11 ms·

Slack wanted to stay independent, but was unable to compete with tech giants

270 points by curiousigor 6y ago

treis 6y ago
I think this is overblown. Slack was perfectly capable of remaining a stand alone company. They just wouldn't have been worth ~30 billion.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Slack has some pretty weird blind spots as a business, too, like that one where all your hundreds or tens-of-thousands of employees must be part of the same general chat channel, where anyone can ping the entire company.
  - iscrewyou 6y ago
    Nobody has engineered a checkbox to disable that yet?
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      They've been spending their their effort giving you their third version of a message-composition "block API" that still doesn't-quite-work as documented.
    - dalyons 6y ago
      They have and it’s been an option for years now. (Disabling posting in #general)
  - RKearney 6y ago
    > where anyone can ping the entire company. It takes 5 seconds to change the permissions on that channel to restrict posting to admins only. We figured that out a few hours after rolling Slack out to a small subset of users to test.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Is it so weird? Surely #general must be a holdover from IRC or some other pre-Slack messenger.
- spurdoman77 6y ago
  Yeah, it is actually weird how these stories are getting written. By any sensible standard slack was insane success. Most founders dream about reaching market value of 1bln. Of course it would be cool to be worth 30bln and have control as well, but tbh many founders are insanely happy if they can get exit even for 30mln.
- exogeny 6y ago
  You’re missing the point. The outcomes and upside are irrelevant, what is relevant is that Microsoft’s only strategy to attack was to give it away for free and bundle it, creating a profoundly unfair (and illegal) advantage that continues the trend of consolidating power and reducing choice.
  - formercoder 6y ago
    Predatory pricing is a component of anti trust but a very difficult one to prove legally. One must prove that by giving consumers a cheaper product they are being harmed. It's an interesting conundrum.
    - orf 6y ago
      But it's not that they just gave consumers a cheaper product - they used their dominance in a specific market to gain dominance in another. It's the same thing as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
      - nodamage 6y ago
        Bundling IE with Windows was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court overturned the district court's initial ruling and remanded it for further analysis, but the case was ultimately settled before any ruling could be made.
        WorldMaker 6y ago
        Also, from the 2020 perspective Microsoft seems to have been right that the browser is an important operating system feature/component and may have simply been ahead of the curve in realizing it. (Today's mobile OSes all make the case that it should be a tightly OS managed component. Most consumers today would be extremely confused if an OS didn't include a browser at all; whether or not they primarily use that browser to install a more preferred browser.) It's easy in 2020 to wonder if the Microsoft anti-trust effort delayed innovations like PWA standards and got in the way of people thinking to build earlier cross-platform, lighter weight HTML "app frameworks" than what we are seeing in this timeline with Electron.
- jasode 6y ago
  >Slack was perfectly capable of remaining a stand alone company. It's possible that Slack's company insiders (founders, C-executives, investment bank advisors, etc) ... all concluded that continuing to compete as an independent company had a more risky outcome: https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+not+profitable https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+not+profitable In other words, let's give the benefit of the doubt and assume all those folks above are above-average intelligent and can use Excel spreadsheets to model user growth, revenue growth, expenses, new products in the pipeline, "what-if" scenarios, etc. Also found a recent related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422092 EDIT REPLY to >"It seems like you stopped reading before my last sentence." Yes, I read that but a healthy business needs to be an ongoing concern and _profitability_ is part of financial health. E.g. Blockbuster Video went from having a market cap worth billions to being worth nothing because of competition from Netflix. Blockbuster went from being profitable to losing money. In one way, Slack is even worse than Blockbuster as it has yet to turn a profit. Setting your snark aside, what justifies your confidence about Slack's possible independent future more than the company's insiders who have all the internal metrics and private financial data to analyze?
  - treis 6y ago
    It seems like you stopped reading before my last sentence.
  - count 6y ago
    https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-think-netflix-killed-blockbuster-now-a-brand-new-report-says-these-7-other-things-mattered-more.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-think-netflix-kill... Heh, ironically, Blockbuster was almost never profitable either :)
- javierluraschi 6y ago
  I completely agree, there is no way Slack becomes irrelevant due to Microsoft. Ironically, getting acquired might.
hpoe 6y ago
So theres an interesting concept in the bible that I have thought about more and more that seems like it would help the problem of concentration of power and large firms. In the Old Testament God commanded the israelites that every 7th 7th year (or every 49 years basically) was to be a year of jubilee. Included among the instructions for the year of jubilee was the requirement that all debts be forgiven and all land revert to it's ancestral owners. Basically the financial system gets reset every 49 years. It seems to me that there are great things that can be done when a business has the right resources but at a certain point business stop competing and start regulating or burying their competition out of existance. Now of course we can't due it exactly how the bible outlines things but I've been increasingly interested in the idea of a regular societal reset on a half a century or so basis. This creates enough time for large firms to grow innovation to happen and wealth creation to happen. Whilst at the same time it prevents eternal dominance by a handful or large players . What would y'all think of a societal reset?
- lostcolony 6y ago
  So there are some noted problems with doing so. Namely, reset starting -when-? At a time of large scale inequality? I.e., millionaire owners of much of NY get locked in as owners for all future generations, and are unable to sell the land, only lease it? Does that lack of salability reduce their economic power sufficiently? Likewise individuals; for anyone who doesn't own land at the start of the system, is there a path to land ownership?
  - hpoe 6y ago
    Well to be clear I'm not saying we should just take what is directly in the bible and lift and shift it, there would obviously be substantial differences between the implementation now and then. As for the when I would say a regular calander cycle, every 50 years or so. Again this is more of the kernel of an idea than a fleshed out plan.
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      There's a reason this is just the kernel of an idea. It's because any possible plan you make off it will very quickly make its manifest unfairness obvious. We aren't living in ancient times, and the distribution of wealth and debt in the world isn't what it used to be. Debt isn't "our crop failed and my family is going to starve this year" anymore.
jonas21 6y ago
I suppose it's all a matter of perspective. As a bootstrapped company, we often worry that someone with lots of venture funding (like Slack) will enter our space with a free product, making it difficult for those of us who actually have to turn a profit to compete.
- judge2020 6y ago
  No doubt this happened with both Google Chat and Microsoft Teams - Google and Microsoft continue to gain marketshare from companies that previously were running their own email/file servers, so any attempt to get them to move to slack is going to be an uphill battle.
- jiveturkey 6y ago
