Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon
bloomberg.com
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What is the point in buying a messaging app?
- instant messenger
- ICQ
- Skype
- Yammer
They all seem to be popular for a short time and then fad away.
What does owing one of these get a company?
The case against owning them is that they all go out of favour and you only have a small window, say up to 5 years, where your platform is dominate before everyone moves onto another solution.
At one point the theory was it got people to use a companies proprietary login, when companies thought there was value in having people use their login.
At this point, if I said Slack would be a shell of its former self in 5 - 10 years would anyone put up an argument , if so what's the argument that this time its different.
I'm a happy slack user, but i"ll move to a new platform tomorrow if a better one comes along, there is almost no network effect or lock with these apps so switching has almost zero cost.
Plugins might provide a slight lockin but time has shown again and again the same plugins will move to the next popular messaging app, which seems to negate any benefit.
For Skype I think it was mostly about rounding out the office suite, MS doesn't want anyone else getting a toehold in workplace collaboration and expanding from there - if you get real classical about it MS Office is the true DNA of the company even more so than Windows/infrastructure. Same reason they bought Yammer and why they were so early on in trying to move on Slack (with the $8B offer that Bill Gates intervened in and shot down).
[Edited slightly for clarity]
Whatever gadgets they might hang off the app, they're fundamentally a way for people to talk to each other. If you don't have the people, why would you need a slick implementation? As you mentioned, the app would go out of vogue and users would move on.
Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.
Which is ironic, because their properties would play a lot better with one than, say, Google or MS. And starting with something like Slack (bottom up vs top down) is an interesting move.
Honest question, since I might be out of the loop here in Europe, but what user engagement pieces does Amazon have then ? I use Amazon for shopping and AWS, and would have no idea what other products they have that are dominating a market. Is this about Kindle ?
If you're going to launch social, you could do a lot worse for a starting point...
And in a broader sense, I'm much more optimistic about building a social network to unify disparate features that people already love, vs imposing one from the top down (e.g. G+). FB only got away with the latter because of being first, and seems to be pivoting to backfill as much functionality around it as quickly as possible.
Well they do own twitch & good reads, right?
Sounds like they really want in on the communication game.
One reason why I think Slack may survive longer than ICQ, Skype etc is how well integrated it is with all other services. For a tool to replace Slack, it should also provide the same level of seamless integration with GitHub, Google Docs, and a hundred other services. That's much harder to do than just building a messaging app.
Also messengers aren't as N-N since you end up only talking to a small number of people after a while and don't actually want to move all your contacts.
I don't want to move all my FB contacts either but the number of connections I sort of care about is still likely more than 100.
Exporting your Facebook profile is a labyrinthian effort few would consider.
Switching chat providers is as simple as getting everyone to use the new thing and going from there, there is little to no baggage to bring with you.
Not yet. We used to think MySpace is huge and not going away anytime soon
That said, if they make ~15M per month directly then up to 1 to 4 billion is probably completely reasonable purchase price. And depending on how things are evolving and internal costs etc 9B while probably high is not crazy ridiculous.
Given how deep it is in a company's workflow you could think of it almost like an operating system where apps can attach to.
It would perfectly fit to eg salesforce, google etc
Unsure what Amazon's goal would be - maybe "enterprise as customers" are the interlinking part between ecommerce and webservices
Internet access is deep in company workflows as well, but that doesn't mean they can't change ISPs.
Are companies building their ordering systems to depend on slack API's or something?
Off the top of my head, both mattermost and rocketchat provide compatible webhook apis that make them drop-in replacements for slack.
So not that deep into peoples workflow...
WhatsApp's support for J2ME ended in 2016[1] - it is now smartphone only, because it requires "advanced features" (or bloat) to compete with Snapchat and complete Facebook's flanking manoeuvre (along with Instagram).
Microsoft doesnt understand this space at all. Look what they are doing to Skype by making it more like Snapchat when their main use case is business related. Teams also feels so unfinished.
Yes I was definitely thrown for a loop with the new Skype that auto-installed on my phone. I'm a boring 37 year old developer that needs skype for business calls, why the hell does it now look like some teenager's social app?
PS. ux-app looks interesting. I can give some feed back as a designer if you want.
Thanks :) and yes, I'd love to hear your feedback, me email is eli@ux-app.com
Slack/Teams/etc are tools. Real work will find the right tools and the right people and the right working model.
Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something.
Turns out there's a market for ubiquitous software. Slack seems similar.
Another datapoint: Look how well the acquisition of Oculus turned out. Palmer now has money, which would've come eventually. He no longer controls Oculus, and hence can't impact the world. And in a twist of fate, Palmer has attracted public annoyance due to some political decisions, so he went from favorite underdog to just another wealthy person.
For ambitious people, this can sometimes be a worse fate than not being rich. Ideas require opportunity and timing, and opportunities like Oculus, Snapchat, and Slack are rare.
