shares of CRM (100 * .0776)
|
| Edit: I can't read!
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Are fractional shares rounded down and converted to cash? E.g.,
| (following OP's example): 7.76 shares of CRM -> 0.76 shares of
| CRM => 241.35 (closing CRM price) * 0.76 = $183.42.
| pashabitz wrote:
| $2,679 in cash
| jbeam wrote:
| $2,679 in cash and the fractional shares of CRM (0.76) will
| likely be converted to cash as well at some market rate.
| manigandham wrote:
| 100 shares of WORK will be converted to $2679 and 7.76 shares
| of CRM. Where did you get 43.84 from?
|
| The current value of WORK doesn't matter, it's the closing
| price on 11/30. The stock price will effectively be pinned at
| that now since nobody will want to trade at another price.
| theNJR wrote:
| >Where did you get 43.84 from?
|
| WORK closing price. I just realized I can't read though,
| misinterpreted the press release.
| [deleted]
| biggc wrote:
| > The stock price will effectively be pinned at that now
|
| Won't it fluctuate with Salesforce's value?
| advisedwang wrote:
| No, it means you get
|
| 1. $2679 in cash (100 * 26.79)
|
| and
|
| 2. 7.76 shares of CRM (100 * .0776)
| abalashov wrote:
| For me the fascinating headline here is the 86% gross margins.
| FY2020 gross revenue at Slack was $630.4m, GAAP gross profit
| $533.2m [1].
|
| SaaS apps are comically, stupidly profitable at scale. That's
| educational.
|
| [1] https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-announces-fourth-
| quarter-a...
| ebg13 wrote:
| Except they had net income of -$570M (that's a minus sign in
| front) because their operational losses are staggeringly high.
| abalashov wrote:
| Yes, but that's the aspect of the cost structure that the
| acquirer is most equipped to tweak.
| ebg13 wrote:
| Indeed. I expect mass layoffs basically immediately.
| rpncreator wrote:
| The timing of this is impeccable. The Dreamforce (Salesforce's
| annual developer and user conference) keynote is tomorrow
| (December 2nd 2020).
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I can't possibly see this going well for salesforce. Buying slack
| for 70x revenue is insane. Their entire market is going to be
| eaten by teams and google chat, if it hasn't already. Microsoft
| has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise
| productivity software because everyone is already using office.
| And those that aren't are on g-suite. Slack's recent guidance was
| horrible too.
| oweiler wrote:
| Of all the messengers I've used Chat is by far the worst.
| Especially threading is almost unusable.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I don't think that matters really. Maybe companies that are
| already using slack won't switch, but if you're using chat,
| which is free, are the executives really going to decide that
| it's worth paying to switch to slack? I think it's unlikely.
| Hard to see where the market is other than startups that are
| already using slack. Slacks revenue is currently nowhere near
| enough for this valuation and I can't see it getting where it
| needs to.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| At least they have threads, but yes the way they do it is
| pretty terrible. I wish they took some inspiration to Zulip.
|
| Also it's really slow.
| paxys wrote:
| Google chat isn't a real competitor in the space. It has always
| been Slack and MS, and being #2 is a rapidly growing sector is
| still very valuable.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Not when your competitors are completely free
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Honest question: what is Google chat? I only know Hangouts, I
| did not know they had a Slack/Teams app as well? Or is this the
| very old app that was integrated into Gmail back in the day?
| [deleted]
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Yea, google has a competitor called chat. As other comments
| have said it doesn't really stack up with teams/slack, but
| the video system is pretty good. It works well enough, an has
| seen consistent improvements over the year. Doubt any company
| would specifically choose google chat, but I know that many
| that already have deals for g-suite are using it. The thing
| is pretty much every company has a contract for office or
| google chat these days. Hard to imagine paying for slack when
| you've already got these free apps available.
| [deleted]
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| https://chat.google.com
|
| It's a team chat, included into Google Workspace (G Suite).
| It's not terrible, and not great. It runs in the browser and
| integrates with Gmail; is really slow; has 1-to-1 messages,
| groups, and rooms; rooms have threads to organize
| conversations, but you can't see a list, you just end up
| scrolling a lot.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Google chat, lol.
|
| Which one?
|
| Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google
| Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with
| Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?