  if you often worry about that, you should consider that you are a feature, not a company. build your erm product appropriately. ie be more attractive to acquire than compete against.
Finnucane 6y ago
"Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative products will prevail over less effective ones released by entrenched firms like Microsoft." Wait, what? When did that start happening?
- giglamesh 6y ago
  Trading on the assumption does not require the assumption to be actually true.
  - floydnoel 6y ago
    Who even makes that assumption. Not economists afaik
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      Neoliberal politicians make that assumption.
loehnsberg 6y ago
Me and my team use both, Slack and Teams, but only because Slack‘s video call feature is really poor compared to its competitor(s). I never really quite got why Slack dev was not able to at least close the gap to Teams in this area. The video call feature is still buggy and lacks important features, such as inviting externals (by calendar invite) or sharing screen AND video, not to mention a whiteboard. If Slack had been a bit more ambitious in this respect, Teams would never have been an option.
- borroka 6y ago
  Don't forget the thousands/(millions) of companies who have enterprise contract for Office 365 and for which Teams comes for "free". Like the company I work for of hundreds of thousands of employees.
  - acomjean 6y ago
    This is a good point. Office 365 seems to have a lot of free applications we don’t use (we tried teams 3 years ago...). They have a trello like thing and a file sharing like thing and a whole host of other stuff bundled in.
- staplers 6y ago
  It's really beyond me how bad Slack's video feature is. If it worked well, most companies could leave behind Zoom.
- mustacheemperor 6y ago
  I can vouch that delivering quality, scaled, enterprise video conferencing is a much bigger technical challenge than it seems after, say, a weekend or two hacking with WebRTC in a hobby capacity. It combines the challenge of supporting a huge landscape of differing hardware devices with that of supporting a huge landscape of differing network environments. There's a near-infinite combination of corner cases that can cause problems and handling them poorly creates the impression of severe instability for the users who experience them. The nature of video conferencing/collaboration software means if 1 user's environment makes the experience unusable, the value for everyone who needs to collaborate with them is also seriously hampered. That said, when we started dogfooding our own conferencing product it was partly because Slack consistently had issues dropping calls after 5-10m of group video. I'm kind of surprised to read such similar complaints 18 months+ on. Presumably it's harder to solve those problems at mass market global scales, we're pretty vertical specific.
antoniuschan99 6y ago
I felt that Slacks innovation never went beyond stage 1-2. The app was thrusted onto stage by upending chat and the momentum was sustained against teams by its 3rd part integrations implementation. Innovations that could have carried the company further could be digital whiteboarding, google docs like editing, dropbox style storage, squiggle like remote teams collaboration. Also the atlassian merger via hip-chat sunset could have resulted a stronger integration between the two organizations. Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned
- NickM 6y ago
  Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned I'm still mad about this. It was such a great piece of software, and then Slack bought it and literally killed it without offering anything to replace the lost functionality.
  - pmart123 6y ago
    Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack.
    - chimeracoder 6y ago
      > Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack. They claim they did, but Slack screensharing is nowhere near what Screenhero's was. A more Screenhero-like replacement is Tuple: https://tuple.app/ https://tuple.app/
      - llaolleh 6y ago
        I'm not really a fan of Tuple. It seems like a poor man's version of Screenhero.
bryanmgreen 6y ago
The dark reality is NOT that people can't compete against monolithic companies. It is that companies have tens of billions of dollars they can spend to acquire companies that are hundred-million-plus net-losers. That lump sum of acquisition money could have been spent in significantly more meaningful ways.
- esja 6y ago
  It's classic malinvestment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinvestment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinvestment
wolverine876 6y ago
Eliminating market advantages for incumbents and wealthy seems to me to be obviously in society's interest: It creates a more competitive marketplace for consumers, reducing prices and increasing innovation, it creates more opportunity for innovators, and it's fundamentally more fair - a meritocracy. I think it should be aggressively pursued, but very carefully - we don't want replace one distortion and unfair system with another. Painting my impressions with a very broad brush: It seems that capitalism was formerly sold to the public as good for society: It provided economic growth, opportunity, and fairness. Those were the goals, and where there were market failures (such as monopolies or prejudice), society would step in and correct it, to further those goals. Now capitalism itself seems to be the goal, the religion, the ideology. It serves no higher purpose - the highest purpose effectively becomes the capitalists. If society steps in, it's rejected as a perversion of capitalism.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Lets say im a current Teams user. If you write a law that forces Microsoft to make me start paying for teams, who are you helping? Me, the consumer? No, you're bailing out Slack using my wallet. That's not pro-consumer. That's anti-consumer. It makes me poorer and both Microsoft and Slack richer.
  - wolverine876 6y ago
    Monopoly abuse doesn't lower prices for the consumer; it reduces innovation and raises prices. It's only 'bailing out' Slack if you accept that abusive monopoly practices as a norm, in which case arresting thieves who steal and sell goods is 'bailing out' the jewelry stores.
varispeed 6y ago
Companies should not be allowed to buy other companies unless it is absolutely essential. This is a flaw in capitalism that creates duopolies and hurts consumers. We then get companies that are too big to fail, can afford creative accounting and plethora of other not so nice things, like lobbying government to change legislation in favour of them. We also need a rule that once company goes over a certain threshold it should be split. I don't think we have ever experienced something like this before that's why there is no regulation and we can see from our experience that companies do not behave nice, so we need a law that forces them to behave.
ogre_codes 6y ago
With the current tech atmosphere, so many people want to call Facebook, Google, and Apple monopolies and Microsoft sort of gets forgotten. Microsoft still has a ton of levers they can pull to influence buyers. Microsoft has the ability to include teams as part of a bigger integrated bundle which businesses find more appealing.
- politelemon 6y ago
  It's because MS have had their run from >10 years ago, and now act less like they used to. Certainly not zero, but certainly nowhere near the F/G/A realms of monopoly and cartel like behavior that we see today.
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thethethethe 6y ago
