Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
techcrunch.com
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In my opinion, Google's expectation is that you run one instance of Chromium per machine. Electron wants to run one per application. Hence performance woes.
I rather like Slack, and have good reasons to use it (it's pretty central to Elixir's community, for one), but even on my relatively beefy MBP (2015) I actively avoid having the app open because it's a heavy Electron piece of shit.
While of course I might be a bit of an outlier as a developer with a preference for 'lighter' applications (and comfortable with CLI stuff), surely I'm not that much of an outlier...
In the case of the enterprise shop I work at, our revenue increases year over year, and so technical debt doesn't get addressed unless it causes such trouble that clients threaten to leave. Development gets slower and costlier over time as cruft builds up in the codebase, but that effect can't be measured, so it doesn't exist as far as management is concerned.
In Slack's case, their indicator of success is the giant valuation they just got. Their desktop app is an annoying resource hog, but hey, they have tremendous market share, so it must not really be a problem for users. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If you build it, they will come. Especially if they don't have a choice. So build the new, deprecate the old.
We're talking about a chat application for diverse corporate teams. If you don't have native apps for Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS at the get-go then you've missed the boat.
Sorry about everyone complaining about CPU, but Slack won the chat wars in part because they were early adopters of Electron, and got plenty of developer productivity benefits out of using the web stack to build on.
Excuse me? You think 5 people can 100% replicate Slack natively within "a few months"?
But you also don't need to re-implement the entire client. You need to do a significant architectural change for performance improvements, not a complete overhaul. Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not that's feasible for five engineers already familiar with the codebase to do within a few months. Your incredulity at the idea is unwarranted.
Hell, throw a few million at it and I can't see why Slack can't be implemented natively on at least iOS, MacOS and Android (especially if parts can still fallback on webviews).
There is absolutely no way in hell that even ten engineers for a couple of months could replicate all of Slack's functionality. Even ten times that much would be a stretch.
They could maybe make a decent chat app prototype in that amount of time. If they are very talented, they might even be able to make a decent chat app MVP that would get some actual users, but there is absolutely no way that they could replicate all of Slack's functionality.
I agree it will take longer, but Slack owes it to their customers to hire people and put out a better product.
Even the most talented construction workers could not build the Empire State Building in a week. It's a little silly to think that these people are like magicians.
Have you looked at Slack's competitors? Slack is arguably the best chat app out there, especially with their UX and the quality of their integrations. It's so presumptious to then tut-tut them suggesting that they "owe their customers better". They're doing very well!
Guess which opinion is more popular.
Now think again about this "doing well to their customers"
So it takes a year, and $2.5M, to do what should take 3 months and $300k.
* not saying this is the case at Slack, it’s just often the case at Everywhere. ;)
It's doable, but it's non-trivial, and probably only buys you the accolades of a small percentage of users on slower hardware. (And incidentally, almost every video chat app I use today runs the fans and slows down my system, but I can deal with it)
People shouldn't have to put up with the system crawl that ensues after firing up slack. It is absurd for the money they charge.
for VScode, there's Visual Studio.
And VScode isn't slow by any stretch. It does take a bit of memory (as expected of an electron app). But it's well engineered, and has very little slow laggy UI parts.
Edit: thought Skype wasn't in Electron, obviously I'm wrong: https://electronjs.org/apps/skype
The alternative for users is to go with a competitor that competes with everything Slack provides, in addition to improved performance. There are at least two such competitors out there, but people put up with Slack, even though they don't have to.
At another company, I watched an five person team, half of whom had related PhDs, the other half over a dozen years of video engineering experience, make incremental improvements to the WebRTC stack.
After a year, was it better? The metrics said it was somewhat better, but the customers still complained all the time.
But it's been done. Skype video calls worked on far inferior hardware and networks back in the day.
So Slack is going to continue eating all your resources, because anyone who cares will switch to a leaner Slack client before they switch away from Slack.
So they focus more on server-side features that ensure they'll be chosen in the first place.
(Is there any video conferencing software that doesn't suck in some way?)
But even simple stuff like "send when internet connection is back" isn't there, like what WhatsApp has.
It also doesn't load very fast for something that you'd think is mostly text. Change teams and you see the spinner a lot. Also when you've come back to WiFi it seems to take ages to get your updates.
A lot of these things seem to be "fixed" by killing the app and restarting, which is something of a smell.
Also seems to use a lot of memory. Not a huge problem on my machine, but I like elegance.