| s3r3nity wrote:
| Don't forget about the new Google Pay, which has its own
| messaging feature for some reason
| lima wrote:
| Google Chat, they have exactly one enterprise messenger
| (surprising, right?).
| singhkays wrote:
| Damn! What kind of research did you have to do to write all
| those names or did you remember them all? :) They're so many
| now, I can only remember a few
| Nition wrote:
| Haha, it reminds me a bit of Microsoft Account, MSA,
| Windows Live ID, Microsoft Passport, .NET Passport, and
| Microsoft Passport Network.
| hated wrote:
| Your one stop shop for all things killed by Google
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| thallium205 wrote:
| The one that is built into every GSuite/Workspace account.
| For free. Google Chat.
| ISL wrote:
| I haven't seen anything in GSuite that holds a candle to
| Slack. Is there a slack-like view embedded in GSuite
| somewhere?
| codemac wrote:
| chat.google.com ?
| temp667 wrote:
| Try doing the slack step of clicking on the phone icon to
| start a call, then adding screen sharing.
|
| We pay for gsuite and we pay for slack. google chat is no
| where yet.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| You click the video button, switch tabs, and click the
| screen share button. I agree that chat sucks compared to
| slack and teams, but it's got enough functionality to not
| be a deal breaker for companies that are already paying
| gSuite. Especially if they've never used the superior
| competitors.
| jasonv wrote:
| The mobile Google Chat still doesn't let you switch
| accounts, like Hangouts supports. Perplexing, given how
| much people in the Google-sphere context switch.
| bonzini wrote:
| Isn't the mobile GChat integrated in the Gmail app?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Chat is now built into the gmail app which is much easier
| to switch on.
| brundolf wrote:
| Slack's main differentiator up until now was that it _wasn 't_
| tied up in a tech giant. That meant it had great compatibility
| with everything, and that it was, as a product, the primary
| focus of its company (and not just an accessory). I think it
| could have survived on that alone, but this acquisition throws
| that entire story in the garbage. Now it'll just be "Teams but
| worse".
| foxhop wrote:
| Salesforce is tied into everything too. I bet this works out
| great. Wish I didn't sell most of my shares at $25...
| schnevets wrote:
| Slack saw the risks of being a "simple, elegant collaboration
| darling, and tried to pivot into operations and workflows
| over the past 3 years. I haven't looked into the feature set
| much, but I think most customers rejected the idea because it
| seemed robust and "un-Slack-y".
|
| I always thought the lack of adoption in this feature set was
| a marketing failure of Slack, but I'm now seeing it as bait
| for a Salesforce integration.
| gwright wrote:
| I haven't read the details but an earlier message said "70x
| revenue". It is hard to think of a reason _not_ to sell at
| that multiple.
| brundolf wrote:
| Sure, nobody said this doesn't work out well for the
| founders. Just the product, and its userbase, and future
| business.
| blackrock wrote:
| Teams suck.
|
| Google Chat? What's that?
|
| I'll stick with Slack.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Unpopular HN opinion: Teams doesn't suck.
|
| It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional
| level of organization (each team gets their own set of
| channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each
| channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both
| simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset
| of Slack.
| jasonv wrote:
| Switching channels/teams in Teams is far less efficient
| than moving through channels in Slack, which means I'm less
| likely to engage well in Teams.
| blackrock wrote:
| I'm going to say it again.
|
| Good grief! Teams, suck!
| djsumdog wrote:
| The way rooms is organized is really annoying. It's not
| just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat
| app on the planet. The rooms also show what appears to be
| IMs for group chats (the style/UI) instead of a chatroom.
|
| The calendar integration is nice and the video chats are
| good, but The Linux version of their client just stops
| pulling audio all the time unless I do a `killall -9
| pulseaudio` and restart it (and it's the only app left
| where I still have to do that).
|
| Teams gets a big "Meh" for me on calls and awful for text
| chat.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _It 's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ...
| every other chat app on the planet._
|
| Yes, it's odd. For those who haven't used Teams, it
| defaults to showing you a team's channels you use most
| frequently (I guess? I never quite understood the logic)
| and then you have to click to see the full list.
| Maddening.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| We use Teams at work, and for that it works quite well.
| Calls and desktop sharing work well, the channels do what
| they do, integration with OneDrive and the wiki thing is
| nice etc.
|
| But then I got a member of a different Team, for one of our
| customers, as part of some integration work. And boy is
| that a CF.