> These giants, armed with nearly limitless funds and extensive client relationships, frequently abuse their advantage and bully smaller upstarts into oblivion. I don’t really understand this viewpoint. Companies are _choosing_ to use Microsoft’s products for various reasons. Maybe they already use Office and the integration with Teams made Teams the best choice over Slack. Maybe the company had an existing relationship with Microsoft so onboarding Teams required less Administrative overhead. There are probably many more that I am not listing. These are legitimate reasons to choose a product over another, not Microsoft abusing its power. Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem. Lone, un-integrated startups, like Slack, still pop up and shake up the market. Then big companies replicate their product and integrate it into their existing software suites and sales pipelines, providing value that the smaller startup cannot. In this case the smaller startup merged with a larger company and will likely be integrated with their systems, providing value that both companies could have easily created alone. This all seems like it’s working as intended to me.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem It's a chat app. (And Slack itself is a huge company) Teams, as a product on its own merits, is not necessarily better than Slack. I very strongly disagree with the notion that integration into a locked-in ecosystem is a legitimate reason and not an abuse of power. When you switch from product A to product B only because product B integrates with proprietary protocols or services you rely on and not on the merit or price of the product itself then that's bad, and it's harming consumer welfare and competition. It also is a positive feedback loop in that those services just keep claiming more and more space and the claim of space alone diminishes the value of everyone else, because you're forever locked into a web of, in this case, Microsoft products. Which is of course one of the reasons the company is so powerful. You can ask yourself this, if every software company waas forced to implement transparent protocols and APIs, so that clients can freely choose their end-user software, what would the market share look like? If it would look different than it does now I think you can make a strong case that consumers are being deprived of choice.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I wish there were more well run 501.3c open source initiatives that relied on major donations from organizations wanting to diversify their risk to being forever beholden to major software providers. E.g. if an O365 subscription costs your organization $10MM per year, why not donate $100k per year (along with 10 of your peers) to a group writing open source bare bones versions that handle 90% of your employee needs. The world would seem to benefit in this model...
- Zhyl 6y ago
  Ah, the Valve Proton model!
- save_ferris 6y ago
  The adage "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM" rings true here. Management at companies that pay $10MM per year on O365 don't see Office as a risk, they see it as foundational to their work. For that amount, they're probably also getting special deals from Microsoft to further integrate into their ecosystem and are constantly sold on all of the features that Microsoft products provide.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  As the saying goes "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." An organization that pays $10MM per year has a lot of leverage and likely has long term contracts to hedge risk. So why, basically, waste $100k?
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  The world really would. I wish there was a way this could work and could pay the same salaries as FANGs do. I think you would like https://www.fsf.org/ https://www.fsf.org/
  - acomjean 6y ago
    If you look the reaction when Red Hat wanted to force the move from free CentOS clone to paid RHEL... That incoming cash would help Linux get better. Free though helps businesses start. Though economies of scale in tech are so huge now.
yalogin 6y ago
Slack missed the opportunity to add video communication and replace webex. They somehow didn't take that next step after conquering chat. I thought with video + enterprise integration they would have become the de facto tool for all collaboration. I guess that is still there on the cards for them. Instead they left that door open for Microsoft to add Teams.
- javierluraschi 6y ago
  Would have love to see ZM and WORK merging, maybe in a parallel reality.
agapon 6y ago
IMHO, we all want to live in the "ever after". I think that's why many successful startups (or startup-like companies) get sold by their founders to mega-corps. The existence and seemingly never-ending expansion of mega-corps is a different story though.
crazygringo 6y ago
> As Matt Stoller notes in his newsletter “BIG“, Microsoft has a track record of giving “away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and [bundling] it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal.” That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist -- you'd be forced to buy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all separately. Or by the same logic, an OS shouldn't be allowed to have any applications at all -- not even a calculator app, because that would be anticompetitive against other calculator apps. In what universe should Microsoft not be allowed to add a chat component to their office productivity suite? When that's clearly an essential component of such suites these days? Sheesh. Slack has had an amazing outcome. And awesome products, historically, tend to be absorbed by large corporations simply because it's more efficient and therefore profitable for everyone involved. There's nothing wrong with that.
- mrkurt 6y ago
  The purpose of antitrust laws is to limit how much damage powerful companies can do. So yes, if we had functional antitrust laws in the US, Microsoft may not be allowed to do certain things. Like bundle a Slack competitor with an existing product. The universe where this should happen is one where we recognize that a healthy capitalistic society is good, and putting constraints on concentrated power helps keep things healthy. The real question behind all this is: are we as a society better or worse off now that Salesforce owns Slack?
- lefrenchy 6y ago
  > That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist It's not that they should not be allowed to exist. Rather, they should not be able to undercut competitors by using their leverage as massive tech companies to subsidize losing money on something while they starve out competitors. Stoller's article has much more nuance than you are attributing, and he outlines that in a world where these tech corporations were not allowed to get as big and powerful, you wouldn't have to be left with binary decisions like this one. This sort of behavior is akin to Amazon selling items at a loss in order to starve out some competitor and then buying them out afterwards in order to benefit from their infrastructure and logistics.
tus88 6y ago
> Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative products will prevail over less effective ones released by entrenched firms like Microsoft. What a bizarre statement. The only think the free market assumes is that the market decides. Nothing else.
remir 6y ago
The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don't really need a chat service. It's not a must for them. On the other hand, what knowledge worker today can function without video conferencing, desktop sharing, file sharing and VoIP? No that many. Teams provide all of that natively. That's why they're wining. Let's be frank, if Teams had been just a chat application, it would never have had the success it currently has, even as part of O365. Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that. The reality is that MS made Teams a complete collaboration platform and Slack couldn't do the same with their product.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  Slack seems like they already had everything they needed. You can do video calls natively in Slack. You can store and transfer files. They just didn’t put the pieces together; everything was kept as a minor complement to chat. That said, I’m not sure they could have competed with Teams in MS corporate deployments under any circumstances. If a company is already using Outlook, Exchange, AD, O365, Teams plugs in very nicely. But, seems like that still leaves a pretty big market.
  - dexterdog 6y ago
    Plus it is zero marginal cost for those places where slack has expensive per user pricing.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    How important is Office365 interactivity really? Calendar is nice but otherwise?
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  I don't want more collaboration. Slack is enough of a distraction. Something integrated with even more tools sounds like a detractor to me.
- Kiro 6y ago
  > The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don't really need a chat service. It's not a must for them. I don't understand this. Chat has always been an integral part of work in all my jobs. Before Slack it was Skype. I can't imagine working through email only. It would be hard enough when we were sitting in the same office but impossible now when we're remote.
