I'm sorry, I've scoffed at other valuations and investments, but I'm just completely beside myself. Why does a chat room need "apps"?

It's kind of weird actually. There's two sorts of people that defend these announcements, I've found:

The first thinks that they are going to build an "amazing" platform some day and that they'll follow this model for "growing revenue". So of course they defend it.

And then there's the second group that has some "great idea" who plans to build on Slack's platform. Personally, I look forward to 2 years of stories about how Slack was unfair to them, or changed the rules on them, or broke an API. Or didn't review fast enough, or any of the other complaints that pop up monthly about other closed platforms.