IMO, the only thing slack does really well, is the threading. But I've ever only been a part of one group that actually used that feature. Every other group uses it like a chat room.
Electron apps appear to be one of the biggest pain points for people in tech and the HN community, and I find it so bizarre that I relate to exactly zero of those complaints.
The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few particularly choice bits:
>"There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation."
>The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.
Yet somehow Slack has come in and taken a massive share of the market in a matter of 5 years.
The updates they put out for Hipchat during slacks rise were new emojis.
You mean, like disabling XMPP and IRC integrations? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/09/slack_cuts_ties_to_...
Even if a lot of those exist elsewhere and you're not using custom bots, hooking everything back up is a pain point. Along with having to export/import data, getting everyone to sign up and get used to a new service, etc. I think it's probably going to take something that's not just a little better, but significantly better and different.
Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.
1. Click the icon to open it. Flip to another app. Multiple times during startup it will steal focus as I'm trying to do other things.
2. Flip back to another app during #1? It'll sit at "Loading Teams..." for. F'ing. ever. You won't get any notifications during this phase. You will not show up as online.
3. When it does load, I'm always 2 months back in chat conversation and have to spend 2 minutes scrolling down to the current time to see if there's anything new.
4. There is no way to skip to latest...
5. Notifications don't integrate with anything, they are custom. They are quirky and peculiar. There have been times that _none of them_ come through - no badge, no notification, no mobile push notification, no nothing - if I hadn't flipped to the app I would have no idea I got any messages at all. And yes, these are direct messages that I have notifications turned on for.
6. Uploading files is annoying as F. Drag and drop into the message. I have to click into the message input box to even start adding any other text (seems like an obvious transition to me)... when it finishes uploading you might get kicked back out of the text box because it wants to ask if this is the same file as you uploaded before.
7. When focusing on the app I'm never, read _never_, placed into the input box, even if I just saw a notification (miraculously!) that I'm trying to reply to. (Skype also has this same problem.)
8. Defaults to emailing you _for every F'ing thing under the sun_. It's an F'ing chat app, why are "you're missing the conversation!" emails the default?
9. Navigation is a clusterF. Three layers of vertical panes of navigation (ala Slack). Then add on top of that horizontal navigation _in every single one_. And not just a fixed number of tabs as navigation, you never have any idea what it's going to look like because...
10. "Integrations" is just BS. All they mean in Teams is a new tab you can add to the horizontal navigation in #9.
11. Any of their logic regarding recent conversations, recent groups, etc. and what should be displayed in the left navigation is crap. I've only got one team that I use, but I have to expand that single team to get the other "chats" in it? You've got thousands of pixels of vertical real estate here, why do I have to constantly expand the _one thing_ in the list?
12. The "wiki" has no navigation by default, you have to try and figure out (amongst the 15 different layers of navigation) where to expand to find the pages in it. Hardly a wiki, and even the editing tools are quirky and annoying - things disappear and reappear at random.
And that's just off the top of my head. This is seriously the _worst_ chat app I have ever used in my life. Some random team at MS took Skype and decided to take the worst UX features of it and make a Slack clone. The fact that they started pushing this to businesses as part of 365 should involve mass firings.
Edit: Formatting and a word... and a number.
But compliance may be. For example, Slack charges a lot of money and requires a lot of users for actual HIPAA compliance (as in signing a BAA, everything else is marketing fluff). Teams, from what I can tell, comes with a BAA out of the box.
It's hard to deny Teams when it's already bundled with 365 that we're spending $25/user/month on, but if anyone has ever used both it becomes _immediately_ obvious that it's worth the money. That's the whole approach MS is going for, and something that's very very hard for Slack to combat.
The $12/user version does NOT include a signed BAA which means it is not HIPAA compliant for all intents and purposes. Like I said, anything without a BAA that says it's HIPAA is useless marketing fluff designed to confuse people. Only the Enterprise Grid product is eligible for a BAA and I believe even then there's some large minimum contract fee.
Remember MS tried to push Yammer to businesses as well, so not everything they do works out.