brown9-2 6y ago
Wait, so Slack has single-digit million users and sold for $27 billion?
segmondy 6y ago
Slack sold because they are not the future, the future of work is video. the pandemic showed that zoom, hangouts, team is much valuable than chat. Those all have chat as well, might not be as good as Slack but if any org had to keep one, it would not be Slack.
- 0xTJ 6y ago
  I very strongly disagree. Even in a physical workplace, quick text messaging has a place. Saying that the video services are more valuable than chat is comparing apples to oranges. And I don't know of a mainstream video conferencing service with text messaging as good as Slack. (Maybe Teams? I was strongly encouraged to used it over the previous option that worked fine, and have intentionally avoided it since out of protest.)
29athrowaway 6y ago
Enterprise guys can bundle solutions together. Slack can't. Example: Atlassian can bundle Jira, Confluence, Hipchat. Microsoft can bundle Office 365, Exchange, Teams, etc.
ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
In Slack's case I'm not sure how much this played a role. Slack itself really seemed like the kind of project a team of developers could write at a one week hackathon. So of course Slack was going to have to compete with essentially clones from all the major vendors and more, it's a very cloneable piece of software. At least something like Zoom seems to not be as easily cloneable (the alternatives don't compare yet, in my opinion at least).
catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
> And if a company like Slack can’t stand up to the consolidation of corporate power, consumers’ ability to freely choose the best and most useful product is at risk That is the flawed assumption. Consumers never had a choice for Slack. It was an enterprise decision
DoreenMichele 6y ago
This is speculation. It is not an interview with the decision makers at Slack. It's an opinion piece. We definitely could do a better job of "championing the little guy." But the title here -- which is not as click-baity as the actual title, is something I experienced as misleading. I expected this to be an interview with someone in the know, not speculation by an outsider based on previous public statements. You can infer a lot based on public statements, but there may be things that weren't being said publicly. It can be impossible to know "the real motive" behind something without a direct statement by the person who made the decision.
breck 6y ago
> “How will you compete with the tech giants? The one and only thing people who are concerned with the tech giants should be talking about is ending #ImaginaryPropertyLaws. Anyone talking about problems with big tech but not talking about ending IP Laws are just paying lip service. I worked at Microsoft. Great and brilliant people. They don't need #ImaginaryProperty protection. End that and sure, shareholders of MSFT will be worse off, but the world will be better off—a ton of people there will go off and start their own companies and there will be a lot more competition in the space. Same for Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. All of these companies rely on #ImaginaryPropertyLaws for the root of their power. Such laws are just plain wrong (we could enable every child on earth to have the same access to information as the richest with a snap of our fingers, but everyday we choose not to), but putting all that aside, if all you care about is ending the monopolization going on in the tech industry, this is the thing you should be looking hard at.
- paxys 6y ago
  IP laws are a negligible factor in the dominance of tech giants. When was the last time Google or Facebook sued a startup for violating one of its patents? It's far easier to just buy them out.
  - breck 6y ago
    It goes far deeper than that. These companies have absurd amounts of proprietary information on everything going on in the world, and it's near impossible to compete. You are right, they will generally just buy you out, but if you don't accept, they will buy out your competitor and then your competitor will suddenly have access to all your customers (and many more), your potential customers, your usage numbers, data on your employees, your financings, et cetera. It's not a fair fight, and it is the way it is because of ImaginaryProperty laws.
nbs_tar 6y ago
It COULD compete with tech giants, it COULDN'T live up to the valuation and had a fiduciary duty to take the offer. Slack's worth $27bn (which is in the top 100 GDPs by country) and was FCF positive. With the right cap table it could stay private and self fund. But it went public, and by the rules of the game it chose to play ended up valued at like 30x forward revenue. To maintain that valuation it had to sell.
- paxys 6y ago
  Yeah, while I agree with the article overall Slack is a bad example to use. It sold not because it was on its last legs but because Salesforce made an absurd offer. There are plenty of smaller companies that die or get acquired because they have no other choice.
heavenlyblue 6y ago
Doesn’t everyone want to stay independent?
intellix 6y ago
Well Microsoft teams is free if you already have office 365 so of course it's now one of the most used systems. I wish calls had native support for Apple pencil as I'd like to use my iPad to draw on screen or a board during meetings
ashtonkem 6y ago
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if Salesforce manages to kill Slack; I’ve come to hate it over the years.
- javierluraschi 6y ago
  Curious, why?
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Slack was supposed to save us from email. It actually made things worse on its own, and email never went away either. Slack has turned into an unrelenting firehose of noise and distraction, and it lacks the tooling necessary to make it actually serve all the roles it fills in most orgs. Something slower, more purpose built, with a much richer set of controls around notification processing (read/unread isn’t enough when it’s a work ask) would serve us all much better.
My7thAccount 6y ago
I like the feature on slack where you can see a graph of private vs public discussions. If the private discussions suddenly increase dramatically while public discussion cease and you aren't involved, something bad is about to happen
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rapht 6y ago
I absolutely do not buy into the idea that "poor Slack" failed to "overcome giants" and that any harm was actually done. $27bn is actually successful for a company that's just a few years old. The competition that was stirred during those years ended up with Microsoft developing what is now a good product for 80% of use cases, with integration with tools (Office) that 80% of companies use, and all those companies benefitting from it did not have to shell out a single additional penny. From the eyes of consumers, I would call it a success of competition rather than a failure. Sure, it has now run its course, but making $27bn out of it is not what I would call a bitter end - the dream of independence aside. But that's a for few individuals to dream about...
cybert00th 6y ago
"it’s time to rebalance the playing field" OK sure, but the author doesn't say how. She's involved in a whole bunch of initiatives to help the little guy, so surely she has a lot of experience to share?
zwu23 6y ago
My current employer is the first company I work at that uses Slack. I used to envy my partner who raves about Slack. However, when I start using it, I wasn’t too impressed. I worked for a Chinese company in my last role, and I have to say I love their internal chat tool (which is a copycat of WeChat) way better than Slack. It doesn’t have the cool and modern interface of Slack, but it’s way more functional. For example, my favorite feature of the WeChat copycat tool is taking screenshots and able to do sketches on the screenshots. It’s integrated within the chat tool and it’s so convenient. With Slack, I have to rely on my Mac’s screenshot feature and Preview for editing, and then drag it in Slack’s chat window. Also, for shared channel, I saw that was innovated by WeChat long time ago, so I wasn’t that impressed with that feature.
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chachachoney 6y ago
J.R. "Bob" Dobbs is not amused.

