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Comment by arjun27 | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Aaron Levie’s recent take on Kara Swisher’s podcast - on how enterprise software is going to be either about Microsoft (jack of trades) or about a collection of smaller companies (specialists in their fields) integrated with one and other. Slack and Atlassian focusing on what makes them great and working together makes a lot of sense

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Levie is wrong. His personal bias is showing: an over optimism that Box can survive as an independent long-term. It's going to be Microsoft and other giants. There's no scenario where Slack remains an independent company, for the exact same reason there was never a scenario where Github remained an independent company. It'll be surprising if Slack is still independent three years from now.

It's perpetual consolidation in enterprise, nothing has changed about that in decades. Microsoft eats Github. Atlassian eats Slack (or some other company does). Maybe Atlassian is the next Oracle, or maybe Oracle or Salesforce or SAP or Microsoft eats Atlassian.

The one thing every scenario has in common: the little fish don't stick around and cooperate, they all get eaten and merged into ever larger companies. Nothing can stop that process, all the little fish have shareholders more than willing to sell when the big price comes in from the giants.

PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun, MySQL, Great Plains, Sybase, Business Objects, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, RightNow, Taleo, MuleSoft, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc etc

It's the same thing going on over and over again. The little fish never stick around. Box will end up in someone's stomach just the same as the rest.

I'm curious then why did nobody buy Atlassian then? There's a possibility that a new company grows out of one of them.

Alas, I mostly agree... But what about Basecamp or Mailchimp for example?

What big corp wants to own the liability of Mailchimp? The minute you crack down harder on customers using spammy email lists, the revenue picture changes dramatically.

Just not big enough with a large enough installed enterprise base.

The big fish (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple) will continue to buy smaller companies until governments steps in and breaks them up in an anti-trust suit. The EU will lead that charge. The writing is on the wall.

if the EU just wants to fine the big tech companies out of existence, then the big tech companies will just stop doing business there. The EU cannot break those US companies up. If disproportionately large fines (e.g. the fine Google recently paid) continue, the tech companies will just leave - which may be what the EU wants, but it also seems that the EU is pretty bad at creating technology companies

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