Teams is unique in how it "ticks all the boxes" but has enough small flaws and unfinished implementations that it makes for a really, really awful tool. There are fundamental problems with the software. To name a few:
- The notifications are wildly inconsistent - sometimes I'll get 5-6 email notifications for a single message that I already saw, sometimes I'll get email + app notifications for messages I am currently viewing, sometimes I'll get no notifications via email or app, for stuff that happened when I was offline. - The way every message is like a new "post" and there can be replies - this is a unique idea, but just really bad to use in practice. When people reply to a post, it gets bumped to the bottom, so posts end up out of order. Also, all the replies to the post automatically get collapsed, making it really annoying to find anything. - The mac app decided to stop displaying new messages (for WEEKS) in certain channels including our service errors channel - I finally gave up and can only use it on the web. - the O365 file integration regularly crashes the browser and mac app. We share a lot of spreadsheets and this just sucks. Sharepoint sync on the mac breaks all the time. It spins and fails to track updates. - O365 collaboration in the browser is brittle, especially disappointing compared to where Google Docs was 5+ year ago. - The Teams search cannot find documents by name. - The messages seem to be backed by email files in sharepoint, which makes a mess in sharepoint (not that it isn't kinda a mess already).
After using the google suite at many companies for many years, and having the standard on-prem microsoft stuff, I have to say Teams is not a viable solution for a software team. Teams "ticks all the boxes" but the execution can't compare to Slack.
Coming from a Linux background, I had lost touch with the Microsoft ecosystem for the most part of a decade and would actively avoid Microsoft related stuff.
When I got a new job, I had to use the whole SharePoint/O365/Teams stack, instead of Slack, in medium-sized teams. It feels much more lightweight and responsive, chat history and search works way better than Slack (for now, at least), and is miles ahead of Skype in terms of not dropping messages, and you know, actually allowing you to chat and call.
I'm not using the O365 integration extensively, and generally view/edit documents as they're supposed to (files), but in the cases I've needed to make some changes in an Excel file, I didn't have any issues.
Of course it suffers from all the problems that an ephemeral, short-term memory chat application does in an organization, but that's to be expected.
Edit : Not affiliated with MS in any way. If I can answer any questions, let me know.
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com
They can also be very slow getting around to fixing things even if they are very important. They only just recently fixed so status works and notifications stopped working for more than a week without getting fixed (patched this week).
I don’t know about 7 billion but based on how technical and non-technical teams alike use and depend on Slack I can easily see 1 Billion or more. But 1 and 7 billion are really far apart. If I were a Slack employee I’d be thinking about my stock. If it sold for 2 billion would I be shit out of luck? Legitimately asking, I don’t know how stock preference works when the VC investment comes after stock has been issued to an employee.
Anyway yeah it's a risky investment and a precarious valuation, there is plenty of competition out there right now, yet somehow nothing seems to be able to come out as better than Slack. Maybe if a party actually spent those millions in investment funds to create good non-Electron apps.
We have been using it for the last 2 years and it has been working pretty much flawlessly for us. Upgrading it is really painless too, since it is just one Go binary that automatically applies DB migrations when it detects that you moved to a new version.
I don't know about other integrations, but I think most Slack integrations should work out of the box with Mattermost, since the data format is the same.
It's also easy to add your own webhooks to automatically post to a specific channel. We e.g. use this to announce deployments via Ansible, where the deploy script simply POSTs to that webhook what is being deployed and by whom.
[0] https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/webhooks-incoming.html...
1. Spend investor money faster than your competitors.
2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there.
3. Load up on hype, marketing. And buzz/PR.
4. Once you have a critical mass of users, lock them in.
I thought the $100bn valuation for them was low and turns out that was right because they had acquired all this data for free. Data which at the time no one valued (and even today don’t value enough) but was worth a lot.
Slack has lots of data, but if they try to monetize it, I suspect they will lose a lot of their users (the data they have is what people would consider private, while the whole point of the data shared on Facebook/instagram is to make it public). And I suspect their avenues for making money are closing out. O365 users get Teams for free, and it’s only a matter of time before Google includes something equivalent in Google Apps for Work.
I suspect Slack’s best bets for justifying their valuation is hoping Google buys them out or includes Slack in a Apps for Work tier, or if they’re really lucky, Amazon decides they truly want to make a play for the enterprise communications market and buy Slack as the centerpiece for that.
You are fooling yourself here. For all the snarky hate Slack gets around here, it's far better designed than any chat app I've had to use so far. It's for work, it doesn't have to be compatible with other chat apps (in fact, that would be a security issue). Searching through your history Just Works, integrations Just Work, and user-friendly features like reactions make it more fun to use (and prevent cluttering up chats with unnecessary chatter). The fact that Slack was able to destroy its established competitors should give you a hint that they're doing something right. People like using slack. My friends have made their own workspaces with it just to keep in touch, because it's so well designed.