270 points by curiousigor 6y ago

I think this is overblown. Slack was perfectly capable of remaining a stand alone company. They just wouldn't have been worth ~30 billion.

fennecfoxen 6y ago
Slack has some pretty weird blind spots as a business, too, like that one where all your hundreds or tens-of-thousands of employees must be part of the same general chat channel, where anyone can ping the entire company.
- iscrewyou 6y ago
  Nobody has engineered a checkbox to disable that yet?
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    They've been spending their their effort giving you their third version of a message-composition "block API" that still doesn't-quite-work as documented.
  - dalyons 6y ago
    They have and it’s been an option for years now. (Disabling posting in #general)
- RKearney 6y ago
  > where anyone can ping the entire company. It takes 5 seconds to change the permissions on that channel to restrict posting to admins only. We figured that out a few hours after rolling Slack out to a small subset of users to test.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Is it so weird? Surely #general must be a holdover from IRC or some other pre-Slack messenger.
spurdoman77 6y ago
Yeah, it is actually weird how these stories are getting written. By any sensible standard slack was insane success. Most founders dream about reaching market value of 1bln. Of course it would be cool to be worth 30bln and have control as well, but tbh many founders are insanely happy if they can get exit even for 30mln.
exogeny 6y ago
You’re missing the point. The outcomes and upside are irrelevant, what is relevant is that Microsoft’s only strategy to attack was to give it away for free and bundle it, creating a profoundly unfair (and illegal) advantage that continues the trend of consolidating power and reducing choice.
- formercoder 6y ago
  Predatory pricing is a component of anti trust but a very difficult one to prove legally. One must prove that by giving consumers a cheaper product they are being harmed. It's an interesting conundrum.
  - orf 6y ago
    But it's not that they just gave consumers a cheaper product - they used their dominance in a specific market to gain dominance in another. It's the same thing as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
    - nodamage 6y ago
      Bundling IE with Windows was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court overturned the district court's initial ruling and remanded it for further analysis, but the case was ultimately settled before any ruling could be made.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        Also, from the 2020 perspective Microsoft seems to have been right that the browser is an important operating system feature/component and may have simply been ahead of the curve in realizing it. (Today's mobile OSes all make the case that it should be a tightly OS managed component. Most consumers today would be extremely confused if an OS didn't include a browser at all; whether or not they primarily use that browser to install a more preferred browser.) It's easy in 2020 to wonder if the Microsoft anti-trust effort delayed innovations like PWA standards and got in the way of people thinking to build earlier cross-platform, lighter weight HTML "app frameworks" than what we are seeing in this timeline with Electron.
jasode 6y ago
>Slack was perfectly capable of remaining a stand alone company. It's possible that Slack's company insiders (founders, C-executives, investment bank advisors, etc) ... all concluded that continuing to compete as an independent company had a more risky outcome: https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+not+profitable https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+not+profitable In other words, let's give the benefit of the doubt and assume all those folks above are above-average intelligent and can use Excel spreadsheets to model user growth, revenue growth, expenses, new products in the pipeline, "what-if" scenarios, etc. Also found a recent related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422092 EDIT REPLY to >"It seems like you stopped reading before my last sentence." Yes, I read that but a healthy business needs to be an ongoing concern and _profitability_ is part of financial health. E.g. Blockbuster Video went from having a market cap worth billions to being worth nothing because of competition from Netflix. Blockbuster went from being profitable to losing money. In one way, Slack is even worse than Blockbuster as it has yet to turn a profit. Setting your snark aside, what justifies your confidence about Slack's possible independent future more than the company's insiders who have all the internal metrics and private financial data to analyze?
- treis 6y ago
  It seems like you stopped reading before my last sentence.
- count 6y ago
  https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-think-netflix-killed-blockbuster-now-a-brand-new-report-says-these-7-other-things-mattered-more.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-think-netflix-kill... Heh, ironically, Blockbuster was almost never profitable either :)
javierluraschi 6y ago
I completely agree, there is no way Slack becomes irrelevant due to Microsoft. Ironically, getting acquired might.

hpoe 6y ago

So theres an interesting concept in the bible that I have thought about more and more that seems like it would help the problem of concentration of power and large firms. In the Old Testament God commanded the israelites that every 7th 7th year (or every 49 years basically) was to be a year of jubilee. Included among the instructions for the year of jubilee was the requirement that all debts be forgiven and all land revert to it's ancestral owners. Basically the financial system gets reset every 49 years. It seems to me that there are great things that can be done when a business has the right resources but at a certain point business stop competing and start regulating or burying their competition out of existance. Now of course we can't due it exactly how the bible outlines things but I've been increasingly interested in the idea of a regular societal reset on a half a century or so basis. This creates enough time for large firms to grow innovation to happen and wealth creation to happen. Whilst at the same time it prevents eternal dominance by a handful or large players . What would y'all think of a societal reset?

lostcolony 6y ago
So there are some noted problems with doing so. Namely, reset starting -when-? At a time of large scale inequality? I.e., millionaire owners of much of NY get locked in as owners for all future generations, and are unable to sell the land, only lease it? Does that lack of salability reduce their economic power sufficiently? Likewise individuals; for anyone who doesn't own land at the start of the system, is there a path to land ownership?
- hpoe 6y ago
  Well to be clear I'm not saying we should just take what is directly in the bible and lift and shift it, there would obviously be substantial differences between the implementation now and then. As for the when I would say a regular calander cycle, every 50 years or so. Again this is more of the kernel of an idea than a fleshed out plan.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    There's a reason this is just the kernel of an idea. It's because any possible plan you make off it will very quickly make its manifest unfairness obvious. We aren't living in ancient times, and the distribution of wealth and debt in the world isn't what it used to be. Debt isn't "our crop failed and my family is going to starve this year" anymore.

jonas21 6y ago

I suppose it's all a matter of perspective. As a bootstrapped company, we often worry that someone with lots of venture funding (like Slack) will enter our space with a free product, making it difficult for those of us who actually have to turn a profit to compete.

judge2020 6y ago
No doubt this happened with both Google Chat and Microsoft Teams - Google and Microsoft continue to gain marketshare from companies that previously were running their own email/file servers, so any attempt to get them to move to slack is going to be an uphill battle.
jiveturkey 6y ago
if you often worry about that, you should consider that you are a feature, not a company. build your erm product appropriately. ie be more attractive to acquire than compete against.