$9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world?
$9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather
affect the world?
Get real, they're not curing cancer they're providing a (great) chat service for businesses and organizations.
We don't know where Oculus would be without FB, i would argue they are better off because they are creating a new market and are in a capital intensive business. The VR market is still slow overall. Without FB, they could have already run out of breath or cut corners on the product.
You're spending too much time in the tech industry. Even if you double the daily active users from a year ago, that doesn't even reach 5% of the US population.
That's a false dichotomy isn't it? You could have a large impact on the world with that sort of money.
From another angle, consider Steve Jobs. He had the money; he could've done anything. But being CEO of Apple was worth more.
Pretty sure that could have some impact.
As much as I hate the trend of companies gobbling up other companies, slack is a bad example here. Almost certainly everyone involved would be better off if a sale happened.
How could Snapchat possibly make money?
It makes a lot of sense for Amazon to offer some kind of managed corporate communications platform to customers who are already heavily invested in AWS, but in the long term, it would probably hurt Slack's core integration strengths.
What would probably be best for Slack is to build out an on-premises enterprise version, which could then be deployed on your cloud of choice. It gets Slack most of the benefits of acquisition by a cloud provider, without the downsides.
One interesting option would be for Slack and Dropbox to merge. Don't know if this kind of deal could ever work out financially, but I think the combination would be quite interesting.
Slack is simply disrupting this area by offering product which is up to date and doesn't need bouncer running (+ hundreds of other useful nice to have features).
Billions of dollars can be made on old ideas positioned properly.
That makes absolutely no sense. Palmer Luckey has a vast fortune thanks to selling, he can easily impact the world depending on what he chooses to do with it.
You've suddenly got a massive amount of capital to execute on the things you've been dreaming up along the way but have never been able to do before. Zuck sure had a company of thousands of employees to look after. And even if your mission was always just to exit... get a new vision.
Do I really need to invoke Elon and his first acquisitions here?
Elon is an outlier of grand proportions.
I don't know anything about Evan Spiegel, but I just read about the Snap Foundation - https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/02/snap-inc-snap-foundation...
I just saw simonrobb's comment, and of course the best example is Elon Musk. That's how you sell a company and do something with the rest of your life.
If somebody can prove me wrong, however, that would be lovely :)
Regardless though, expecting Amazon to refrain from taking the proprietary information they have access to (in any form) and drilling you into the ground with their own twist on it seems like a bad bet, just ask Nucleus.
Companies that don't want to entrust their sensitive conversations to Slack, etc., opt to use on-site Hipchat servers, or other means of communication. Amazon buying Slack doesn't significantly alter their calculus.
Are you saying that organizations that care to keep secrets get left behind by those that don't?
That sounds kind of ridiculous.
Organizations that refuse to use Slack are at a disadvantage. When employees show up and realize there's no Slack, they start to analyze all other company decisions. How much effort could be saved just by using Slack? Those secrets had better be important to justify this loss.
There are alternatives. Rocket Chat is self-hosted, and maybe it's sufficient. But second-place software will always feel second-place.
If your reasoning is solely "We are a company, so we have secrets," that's justifiable only in narrow domains, like a security company.
For the rest, and especially at startups, the strategic risk of revealing your secrets to Slack is counterbalanced by the fact that Slack can't take advantage of those secrets without committing suicide. The moment everyone stops trusting Slack, that trust is gone forever.
In the meantime, Slack has been a faithful steward. What are the risks? An employee could go rogue and steal the data. An acquirer like Amazon could use the data maliciously. Slack could get hacked and the data could be made available publicly.
Of those, getting hacked is the only relevant concern. Employees are unlikely to end their careers by stealing data. But if Slack's data is ever stolen and made public, everyone will have egg on their face simultaneously. That means it's less likely to be a disaster for any individual organization.
Talent has a way of sniffing out incongruities like this. When an organizational mandate doesn't pass the bullshit test, opinionated talent will usually try to change the situation, or leave. And opinionated talent tends to be effective talent.
When effective talent leaves, better watch out. You might have suddenly become one of those organizations that find it impossible to attract top performers.
To put it plainly, who would want to work someplace that puts the company's quality of life over the employee's over something so trivial?
Of the startups that will eventually survive, even if all of them revealed all of their operational and strategic insights simultaneously, they're unlikely to die. Or even be slowed down, really. Most startups are working on ideas that seem bad. That's why startup investing is hard. Revealing your seemingly-bad strategies to the world won't change much. And if your idea seems good, you tend to be entrenched. It's unlikely some other company could form and steal it from under you before you can execute on it.
In all but a handful of domains, we're left with repellant pseudo-justifications for avoiding the one tool that everybody uses. Hopefully those secrets were very important!
If I hire you, and your concern is "why can't I use this one specific chat service", I hired the wrong fucking person.
I don't get the stance that this is "hype" or a "bandwagon" at all.