But Slack largely lacks that. A startup might setup a free Slack instance, then run into its limitations and pay for extra service. But aside from some institutional inertia, nothing stops a company from switching. You don't need Slack to reach your public, unlike say Facebook. It's a chat tool, an average one, and you can easily migrate out of it. As a repository for essential business knowledge, Slack is not a good solution and could even be harmful compared to things like a wiki or documents stored in a revision control system.
And as a pure SaaS offering, there is no way in hell Slack is worth $7 billion. You can replicate its functionality for less than $100 million, and get native, fast apps. There must be something else, but I just don't see it.
Maybe Slack has advanced in the past year and a half tho..
Because it's aimed at gamers?
> Besides that it's very annoying that it's a complicated mess that has no real focus.
It's a chat and VOIP system, seems to do those both very well. Not exactly complicated.
The problem with Discord tbh is I've found it to be less reliable than Slack in terms of uptime/push notifications. It also has fewer devop functions prebuilt which means building them out.
Not a big deal if you are a hobbyist, is a big deal if you are paying people $100+/hr to do it.
It is nice that it's free and unlimited of course, it's a no brainer compared to free Slack, but for work I'd prefer to use Slack.
It's deceitful, but its standard operating procedure for SaaS and we've seen it before with Twitter.
I wouldn't be surprised if IMAP is deprecated from GMail in a few years.
Having lived through the hell that was x.400 I'm almost amazed there isn't a billed tier for businesses to go back to those dark days. Although I think we almost were there with exchange/Skype federation.
We pay hundreds a month for Slack and they are worth 7b but with all their money and hundreds of employees they just can't figure out how to get a photo to upload in a reasonable time. Just can't figure out how to do it!
Depending on where you are in Asia, this is a hard one. I run a company with geo-distributed systems, and even having a few Asian-base servers it is still difficult to reach the whole region. You almost need to have datacenters in every country to make it work effectively.
Not saying it's an excuse…it is $7B after all. That buys a few servers in many different regions. :)
Edit:
To continue my thought. Here are a few of the issues you're facing:
- China has the GFW.
- South Korea has very subpar links to anything outside South Korea.
- SE Asia is tons of undersea cables with limited capacity.
There's no actual $7B involved here. At least, not in the 'buy the Angkor Wat and turn it into a data center' sense.
Valid point.
Thankfully buying a few regional servers is manageable with $437m. :)
It's so terrible I just make people Skype me.
1. Slack has tapped into an energetic market 2. People will use the product even if it sucks, or can be compelled to use it by their company's management and IT. 3. There's money on the table for anyone who can build Slack-like services at a better level of quality.
There's also a spiritual similarity in this gripe to the gripe about Apple being a $1T company despite their descent into software and dongle hell—people are buying it despite its flaws because the marketing and the appeal is overwhelming.
It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story. Especially since it's built on top of electron, which I'm still trying to accept as a real platform for application development, and not the '3d printer' of the software world.
I hope they don't use this money to feature-swamp the app, and instead focus inward on performance and migrating to a more stable platform.
Very unlikely , I'm not aware of Slack being an Innovation Driven company. I've seen nothing from them in the Open Source World.
As for using Electron for its desktop app: do end users really care?
I don't use an application tray in my desktop, so having browser windows open for the chats is basically feature-equivalent and saves me RAM
If I tried to write down all the other corporate-focused chat products that preceded Slack, there would be no way for me to write them all down. To say nothing of the chat products that weren't necessarily corporate focused, but could easily be used in a corporation. They were not first to market; they came into a crowded space, but one where nobody seems to have quite put all the pieces together the way the market wanted, and proceeded to dominate.
If I would have any concern about Slack as an investor, it would be that they don't have a terribly great moat, in part precisely because there are so many companies sitting on a code base that has 90% of the hard technical work done. Personal chat products had a certain amount of stickiness because you had to be on the service that your friends were on. A corporation can simply move wholesale by executive fiat, and the bigger the customer, the bigger the savings number will be and the less connected the buyer will be to the people demanding Slack in particular. I would expect Slack to be facing some pricing pressure in the medium-to-long term as the abundant field of competitors starts essentially copying from Slack what works and starts tweaking their products to fit.
And besides, the field of competitors is getting smaller, not bigger. See: Atlassian throwing in the towel on HipChat and Stride.
The depth of those integrations serve as the depth of the moat. If your integration is basically "I send and receive textual messages", which from what I see the vast majority are, you've got an integration which could be ported to a competitor in less than a week. A lot of the integration work is in the thing being integrated rather than chat-system specific things.