Finnucane 6y ago

"Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative products will prevail over less effective ones released by entrenched firms like Microsoft." Wait, what? When did that start happening?

giglamesh 6y ago
Trading on the assumption does not require the assumption to be actually true.
- floydnoel 6y ago
  Who even makes that assumption. Not economists afaik
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    Neoliberal politicians make that assumption.

loehnsberg 6y ago

Me and my team use both, Slack and Teams, but only because Slack‘s video call feature is really poor compared to its competitor(s). I never really quite got why Slack dev was not able to at least close the gap to Teams in this area. The video call feature is still buggy and lacks important features, such as inviting externals (by calendar invite) or sharing screen AND video, not to mention a whiteboard. If Slack had been a bit more ambitious in this respect, Teams would never have been an option.

borroka 6y ago
Don't forget the thousands/(millions) of companies who have enterprise contract for Office 365 and for which Teams comes for "free". Like the company I work for of hundreds of thousands of employees.
- acomjean 6y ago
  This is a good point. Office 365 seems to have a lot of free applications we don’t use (we tried teams 3 years ago...). They have a trello like thing and a file sharing like thing and a whole host of other stuff bundled in.
staplers 6y ago
It's really beyond me how bad Slack's video feature is. If it worked well, most companies could leave behind Zoom.
mustacheemperor 6y ago
I can vouch that delivering quality, scaled, enterprise video conferencing is a much bigger technical challenge than it seems after, say, a weekend or two hacking with WebRTC in a hobby capacity. It combines the challenge of supporting a huge landscape of differing hardware devices with that of supporting a huge landscape of differing network environments. There's a near-infinite combination of corner cases that can cause problems and handling them poorly creates the impression of severe instability for the users who experience them. The nature of video conferencing/collaboration software means if 1 user's environment makes the experience unusable, the value for everyone who needs to collaborate with them is also seriously hampered. That said, when we started dogfooding our own conferencing product it was partly because Slack consistently had issues dropping calls after 5-10m of group video. I'm kind of surprised to read such similar complaints 18 months+ on. Presumably it's harder to solve those problems at mass market global scales, we're pretty vertical specific.

antoniuschan99 6y ago

I felt that Slacks innovation never went beyond stage 1-2. The app was thrusted onto stage by upending chat and the momentum was sustained against teams by its 3rd part integrations implementation. Innovations that could have carried the company further could be digital whiteboarding, google docs like editing, dropbox style storage, squiggle like remote teams collaboration. Also the atlassian merger via hip-chat sunset could have resulted a stronger integration between the two organizations. Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned

NickM 6y ago
Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned I'm still mad about this. It was such a great piece of software, and then Slack bought it and literally killed it without offering anything to replace the lost functionality.
- pmart123 6y ago
  Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack.
  - chimeracoder 6y ago
    > Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack. They claim they did, but Slack screensharing is nowhere near what Screenhero's was. A more Screenhero-like replacement is Tuple: https://tuple.app/ https://tuple.app/
    - llaolleh 6y ago
      I'm not really a fan of Tuple. It seems like a poor man's version of Screenhero.

bryanmgreen 6y ago

The dark reality is NOT that people can't compete against monolithic companies. It is that companies have tens of billions of dollars they can spend to acquire companies that are hundred-million-plus net-losers. That lump sum of acquisition money could have been spent in significantly more meaningful ways.

esja 6y ago
It's classic malinvestment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinvestment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinvestment

wolverine876 6y ago

Eliminating market advantages for incumbents and wealthy seems to me to be obviously in society's interest: It creates a more competitive marketplace for consumers, reducing prices and increasing innovation, it creates more opportunity for innovators, and it's fundamentally more fair - a meritocracy. I think it should be aggressively pursued, but very carefully - we don't want replace one distortion and unfair system with another. Painting my impressions with a very broad brush: It seems that capitalism was formerly sold to the public as good for society: It provided economic growth, opportunity, and fairness. Those were the goals, and where there were market failures (such as monopolies or prejudice), society would step in and correct it, to further those goals. Now capitalism itself seems to be the goal, the religion, the ideology. It serves no higher purpose - the highest purpose effectively becomes the capitalists. If society steps in, it's rejected as a perversion of capitalism.

missedthecue 6y ago
Lets say im a current Teams user. If you write a law that forces Microsoft to make me start paying for teams, who are you helping? Me, the consumer? No, you're bailing out Slack using my wallet. That's not pro-consumer. That's anti-consumer. It makes me poorer and both Microsoft and Slack richer.
- wolverine876 6y ago
  Monopoly abuse doesn't lower prices for the consumer; it reduces innovation and raises prices. It's only 'bailing out' Slack if you accept that abusive monopoly practices as a norm, in which case arresting thieves who steal and sell goods is 'bailing out' the jewelry stores.

varispeed 6y ago

Companies should not be allowed to buy other companies unless it is absolutely essential. This is a flaw in capitalism that creates duopolies and hurts consumers. We then get companies that are too big to fail, can afford creative accounting and plethora of other not so nice things, like lobbying government to change legislation in favour of them. We also need a rule that once company goes over a certain threshold it should be split. I don't think we have ever experienced something like this before that's why there is no regulation and we can see from our experience that companies do not behave nice, so we need a law that forces them to behave.

ogre_codes 6y ago

With the current tech atmosphere, so many people want to call Facebook, Google, and Apple monopolies and Microsoft sort of gets forgotten. Microsoft still has a ton of levers they can pull to influence buyers. Microsoft has the ability to include teams as part of a bigger integrated bundle which businesses find more appealing.

politelemon 6y ago
It's because MS have had their run from >10 years ago, and now act less like they used to. Certainly not zero, but certainly nowhere near the F/G/A realms of monopoly and cartel like behavior that we see today.

deleted 6y ago

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thethethethe 6y ago

> These giants, armed with nearly limitless funds and extensive client relationships, frequently abuse their advantage and bully smaller upstarts into oblivion. I don’t really understand this viewpoint. Companies are _choosing_ to use Microsoft’s products for various reasons. Maybe they already use Office and the integration with Teams made Teams the best choice over Slack. Maybe the company had an existing relationship with Microsoft so onboarding Teams required less Administrative overhead. There are probably many more that I am not listing. These are legitimate reasons to choose a product over another, not Microsoft abusing its power. Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem. Lone, un-integrated startups, like Slack, still pop up and shake up the market. Then big companies replicate their product and integrate it into their existing software suites and sales pipelines, providing value that the smaller startup cannot. In this case the smaller startup merged with a larger company and will likely be integrated with their systems, providing value that both companies could have easily created alone. This all seems like it’s working as intended to me.