|
| Unlike Discord you either have this team or that team
| active. Notifications from the other are horribly
| unreliable, and there's no way to chat with someone in one
| team while you're in a call with someone from the other
| team besides running a separate client.
|
| So as such, "Teams" really should have been named "Team".
| Karunamon wrote:
| Teams, indeed, sucks.
|
| The problem is that the people responsible for mandating its
| usage don't care how much it sucks, they care that it's
| working enterprise IM and they get it for free with the
| Office subs they're already paying for.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I don't disagree, but unless you're at a startup you probably
| don't get to choose. It's some executive choosing, and saying
| we saved a boatload by moving to the app that's included with
| our productivity suite is enticing.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Exactly. At companies that are large customers, employees
| don't get to choose. You get Google Chat integrated into
| your email inbox, and connections to Slack are blocked.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Google chat sucks so bad that googlers want to use slack
| instead
| v1g1l4nt3 wrote:
| It makes sense for them to buy Slack instead of Discord, since
| Discord has no ambitions to go into the enterprise business. This
| tweet is from 2017, but there hasn't been any announcements
| stating otherwise:
| https://twitter.com/discord/status/904787004357058561
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| Is there any reason Rocket.chat [1] never gets a look in, in
| these discussions?
|
| It's open source and you can self host pretty easily.
|
| We've been using it for 6 months and really couldn't be happier.
|
| https://rocket.chat/
| sebmellen wrote:
| +1 Rocket.chat is awesome and the best open-source Slack
| alternative imo.
| [deleted]
| xyst wrote:
| how is it that a chat app is worth $27B?
| abalashov wrote:
| With 86% gross margins, I'm not entirely surprised it's seen as
| a good proposition:
|
| https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-announces-fourth-quarter-a...
| ebg13 wrote:
| With operating losses at 93% of total revenue, bringing
| FY2020 net income deeply negative, I'm still surprised.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| I wonder how Microsoft is going to respond to this..?
|
| Although a slightly different market, I could easily see them
| acquiring Discord and rebranding it towards corporate customers
| turned off by the incoming Salesforce integration with Slack.
| After all, Slack managed to Trojan Horse it's way into companies,
| and now with many people using Discord at home... it's not a
| stretch to say Discord could take the same approach!
|
| Discord have recently been actively re-positioning themselves
| less towards the gaming community overall, and more towards being
| a general purpose chat application.
|
| Teams will likely see a flurry of updates and new features as
| well.
| kescher wrote:
| Salesforce, more like Buyforce. They are acquiring so many
| companies, it's not even funny.
| hobofan wrote:
| That's just what CRM companies do, isn't it? SAP is also just a
| huge pile of acquisitions that's held together by some duct
| tape.
| interestica wrote:
| > enabling companies to grow and succeed in the __all-digital
| world __
|
| That 's not the only world, right? Anyone wanna succeed in the
| _real_ world?
| aprdm wrote:
| I ctrl + f and saw no mention of rocket chat, is it no longer
| trendy? Have been using for a while on prems and it sort of just
| works.
|
| Good on Slack I guess! A very nice exit.
| myguysi wrote:
| Posted 2 minutes before you
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270708
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Time for Stewart to make his next "failed" game. Go big!!!
| orf wrote:
| Damn. I can't see how this ends well for Slack users in the long
| term.
|
| > Combining Slack with Salesforce Customer 360 will be
| transformative for customers and the industry. The combination
| will create the operating system for the new way to work,
| uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-
| digital world.
|
| Oh. Oh no.
| kace91 wrote:
| It funny that, everywhere in my circle, people are going "damn,
| we need to find an alternative now".
|
| It really says something about a company that people see their
| name getting close as a sign they should stop using a product.
| eplanit wrote:
| I guess it's the 21st century equivalent to being purchased
| by Computer Associates -- which was known as the place where
| good software goes to die.
| Axsuul wrote:
| Most are quick to overreact but in reality, the switching
| costs are non-trivial.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| This seemed to be the response in every conversation I've had
| with people about Slack being acquired. No matter who
| acquired Slack, it just seemed like negative value to the
| existing customers who signed on for a ubiquitous messaging
| platform.