If this is just going to be a game of "let's list every feature Slack has bolted on to their chatroom" then I don't care to play.
My friend's company used Hipchat over Slack for precisely that reason - they're a security company, one you've likely heard of.
1. Great fit with twitch.
2. Seems like it could be "forked internally" and reskinned to compete with slack in the business space too.
I love discord so much part of me wants Amazon to buy Slack just so it would kill it (or MS or Verizon or anyone who tends to not know what to do with things).
> Discord is the better app at this point. Even for business use.
That, and the gaming specific branding, are the only reasons I can think of why businesses might not even consider Discord.
Discord has Webhooks (which is all I need). Slack requires a bunch of admin hoops and adoption by 3rd parties. With webhooks, as long as a service has an API, people like me can plug them right in.
Simpler. I don't need comments and threads and snippets and posts at the expense of simple communications. These features are also inconsistent and incompatible across devices.
Search/Cost. Search doesn't search contents of snippets which was a gotcha. And with a 10000 message limit, anyone using it for free reaches a point where search breaks. I was deleting messages for a while because at the end of the day all the 50/mo would have gotten us is unbroken search. It's like 99% of the product is free and they ask to pay 50/mo for the last 1%.
Web Hooks. Integrating anything is as simple as a single line cUrl command. So for business use, if you already have a server doing a bunch of stuff with various APIs, adding notifications to discord is a one liner.
Also Discord has a more intuitive server list on the side bar. With slack you have to register with every team and "switch". In Discord it's just another tab.
A business on Slack is one that 1) can't see a superior chat program when they see one, 2) are willing to pay for an inferior product, and 3) can't look past the "gamer" origins of a platform.
But to Slack's credit, they built a business out of just chat, which is miraculous. And though I've arrived at Discord, they deserve all the credit and respect in the world for achieving what they have achieved through a mere chat subscription service. And I'm sure their philosophy and business direction is what got them to where they are, so standing up and challenging exactly that would admittedly be naive on my part. However I still do not believe any of the points that I have made are incorrect either, which just tells you more about this industry (chat industry?).
They just need a "Discord for Business". They would kill.
My biggest problem is getting groups to move from slack to discord. People just use what they're used to and if their company already pays for one of the connections then they are going to be running it all of the time anyway.
But it's not really. It's primarily focused around text, and chime is around videos and meetings. That's the use case. Chime is built around meetings. Slack is built around chat.
Disclaimer: Work for AWS.
Chime is definitely better than Lync, but I stand by my statement that it's not very good at text. It's missing basic UI features like threading or merged comments, profile pictures/icons, not to mention more advanced integrations.
I love using it for meetings... but text functionality is still lagging behind Slack, or even Mattermost (also used within Amzn)
Disclaimer: Also work for AWS.
Also, an easy way to get companies signed up w/ Amazon Prime!
https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/
Although the search data would indicate Slack is still super hot - I tend to agree (anecdotally) that the market is saturated, first movers have already ... moved, and most likely growth will be slow.
So far of course Slack is still much more popular among business users, but I've anecdotally noticed a big surge in Discord usage among consumers (on Reddit especially).
How long will it take for Facebook/Google/Microsoft to get a good enough product and release it for "free" ? I am not sure but I think it will be hard for slack to diversify its portfolio.
Would Twitch survive against Google's YouTube gaming if it would not get acquired by Amazon ?
https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat...
https://blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterprise...
So now, I find myself using email more again. Slack seems to bring with it expectations of instant replies and lately I find myself preferring the more asynchronous nature of email. I do like that the Slack archive is generally open and searchable to all, but the interruptions suck. If the Slack client was silent unless it had focus, I think it would work better for me.
This would be a radical departure from that pattern.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-chime-unified-commun...
It was launched only 4 months ago. I wonder how it's doing today and how important Amazon thinks this space is for them and their platform. It's AWS branded too which is a bit odd.
Exactly, because their technology is complete crap.
I would be very surprised to see a slack deal go through, knowing what I know about our acquisition process, but they are a little different than we were. If AMazon buys them they have better be sure they can quickly integrate them, unlike twitch that's unique enough to hang around.
I like they don't necessarily have to vertically integrate all their acquisitions.
Slack and Amazon appear to have very difficult cultures, so that would be a very interesting acquisition. If I was an engineer at Slack, I would really, really hope that the company could continue to operate independently, as a subsidiary. I would not be happy if I was forced to work for Amazon for the next x months before I could cash out and leave.
I don't have anything against Microsoft per se, but in my opinion, they ruined Skype.
Amazon has Chime.
At least 10 million a month, I assume?
Edit: "Slack has 5 million daily active users -- 1.5 million of whom pay to use the service -- and had $150 million in annual recurring revenue as of Jan. 31." from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/messaging...
Slack: ~10 million users for $9b?
This doesn't make much sense to me. What's the rationale behind this?
Different product means different user economics.