Barrin92 6y ago
>Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem It's a chat app. (And Slack itself is a huge company) Teams, as a product on its own merits, is not necessarily better than Slack. I very strongly disagree with the notion that integration into a locked-in ecosystem is a legitimate reason and not an abuse of power. When you switch from product A to product B only because product B integrates with proprietary protocols or services you rely on and not on the merit or price of the product itself then that's bad, and it's harming consumer welfare and competition. It also is a positive feedback loop in that those services just keep claiming more and more space and the claim of space alone diminishes the value of everyone else, because you're forever locked into a web of, in this case, Microsoft products. Which is of course one of the reasons the company is so powerful. You can ask yourself this, if every software company waas forced to implement transparent protocols and APIs, so that clients can freely choose their end-user software, what would the market share look like? If it would look different than it does now I think you can make a strong case that consumers are being deprived of choice.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

I wish there were more well run 501.3c open source initiatives that relied on major donations from organizations wanting to diversify their risk to being forever beholden to major software providers. E.g. if an O365 subscription costs your organization $10MM per year, why not donate $100k per year (along with 10 of your peers) to a group writing open source bare bones versions that handle 90% of your employee needs. The world would seem to benefit in this model...

Zhyl 6y ago
Ah, the Valve Proton model!
save_ferris 6y ago
The adage "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM" rings true here. Management at companies that pay $10MM per year on O365 don't see Office as a risk, they see it as foundational to their work. For that amount, they're probably also getting special deals from Microsoft to further integrate into their ecosystem and are constantly sold on all of the features that Microsoft products provide.
marcinzm 6y ago
As the saying goes "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." An organization that pays $10MM per year has a lot of leverage and likely has long term contracts to hedge risk. So why, basically, waste $100k?
jtsiskin 6y ago
The world really would. I wish there was a way this could work and could pay the same salaries as FANGs do. I think you would like https://www.fsf.org/ https://www.fsf.org/
- acomjean 6y ago
  If you look the reaction when Red Hat wanted to force the move from free CentOS clone to paid RHEL... That incoming cash would help Linux get better. Free though helps businesses start. Though economies of scale in tech are so huge now.

yalogin 6y ago

Slack missed the opportunity to add video communication and replace webex. They somehow didn't take that next step after conquering chat. I thought with video + enterprise integration they would have become the de facto tool for all collaboration. I guess that is still there on the cards for them. Instead they left that door open for Microsoft to add Teams.

javierluraschi 6y ago
Would have love to see ZM and WORK merging, maybe in a parallel reality.

agapon 6y ago

IMHO, we all want to live in the "ever after". I think that's why many successful startups (or startup-like companies) get sold by their founders to mega-corps. The existence and seemingly never-ending expansion of mega-corps is a different story though.

crazygringo 6y ago

> As Matt Stoller notes in his newsletter “BIG“, Microsoft has a track record of giving “away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and [bundling] it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal.” That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist -- you'd be forced to buy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all separately. Or by the same logic, an OS shouldn't be allowed to have any applications at all -- not even a calculator app, because that would be anticompetitive against other calculator apps. In what universe should Microsoft not be allowed to add a chat component to their office productivity suite? When that's clearly an essential component of such suites these days? Sheesh. Slack has had an amazing outcome. And awesome products, historically, tend to be absorbed by large corporations simply because it's more efficient and therefore profitable for everyone involved. There's nothing wrong with that.

mrkurt 6y ago
The purpose of antitrust laws is to limit how much damage powerful companies can do. So yes, if we had functional antitrust laws in the US, Microsoft may not be allowed to do certain things. Like bundle a Slack competitor with an existing product. The universe where this should happen is one where we recognize that a healthy capitalistic society is good, and putting constraints on concentrated power helps keep things healthy. The real question behind all this is: are we as a society better or worse off now that Salesforce owns Slack?
lefrenchy 6y ago
> That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist It's not that they should not be allowed to exist. Rather, they should not be able to undercut competitors by using their leverage as massive tech companies to subsidize losing money on something while they starve out competitors. Stoller's article has much more nuance than you are attributing, and he outlines that in a world where these tech corporations were not allowed to get as big and powerful, you wouldn't have to be left with binary decisions like this one. This sort of behavior is akin to Amazon selling items at a loss in order to starve out some competitor and then buying them out afterwards in order to benefit from their infrastructure and logistics.

tus88 6y ago

> Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative products will prevail over less effective ones released by entrenched firms like Microsoft. What a bizarre statement. The only think the free market assumes is that the market decides. Nothing else.

remir 6y ago

The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don't really need a chat service. It's not a must for them. On the other hand, what knowledge worker today can function without video conferencing, desktop sharing, file sharing and VoIP? No that many. Teams provide all of that natively. That's why they're wining. Let's be frank, if Teams had been just a chat application, it would never have had the success it currently has, even as part of O365. Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that. The reality is that MS made Teams a complete collaboration platform and Slack couldn't do the same with their product.

snowwrestler 6y ago
Slack seems like they already had everything they needed. You can do video calls natively in Slack. You can store and transfer files. They just didn’t put the pieces together; everything was kept as a minor complement to chat. That said, I’m not sure they could have competed with Teams in MS corporate deployments under any circumstances. If a company is already using Outlook, Exchange, AD, O365, Teams plugs in very nicely. But, seems like that still leaves a pretty big market.
- dexterdog 6y ago
  Plus it is zero marginal cost for those places where slack has expensive per user pricing.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  How important is Office365 interactivity really? Calendar is nice but otherwise?
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
I don't want more collaboration. Slack is enough of a distraction. Something integrated with even more tools sounds like a detractor to me.
Kiro 6y ago
> The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don't really need a chat service. It's not a must for them. I don't understand this. Chat has always been an integral part of work in all my jobs. Before Slack it was Skype. I can't imagine working through email only. It would be hard enough when we were sitting in the same office but impossible now when we're remote.

brown9-2 6y ago

Wait, so Slack has single-digit million users and sold for $27 billion?

segmondy 6y ago

Slack sold because they are not the future, the future of work is video. the pandemic showed that zoom, hangouts, team is much valuable than chat. Those all have chat as well, might not be as good as Slack but if any org had to keep one, it would not be Slack.