| untog wrote:
| I doubt they care. What I suspect Salesforce realised long
| ago was that they don't need to appeal to their end-users,
| they just need to appeal to the managers in charge of signing
| contracts. In that regard, Slack is a fantastic fit.
|
| Sadly I suspect the people saying "we need to find a Slack
| alternative" today are the same ones that have been saying
| "Slack sucks" this whole time, to little effect.
| aleksanb wrote:
| Come to zulip! We switched our company to zulip wholesale
| after covid forced work from home onto everyone, and wow,
| talk about a force multiplier.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| How does it compare with Matrix?
| mushufasa wrote:
| zulip is one of those rare pieces of software that really
| gives me joy to use.
|
| feature-by-feature on paper, it doesn't necessarily stand
| out compared to the crowded landscape. It's not a new
| distributed protocol or anything unique.
|
| but you really can tell it's well crafted, with love as
| slack used to say. And if you don't believe me, you can
| inspect the source code yourself!
| daniellarusso wrote:
| This is what I am excited for.
|
| I have wanted our company to move away from Slack to
| something w better thread discussions.
|
| We have long resisted Salesforce because of pricing, say,
| compared to Pipedrive for CRM.
|
| I am interested to see what happens with pricing and many
| orgs locked data.
|
| I know we do not pay for the high uptime plan.
| jariel wrote:
| It says much more about the people saying that than anything.
|
| Salesforce is a reasonably good operating entity, I don't see
| any reason for Slackers to flinch.
|
| But consider that 'Slack' was a _movement_ - literally the
| name, the original premise, there was a corporate /hip aspect
| to it. Which now it's not, just the opposite, because it's
| 'Salesforce'.
|
| So at least in part - 'it's not cool now'.
| pojzon wrote:
| TBH it would be the same in case Microsoft would buy them
| out. Its really hard to get out of the shadow of failed
| products.
|
| Products that people started hating with passion.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Agreed, the reactions I'm seeing here feel more more
| emotional than rational. (Which is totally legitimate.
| Emotions are a dominant factor in product "love".) If the
| product were to get worse, there are any number of
| effectively-equivalent (if not as lovable) substitutes.
| jariel wrote:
| It's 'legit' to feel a certain way, the opposite to make
| decisions about business and productivity that way.
|
| The _real_ trick is, to figure out all those things we do
| that we _think_ are based on utility, but are not.
|
| The Saab ad comparing their car to the Jets the make
| appeals to our 'every little boy wants to be a pilot'
| fantasy.
|
| But the Ford ads that tell us how 'strong' our vehicle is
| going to be ... even though many of us will never, ever
| use them for this purpose.
|
| Like the guy with 1000 different tools in his shed - he
| buys them 'because they are useful'. But really, it's the
| 'emotion/novelty' of utility, not actual utility.
|
| At least 1/2 of the tech industry is driven by this, it's
| hilarious. We HNers, so neurotically passionate about
| whatever it happens to be ... are the most guilty.
|
| Of course a lot comes out of purely speculative and
| creative use of technology, it's just that we should be
| better at discerning.
|
| Slack, if it's bad, is probably because it's a noisy
| channel, not because it's Salesforce.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _It 's 'legit' to feel a certain way, the opposite to
| make decisions about business and productivity that way._
|
| That seems very reasonable from a purely rational POV,
| and I know we all like to think of ourselves as rational
| creatures. (It reminds me of this: https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comic/rational-2)
| slg wrote:
| Is this specifically a problem with Salesforce? I think
| people would have this reaction with almost any company that
| purchases Slack. It represents a shift in focus from being a
| messaging company to being a piece of a bigger portfolio.
| That shift alone is much more important than whatever the
| other pieces in the portfolio happen to be.
| chadlavi wrote:
| If it had been Microsoft buying them I would have been
| like, well, they've done ok with GitHub so far. And I
| begrudgingly feel that way as someone who reviles their
| flagship OS and office products.
| Axsuul wrote:
| How do you feel about Heroku then? Salesforce purchased
| them about 8 years ago.
| chadlavi wrote:
| I've never used it. But I did use a CRM product a while
| ago that got purchased by SalesForce, and it was a
| disaster.
