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I think of all of those WhatsApp has been the most successful both in terms of moat defense purposes and it still has the potential of turning into something like WeChat or LINE (or what they're doing with FB Messenger itself) with its own monetization.

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]

Agreed. These purchases seem to work the best when they're used for defensive purposes and to round out a product offering that already has a substantial userbase.

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.

> Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.

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 ?

This would possibly be a first step for AWS to start moving up the stack.

What does that mean?

It means Amazon renting you access to business software rather than access to computers on which you can run your own business software.

The shopping portal, reviews, AWS, Kindle, and Echo are all direct touchpoints with users of some sort.

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.

“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.”

Well they do own twitch & good reads, right?

Interesting to note on this front is Amazon's move towards enabling voice and chat communication via Alexa between Alexa accounts, and by extension Alexa-enabled devices.

Sounds like they really want in on the communication game.

We all asked the same question about Facebook. All social networks before Facebook had faded away. But, Facebook didn't. Potential Slack buyers think that Slack is also here to stay in a similar manner. EDIT: I'm not saying Slack is Facebook.

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.

Facebook isn't just about the people on it at this instant, it is about the accumulated history people build up on it.

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.

I don't think that's true. Switching to another messaging service means you lose all past messages. It also means you need to integrate all other services (like Github, Google Doc, Travis, and many others) to this new messaging service. That is a lot of friction!

Chat services usually have an import service. At least for their more famous competitors. Doesn't Slack allow you to export your message history?

A consumer to consumer N-N network is much harder to coordinate a migration than a corporate N-N network, for one.

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.

Skype has been going strong for 14 years. It's not impossible of course, but I have my doubts Slack will endure that long in its current form.

Yeah, I was primarily talking about using Skype for business / work messaging. Hence the point about integration etc.

> But, Facebook didn't

Not yet. We used to think MySpace is huge and not going away anytime soon

Slack has a rather large number of paying customers for a messaging platform, so even over just 10 years you could extract quite a bit of cash directly on top of that owning platforms allows for a lot of indirect profits.

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.

Slack is an enterprise platform.

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

How is slack deep in a company's workflow? In other words, what stops them from switching to an alternative chat?

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?

>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

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 didn't fade at all. They have 1.2 billion monthly active users and climbing. Their "stories" feature got 177 million daily active users in just 10 weeks. For comparison, Snapchat is only at 166 million DAU as of Q1 this year.

WhatsApp is (AFAIK) the only major chat service that offers a J2ME app. There are a _lot_ of feature phones in the Global South, and a lot of telecoms that charge gouging rates for SMS and MMS.

> WhatsApp is (AFAIK) the only major chat service that offers a J2ME app

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).

1. https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/s60/21099118

Ah, I guess my information is out of date. It's sad that Facebook owns WhatsApp now.

Large corporations will buy messaging / social networks over time because of the fact that there is a long tail for people who will use the service. The perception that app X is "uncool" or has no growth is the fact that being a part of HN makes you think that the bleeding edge is whatever everyone uses. Of those other frameworks there are a multitude of users on those platforms. The perpetual buying of these companies is a part of the Red Queen hypothesis that large megacorporations have to adapt to survive. One way to do this is the purchase of companies and messaging and social have so much cool platform churn that it becomes endless.

To be honest most of those faded because they let the product fade.

I think they let the product fade because they weren't making very much money. It hard to have a vibrant product when you can't pay the rent.

MSN messenger and Yahoo both had significant funds.

They had funds from their parent companies which made money by other means. I'm not certain, but I suspect neither product made any money for Microsoft or Yahoo. What CEO in that position is going to double down on R&D funding to keep the chat program relevant?

ICQ was a classic first mover that had explosive growth and continued to succeed in a relative way, but not relative to the overall market. AIM, Yahoo! and MSN messenger platforms knocked it off that pedestal, and the company seemed more interested in sabotaging its platform to squeeze ad revenue than making it more relevant or meaningful to their userbase.

I'd say Slack has better penetration into enterprise than all those except sykpe. if you look at Amazon's prior communication attempt, its aimed as a business communication solution. Slack has done well to penetrate that segment. Your list is consumer grade, whereas Slack, Webex, Gotomeeting, Zoom, bluejeans, google meetings etc are focused on improving business communications.

It's best to compare Slack to MS Lync (which is now branded as Skype, was built out of MSN Messenger). In Windows environments, it's a pretty important piece of communication software. I use it constantly everyday to communicate and meet with those across my province (Alberta).