0xTJ 6y ago
I very strongly disagree. Even in a physical workplace, quick text messaging has a place. Saying that the video services are more valuable than chat is comparing apples to oranges. And I don't know of a mainstream video conferencing service with text messaging as good as Slack. (Maybe Teams? I was strongly encouraged to used it over the previous option that worked fine, and have intentionally avoided it since out of protest.)

29athrowaway 6y ago

Enterprise guys can bundle solutions together. Slack can't. Example: Atlassian can bundle Jira, Confluence, Hipchat. Microsoft can bundle Office 365, Exchange, Teams, etc.

ApolloFortyNine 6y ago

In Slack's case I'm not sure how much this played a role. Slack itself really seemed like the kind of project a team of developers could write at a one week hackathon. So of course Slack was going to have to compete with essentially clones from all the major vendors and more, it's a very cloneable piece of software. At least something like Zoom seems to not be as easily cloneable (the alternatives don't compare yet, in my opinion at least).

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago

> And if a company like Slack can’t stand up to the consolidation of corporate power, consumers’ ability to freely choose the best and most useful product is at risk That is the flawed assumption. Consumers never had a choice for Slack. It was an enterprise decision

DoreenMichele 6y ago

This is speculation. It is not an interview with the decision makers at Slack. It's an opinion piece. We definitely could do a better job of "championing the little guy." But the title here -- which is not as click-baity as the actual title, is something I experienced as misleading. I expected this to be an interview with someone in the know, not speculation by an outsider based on previous public statements. You can infer a lot based on public statements, but there may be things that weren't being said publicly. It can be impossible to know "the real motive" behind something without a direct statement by the person who made the decision.

breck 6y ago

> “How will you compete with the tech giants? The one and only thing people who are concerned with the tech giants should be talking about is ending #ImaginaryPropertyLaws. Anyone talking about problems with big tech but not talking about ending IP Laws are just paying lip service. I worked at Microsoft. Great and brilliant people. They don't need #ImaginaryProperty protection. End that and sure, shareholders of MSFT will be worse off, but the world will be better off—a ton of people there will go off and start their own companies and there will be a lot more competition in the space. Same for Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. All of these companies rely on #ImaginaryPropertyLaws for the root of their power. Such laws are just plain wrong (we could enable every child on earth to have the same access to information as the richest with a snap of our fingers, but everyday we choose not to), but putting all that aside, if all you care about is ending the monopolization going on in the tech industry, this is the thing you should be looking hard at.

paxys 6y ago
IP laws are a negligible factor in the dominance of tech giants. When was the last time Google or Facebook sued a startup for violating one of its patents? It's far easier to just buy them out.
- breck 6y ago
  It goes far deeper than that. These companies have absurd amounts of proprietary information on everything going on in the world, and it's near impossible to compete. You are right, they will generally just buy you out, but if you don't accept, they will buy out your competitor and then your competitor will suddenly have access to all your customers (and many more), your potential customers, your usage numbers, data on your employees, your financings, et cetera. It's not a fair fight, and it is the way it is because of ImaginaryProperty laws.

nbs_tar 6y ago

It COULD compete with tech giants, it COULDN'T live up to the valuation and had a fiduciary duty to take the offer. Slack's worth $27bn (which is in the top 100 GDPs by country) and was FCF positive. With the right cap table it could stay private and self fund. But it went public, and by the rules of the game it chose to play ended up valued at like 30x forward revenue. To maintain that valuation it had to sell.

paxys 6y ago
Yeah, while I agree with the article overall Slack is a bad example to use. It sold not because it was on its last legs but because Salesforce made an absurd offer. There are plenty of smaller companies that die or get acquired because they have no other choice.

heavenlyblue 6y ago

Doesn’t everyone want to stay independent?

intellix 6y ago

Well Microsoft teams is free if you already have office 365 so of course it's now one of the most used systems. I wish calls had native support for Apple pencil as I'd like to use my iPad to draw on screen or a board during meetings

ashtonkem 6y ago

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if Salesforce manages to kill Slack; I’ve come to hate it over the years.

javierluraschi 6y ago
Curious, why?
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Slack was supposed to save us from email. It actually made things worse on its own, and email never went away either. Slack has turned into an unrelenting firehose of noise and distraction, and it lacks the tooling necessary to make it actually serve all the roles it fills in most orgs. Something slower, more purpose built, with a much richer set of controls around notification processing (read/unread isn’t enough when it’s a work ask) would serve us all much better.

My7thAccount 6y ago

I like the feature on slack where you can see a graph of private vs public discussions. If the private discussions suddenly increase dramatically while public discussion cease and you aren't involved, something bad is about to happen

deleted 6y ago

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rapht 6y ago

I absolutely do not buy into the idea that "poor Slack" failed to "overcome giants" and that any harm was actually done. $27bn is actually successful for a company that's just a few years old. The competition that was stirred during those years ended up with Microsoft developing what is now a good product for 80% of use cases, with integration with tools (Office) that 80% of companies use, and all those companies benefitting from it did not have to shell out a single additional penny. From the eyes of consumers, I would call it a success of competition rather than a failure. Sure, it has now run its course, but making $27bn out of it is not what I would call a bitter end - the dream of independence aside. But that's a for few individuals to dream about...

cybert00th 6y ago

"it’s time to rebalance the playing field" OK sure, but the author doesn't say how. She's involved in a whole bunch of initiatives to help the little guy, so surely she has a lot of experience to share?

zwu23 6y ago

My current employer is the first company I work at that uses Slack. I used to envy my partner who raves about Slack. However, when I start using it, I wasn’t too impressed. I worked for a Chinese company in my last role, and I have to say I love their internal chat tool (which is a copycat of WeChat) way better than Slack. It doesn’t have the cool and modern interface of Slack, but it’s way more functional. For example, my favorite feature of the WeChat copycat tool is taking screenshots and able to do sketches on the screenshots. It’s integrated within the chat tool and it’s so convenient. With Slack, I have to rely on my Mac’s screenshot feature and Preview for editing, and then drag it in Slack’s chat window. Also, for shared channel, I saw that was innovated by WeChat long time ago, so I wasn’t that impressed with that feature.

deleted 6y ago

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chachachoney 6y ago

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs is not amused.