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| Heroku's consistent user experience post-Salesforce-aquisition
| gives me a little hope. It would be nice to hear Salesforce
| offer some assurances of product independence, though.
| mccolin wrote:
| I agree Heroku has in this way been a model acquisition, but
| in this instance I can't see Salesforce being able to make
| those assurances - they likely see Slack as a key interface
| for their products and services, and integrating the two to
| support that vision will require oversight.
|
| I can still see a world where Slack is a tool that continues
| to operate and serve its customers, similar to Heroku post-
| acquisition, but Salesforce augments their services with
| Slack tie-ins (and vice-versa).
|
| Short: there's a middle ground I think they can strike.
| codeulike wrote:
| "SlackForce" here we come.
|
| The clash of meaning in those two words says it all.
| tazjin wrote:
| Wow. I had to use a Salesforce tool once, and I can confidently
| say that the only worse things out there are various online tax
| return forms and Workday.
| scruple wrote:
| > The combination will create the operating system for the new
| way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in
| the all-digital world.
|
| I'm just complaining, but... Why do people write things like
| this? I see it in my own employer and our marketing material,
| too. It's confusing bullshit that is devoid of any meaning.
| treis wrote:
| It's not really devoid of meaning if you understand the
| space. Roughly, Salesforce is about processes and Slack is
| about communication. Think about handling something like
| responding to a RFP. Salesforce is good at breaking that down
| into several pieces of work and assigning them to different
| people, but the communication and UI sucks. Slack makes
| communicating across a team easy but lacks the tools to build
| in formal processes. Combining those will, at least
| theoretically, end up as a better product.
| codeulike wrote:
| Its for managers. It works.
| arkitaip wrote:
| The text targets key partners, investors and other financial
| people who needs to be convinced that this is indeed The Best
| Deal Possible for everyone involved.
| Communitivity wrote:
| Great for Matrix though. I love Slack, and think this is one of
| the worst possible ends for it, from the users POV. I hope it
| was a profitable exit for the founders and employees though.
|
| I am also surprised, as I'd think the COVID pandemic would have
| boosted its use. Though, after thinking about it I've seen MS
| Teams everywhere outside of Open Source and startups. A post-
| mortem of why they sold, and the events leading to it, would be
| an awesome thing for one of the founders to do.
| untog wrote:
| > Combining Slack with Salesforce Customer 360 will be
| transformative for customers and the industry. The combination
| will create the operating system for the new way to work,
| uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-
| digital world.
|
| oh _no_. It sounds like they 're not even going to try to
| maintain the whole "wholly independent subsidiary" act. Slack is
| being swallowed wholesale.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I can't imagine our company sticking with Slack if we are
| forced to start using Salesforce as well. Although I'm not
| really sure what we would use at that point. Teams needs the
| whole Office subscription and we're already on G Suite.
| untog wrote:
| I'd say that I'm amazed Google hasn't come up with a
| competent Slack competitor yet, but then it's "Google" and "a
| messaging product", the two are like oil and water.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _it 's "Google" and "a messaging product", the two are
| like oil and water._
|
| What are you talking about? Messaging products are so
| integral to Google's vision that they can't stop making
| them.
| prewett wrote:
| The problem is they can't settle down on something. I
| can't even tell you what their current messaging product
| is right now. Google Wave is dead. Google Facebook^HPlus
| is dead. I think Hangouts is dead? The thing in my GMail
| gives me notices that it's going away. Is it Google
| Voice? Why would I use a product with the name "Voice" to
| type "Text" to people, especially when it used to be a
| phone substitute. Certainly nothing is integrated, aside
| from whatever the thing in GMail is that's going away
| (and a 100 pixel wide chat isn't going to be useful for
| team discussions, anyway). Messaging for Google feels
| like "this ought to be something we can be good at, but
| can't actually figure out what to do".
|
| Google makes "messaging products" but it's just something
| that floats on top on top of the sea of Google stuff.
| Like oil on top of water.
| depr wrote:
| it was sarcasm
| linuxhiker wrote:
| Which in some ways will be wonderful and hopefully drive people
| to more productive solutions.
| productceo wrote:
| Salesforce is rising as a formidable foe to Microsoft.
| goatherders wrote:
| No they aren't. What is the SF equivilant to O365, Azure,
| Office, and Windows?
| ipsum2 wrote:
| They don't have to be exactly matching Microsoft 1:1 to be a
| competitor. But Office/O365 -> Quip, Azure -> Heroku, Windows
| -> Lightning Platform (a bit of a stretch)
| jmsflknr wrote:
| More context here: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/01/salesforce-
| buys-slack/
| tilolebo wrote:
| Damn it, here we go again :-(
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Soooo, I bought a very small number of Slack shares at the market
| open today with no idea this was coming down the pike oh well
| jasonv wrote:
| This has been much discussed the last bit of time, on what
| basis are you buying shares in a company..?