As you use more Slack-specific features the moat gets deeper, but you do have to stretch a bit before you're really "slack-specific". Rich text formatting, conference rooms at a basic level, etc. isn't "slack-specific".
(Be sure to read that first sentence of mine a couple of times before replying. It does not say "integrations are always trivial to port and are thus irrelevant", for instance. If I wanted to say that, I would have.)
"Atlassian throwing in the towel on HipChat and Stride."
I strongly suspect that Atlassian threw in the towel not because it was hopeless, but because a highly profitable company has a business imperative to avoid things that will merely be sorta profitable to them, or where profit will be harder than their other highly profitable activities. It's why Google doesn't simply do everything; put over-simply, for something to be worth Google doing, it has to be more profitable than putting another engineer on AdWords. When a company is valued at $7.1B, it validates the market, and even if there was no competition today, there most assuredly will be in two years!
(I work for a company not quite as high as Google in the "necessary profit per engineer" metric, but we've also divested "merely" profitable businesses because they were basically a drag on the rest of the company, and lacked sufficient strategic value to overcome that disadvantage.)
Off topic, but when you write something like this the message you’re sending is “I’d rather insult the reader than take the time to communicate in a way that can be properly understood.” Hopefully that’s not the intention.
There is no other way to communicate nuance that I've found. If you claim that "some types of X are Y", you'll get angry replies about how some X aren't Y, angry replies about how terrible it is to claim that all X are Y, and on more than one occasion, angry replies about how some types of X are Y.
If you're insulted, well, then, it's not targeted at you. But abundant experience says it does have non-zero targets. And it's getting worse, not better, as more and more people are convinced(/programmed) to believe that reading people as harshly as possible and then being as angry and offended as possible is a virtue rather than a vice. As these people get more power, it's becoming simply self-defense to make sure you underline your point.
Can you say why you feel this is a first-to-market story? When they started my first reaction was "This market is too crowded and they will have a tough time gaining traction." At that time, I used Basecamp for project management, and so I thought Campfire was excellent for team chat.
I also worked at one company that used Yammer, and that seemed fine.
Also, obligatory, I worked at a company where the tech team used IRC.
Back in 2004, I worked at a company where the dev team used Yahoo chat. It was surprisingly good. We would be logged into video chat for hours, talking over problems with each other.
I like Slack, but I've never understood why developers made such a big deal with it. I wonder if it caught some generational shift? It arrived on the scene just as the economy was recovering from the Great Recession, and it caught the eye of the next wave of founders who were building startups in the new era. But I don't think it is an example of first-to-market. It is actually more interesting than that. It is an example of late-to-market-but-still-successful. That's rare. But I still don't understand why it has been so successful.
Not saying that this is surely what makes it valuable, but could see a management team deciding to use it as a means of improving productivity, where they could take logs and tie them into a system for gauging sentiment. Not saying it's right at all, but could see the value others could see in that
Hipchat was solid. App was great to use and did not consume many resources. Integration with other tools was ok. Of course things like Atlassian were nice. Webhooks, API worked for me. Even writing simple notifications worked.
We then switched to teams because we already use Office 365 and the guy in charge likes MS. Enough said. Teams and Office 365 has weird UI experiences and it feels sluggish. Did not like it t all.
At the moment we use Slack. You can switch from workplace to workplace. Slack is viral. You need to have it. All the integrations. UI is more polished than Teams but overall I am not a fan. It feels sluggish like Teams at times.
Only reason I moved over to Discord was too many chat apps and the hobby users were all on Discord anyway.
I have no experience with more than a few users. If you want a hosted solution, I have seen reports that Zulip works well with a large number of users.
The information in the individual slack account is most likely PD under the GDPR.
just become a Slack employee?
I hope they have very, very good security and encryption measures on all levels.
[0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Also, almost every large company has had a data breach at one point or another. What counts is how they respond to that issue and mitigate for the future.
Slack seems to be in peacetime: aggressive growth, buying things like HipChat. If they're dominating the market, why would they need to raise money?
The thinking is that the more a hot company can raise, the longer they can stay public.
In the current cycle, IPOs are more rare than in previous cycles (partly because FAANG are acquiring more companies and partly because companies are waiting longer to IPO) so having more cash on hand gives the company that much more runway.
So even if they are a market leader, give them more cash? I get why Uber does it because they have serious commoditized competition with Lyft, but Slack does not seem to have even a close 2nd place.