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Yeah this is a fun little lesson for me. I'd been thinking
| through the summer that we need to expand what we do with our
| money and had been dithering, put together a short list of
| companies (like kid summer) and slack was one of them. I
| faffed about, put it off and then last night just decided
| "you know what, just place some trades and pull the plaster
| off" so I bought like 50 shares across a handful of companies
| - I own 3 slack shares so I'm not all that bothered.
|
| I've risked very little money in my first share purchases - I
| couldn't even buy a new low end mountain bike for what I've
| got at risk.
| tekacs wrote:
| For people looking for an alternative to switch to, we've been
| using Quill [0], which is pretty much a more slick, clean Zulip.
|
| It has a great approach to threads, where you can make them
| mandatory or optional on a per-channel basis (even when optional
| they have names and are more useful than Slack threads).
|
| They also support adding external parties to channels/threads by
| email or SMS and even more interestingly, their model is such
| that you can direct message people in other Quill organizations
| if you know their details.
|
| [0]: https://quill.chat
| Aeolun wrote:
| This does not appear to be open source?
|
| It doesn't even have a pricing section.
| tekacs wrote:
| It's not open source and it's free for now, presumably for
| the duration of the beta.
| aloknnikhil wrote:
| On first glance that page looks like something Apple might have
| put together. I genuinely thought this was from Apple.
| tekacs wrote:
| The aesthetics have a certain feel that makes them seem
| Apple-ish, yes. I feel that when I use it day-to-day, too. :)
| abhij89 wrote:
| Back then: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/04/source-microsoft-
| mulled-an...
|
| Microsoft must be cursing their decision right now..
| intern4tional wrote:
| Over what? Teams is currently eating Slacks lunch.
| heavyarms wrote:
| I'm so tired of hearing this argument. The amount of revenue
| generated by customers who use only Microsoft Teams without
| an Office365 subscription is exactly $0 [1]. MS gives you
| exactly 2 options to get teams:
|
| 1. Free
|
| 2. Included as part of Office365.
|
| Teams is currently eatings Slacks lunch, but the lunch was
| paid for by a corporate IT guy who switched to Office365 so
| he could lay off some IT admins and save some money compared
| to managing an on-premise Exchange server.
|
| [1](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-
| team...)
| trevorishere wrote:
| We don't have _less_ staff due to migrating from Exchange
| Server to EXO -- quite the opposite (and the remainder of
| the M365 stack has significantly grown IT, as well).
| goatherders wrote:
| I don't understand. What argument are you tired of hearing?
| Teams has more users than Slack. Doesn't matter how/why
| they got them.
| hacker_newz wrote:
| Captive users don't really count.
| [deleted]
| laurent92 wrote:
| Or happy that Salesforce is spending $26bn and not Microsoft.
| madrox wrote:
| "Congratulations to Slack on its exit" I say as I forgot they are
| post-IPO.
|
| I always thought it strange how big Slack got to begin with.
| History will probably remember its ultimate accomplishment was
| getting lots of companies to switch from direct-message
| communication to chat rooms. However, that was probably
| inevitable as an internet savvy generation took over more
| companies, and Slack was simply well-timed. It's not like the
| product was light years ahead of its myriad of competitors. It
| had a little better design and had friendly corporate terms.
|
| Which is good news. If Salesforce really does ruin Slack, I have
| no doubt someone will swoop into the space just as quickly as
| they did.
| juvoni wrote:
| This is a major win for Discord.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I'd argue that discord brand simply doesn't lend itself well to
| business.
|
| maybe they'll spin off a business oriented division with a
| different name,
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Maybe, though this reminds me of the story where Borland's
| management decided to move away from the "hacker" style ethos
| and mainstream audience so that they chase after the
| "enterprise" businesses and ended up alienating their own
| engineers, their existing customers and screwing up
| themselves over the years to the point where they went from
| being one of the biggest software houses in the computer
| industry to a little ball that is painted and thrown around
| owners that operate akin to digital graveyards.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Because "slack" is so business-like?
| offtop5 wrote:
| Look at the use cases. Discord is very much known for
| people talking about video games , not much else.
|
| Slack started as an internal business tool and it remains
| so.
| Spivak wrote:
| Discord also caters to small-med non-gaming online
| communities almost by accident because the kinds of
| moderation features you'd need are the same as if you
| were a streamer with an audience.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| There's a bunch of open source projects using it now as
| well. I have two separate family Discord servers. Quite a
| few social ones that aren't specifically gaming focused
| too.
| tguedes wrote:
| Slack has actual administrator tools unlike Discord.
| Discord very clearly has no interest in the capturing any
| significant market share in the business space.
| parliament32 wrote:
| It's not the literal name, it's the reputation.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Discord's problem isn't it's name. Discord's entire
| interface is based around gaming. It shows your running
| game in the UI, it integrates with Steam, etc. It's loading
| messages are all based on gaming culture.
|
| It just doesn't present itself as something you'd consider
| for your business.
| MH15 wrote:
| The problem with Discord isn't the branding, it's the
| license. Anything you send in Discord can be used for
| branding material by Discord. Not good for a business.
| ripdog wrote:
| The loading messages were replaced with generic non-
| playful ones relatively recently, FYI.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Good to know. I have some Discord groups and contacts,
| but I don't spend a lot of time in it. I actually find
| the playful messages somewhat endearing, but I feel like
| they'd be better off launching an entirely separate
| client if they want to appeal to businesses.
| Spivak wrote:
| It's not really about the name or the branding but that
| fact that Discord's primary market and the driving force
| behind all their features is gaming communities.
|
| Business, for worse, will demand features catered to their
| workflow.
| dapids wrote:
| You do realize slack has an entire enterprise product
| offering, even for HIPAA businesses and industries.?
| [deleted]
| stickfigure wrote:
| Bizcord.
|
| That was easy.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| Bizcord 360
| Hamuko wrote:
| Create a new login system, make the white theme default and
| call it "Discord Business". Done.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| And integrate business twitch streams please, with company
| email footers always reading 'don't forget to sub to my
| stream'. Let the twisted fantasy play out where the
| business world lives like esports streamers and wow raiding
| guilds.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| What will be the corporate version of the famous "Leeroy
| Jenkins" moment in WoW?
| zelias wrote:
| Edward Snowden
| [deleted]
| tilolebo wrote:
| Discord is awesome but do they propose any kind of plan for
| businesses?
| emidln wrote:
| Mattermost too. Slack competitors are going to benefit from
| companies not wanting to touch Salesforce with a 10 foot pole.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| My company uses mattermost for over 100k employees.
| dubme1 wrote:
| Mine too. Finance?
| c0nducktr wrote:
| Just curious - are you self-hosting, or using their SaaS
| product?
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| My company has a similar size, and we have a self-hosted
| Mattermost instance. We're switching away because the
| executives bought into another product but that's a
| different story, Mattermost works well at that size.
| [deleted]
| Spartan-S63 wrote:
| It's a major opportunity for them, for sure. They are still
| missing some features I find critical, but they really have
| things figured out with integrated voice/video communications
| in the app.
|
| The one feature I wish they'd clone from Slack are threaded
| replies. I know they're rolling out a new way to reply, but it
| still makes the chat flow messy. I really enjoyed the way Slack
| allows for breakout threads/replies to a particular message. It
| was a great way to display enough context, but not make the
| flow confusing.
| brobinson wrote:
| Threads are by far the worst part of using Slack. A few
| coworkers use them, but most do not use them. It causes lots
| of unnecessary clicking and keeping track of an additional
| place where conversation is happening.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Worse than getting a million notifications about something
| you're not interested in yet don't want to mute the
| channel?
| xxpor wrote:
| Oh my god the absolute worst thing about slack are threads.
| Can we please not bring them to anything else? how do they
| provide any value whatsoever other than making it hard to
| realize someone responded to you?
|
| Signed, Someone who used IRC for decades
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| Slack - Too much thread
|
| Discord - Not enough thread
|
| M$ Teams - Just right thread
|
| As much as I hate to say it, after using all three, I
| definitely like the Teams threads the best. That model
| offers the best balance of visibility and organization that
| I have seen.
| 0x11 wrote:
| Completely agree, threads confuse me and feel unnecessary.
| One colleague uses them, but no one else and I always miss
| them.
| gitweb wrote:
| Isn't the whole point of notifications to make it apparent
| when someone has responded to your thread?
| nottorp wrote:
| What notifications? They're all off, we talk 90% async.
| And it's impossible to see a thread that you don't know
| about in their UI.
| xxpor wrote:
| If everyone's talking asynchronously, why not use email?
| nottorp wrote:
| - talking async is a lot less friction than sending
| emails
|
| - you have your info pre separated in channels instead of
| needing to sort your emails into folders
|
| - you can pin important data to the channel for future
| reference
|
| - even sending small files is less complicated via a chat
| app
|
| - you can get up to date just by scrolling up a bit
|
| That's all I could think of in 2 minutes.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Discord threads are much closer to IRC than slack threads.
| benglish11 wrote:
| I used to think the same thing regarding threads and I
| think slack's UI for them is bad (pushing them to a side
| window and squishing the main chat) but I have found them
| useful a few times recently. Often times a channel will
| have several different topics going on and the ability to
| push a conversation into a thread has been useful to avoid
| cross talk.
| nottorp wrote:
| Slack threads are unusable. I don't know about you, but I
| never ever notice them when someone makes the mistake of
| starting a new one.
| [deleted]
| epaga wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| Our smallish company has used Discord all year long for our
| company communication and I could hardly be happier. They have
| an excellent bot API, a super clean yet playful interface,
| instant search and just don't feel/smell as "enterprisey" as
| Slack already felt (and that was well before now being acquired
| by Salesforce).
|
| If Discord can maintain all those things and add a bit more
| Microsoft integration, they have a huge opportunity here.
|
| (Either that or Microsoft can preempt the whole thing and
| acquire Discord).
| duxup wrote:
| Serious question, is Discord making efforts to get into the
| "business messaging" (can't think of a better term) type space?
| somehnrdr14726 wrote:
| Honestly confused why Salesforce didn't buy Discord instead.
|
| Discord's entire business model seemed to be geared toward
| toppling Steam by perfecting community features and then
| expanding into digital sales. Right when they launched their
| game store, Epic Games started one too and was throwing around
| Fortnite money to lock in exclusives. Discord quickly retreated
| and has seemed rudderless for the past year.
|
| They already started shifting away from their gamer branding.
| Earlier this year they generalized to online communities. And
| they have a formidable architecture. Some game servers have 6
| digit user counts. Their permission model is also way more
| robust than Slack's, and that's not an easy gap to close given
| how tightly woven into the architecture a permission model
| needs to be.
|
| In comparison to Slack, this all could have been had for
| pennies on the dollar. They must really want the brand, or the
| customer base, or to already have the enterprise feature gap
| closed.
| Axsuul wrote:
| Slack's customer base has a lot more in common to
| Salesforce's than Discord's. Furthermore, Discord is not a
| business tool and far from it.
| wcarss wrote:
| As someone working har on a scrappy alternative to slack, this
| feels like a major win for us, too. For every competitor,
| really.
| ehejsbbejsk wrote:
| How so?
| tiborsaas wrote:
| They are not Slack.
| justaguy88 wrote:
| What do we migrate to now?
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Pidgin enterprise where you can log into multiple enterprise
| chat applications with one account.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Makes me mourn for keybase once more :-(
|
| I guess I could be wrong but I feel like the chances of Slack
| surviving with its genuine "compatibility with everything" story
| and overall usability intact 3 years from now is small.
| thrower123 wrote:
| They got destroyed by Microsoft's pushing of Teams.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| Get ready for annoying nickel and dime'ing for Slack pricing.
| dcanelhas wrote:
| I'm not a slack power user, but I feel that it's a bit like IRC
| but with a fancy (and slow) GUI wrapped around it. Certainly I am
| wrong, but how wrong?
| 2sk21 wrote:
| Same opinion - I have mostly used Slack as a chat tool and it
| works very nicely for that
| draw_down wrote:
| What exactly does this fresh, original observation have to do
| with the company being acquired?
| Bjartr wrote:
| You're about right, but I think not recognizing the value of
| having a UX that the average person feels comfortable with Both
| for daily usage and initial setup. IRC, for all its strengths,
| does not achieve that.
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