Slack Acquires Astro
slackhq.com
slackhq.com
Lo and behold the Director shortly leaves the company to found a startup aimed at solving Problem X. Eighteen months later we buy them, aquihiring back the director and some engineers who left with him to start the startup.
The head of the business unit knew he couldn't get the approval from the board to solve Problem X, so he basically outsourced the risk and in the end the director and his engineers ended up with a nice chunk of change and their old jobs back.
In tech it's also pretty sad that small startups with a good product still don't feel that they can make it on their own but instead prefer to be bought up by a bigger player who then shuts down their product.
May be those people really hate working on the startup and all they want is a big fat exit. That is reasonable.
To put a little wrinkle in it, it's both big companies outsourcing R&D to pick from the winners, but also tax payers subsidizing the R&D through R&D tax credits.
My general sense is that experimentation startups are inclined to think, "F the users. They're our tool, not our purpose."
I'm still all for driving away potential adopters. The default understanding, that startups are putting out real products, is hurting adopters that grow their workflow around some SaaS offering, only to have the rug pulled out from under them. I'd much prefer if startups were up-front about their real goals, though I realize this won't happen, as it goes against the whole premise of fast and massive growth.
I personally use Astro on my iPhone (just uninstalled this morning when I got their notification). It was good app, but no way for them to get any money from me.
It's really hard to build a product AND a predictable, profitable, repeatable growth model that VCs want to fund.
Much of this world is R&D done on spec because big co's have difficulty innovating internally.
Screenhero was acquired by Slack, and while it wasn't shut down immediately, new signups were disabled. They eventually shut it down entirely when they released support for screensharing within Slack, but the experience of that is nothing like what it was with Screenhero. Even aside from forcing people to pay for a Slack instance just to screenshare[0], the actual video sharing experience just... doesn't work anywhere near as well. So the pattern seems to be:
- acquire product - shut standalone product down - replace product with inferior version of product, integrated into Slack - charge more
[0] if you don't already share a Slack instance with the person you want to call, this is a really awkward workflow just to screenshare
I get they want to keep Astro's clients around, but it's a big FU to companies that rely on Astro to have two weeks notice about changes potentially affecting their entire users base.
It reeks of arrogance. Sure I understand it was a acquihire, but that means you acquired the company and take on their obligations including moral. An it is poor form to dump customers / users out when they likely could have kept the services up for at least 3 months.
If slack doesn't care about that, then I am not sure this is a business I really want to have a dependency on.
> The past few years have been a remarkable journey at Astro
What's next? Scrambling to find a replacement email workflow in t minus 15 days and counting ...
There is NO "what's next". The product they are using is disappearing forever. Why are these product shutterings always phrased as a "bold new adventure" for former customers?
> We’d like to thank you, our users, for whom we built this company, and for whom we look forward to serving further as part of Slack.
I realize it is exciting news for the Astro VCs (maybe?) and, again, maybe Astro's employees, but this isn't how you thank someone for being a loyal customer. Apologize for screwing them at least.
Still sore about Google shuttering Sparrow a few years ago - it was by far the best email client on both iOS and Mac at the time.
<I should buy a boat cat> I should start a half-way decent mail app.</I should buy a boat cat>
For context, it takes a day or two to build an app that can display an SMS message correctly, and maybe 25 person years to build an app that can display an email thread correctly. This means that no matter how much money you raise, by the time you have a semi-working product it will be pretty much time for your VCs to start returning money to their LPs before you can get traction.
If you want an email client that's not going to get shut down, try Missive... They are funding their email client from a side business selling t-shirts rather than taking VC, so it's much less likely to go anywhere.
How so? E-mails are not that complicated. Unless your threading involves some speculative ML algorithms.
But that's the easy part. The hard part is that there is no spec at all that governs what actually goes inside the body of a message. The easiest way to explain is by way of analogy:
Imagine that you've never left your village and know nothing of the outside world, but are tasked with building a car capable of circumnavigating the globe.
So you start out by building the first version of your car that can drive on your village's streets successfully. So far, so good, you think you've solved the problem and assume it will just keep working. But as soon as you get outside your village you see that the roads are no longer paved, so the car quickly breaks down. So you go back and build a new car that can also drive on gravel roads, and set out again. And this works well enough until there stops being roads at all. So now you go back and build a third car that can handle paved roads, dirt roads, and off roading. And this works for a while until you encounter sand... And water... And -100 degree cold... And 10,000 degree heat... And zero oxygen... And people start shooting at you. Etc.
And of course if you're not very careful then the time required to build each new version of the car will increase exponentially, since you need to make sure it still works equally well on all of the previous terrain you solved for.
This is basically email parsing in a nutshell. It's also why you keep seeing these companies get bought out for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars without many users, and sometimes without having even launched anything. Because email is by for the world's largest source of human knowledge so it's a very valuable domain to be able to work with, but only a handful of people really have the expertise.
Just kind of funny.
I'm sure a fair amount of people are pulling their hair out
It's just a talent acquisition. If "slack buys astro" means nothing to you, maybe this article isn't meant for you. Not all news is relevant to all people.
Isn't this very little time if your company depends on Astro for work?
The new reality.
1 - Slack has a terrible Electron app. I'd like to see money spent fixing that over buying more talent for some odd integration between my email and my work chat. 2 - Astro was great, it met all my needs/wants in an email client.
Point 2 is really the gotcha here. Astro snoozes, allows using the gmail keyboard shortcuts, supports maOS and iOS, and most importantly, implements the Office365 api directly. (As opposed to the typical Exchange and/or IMAP tunnels most clients use.)
The company I work for either through mandate, or just letting IT do stuff (I don't know which), has disabled IMAP access AND Exchange access to our Office365 Instance. BUT I can use the api.
Astro and Polymail both fit the bill.
I liked Astro better. I immediately thought about going to Polymail, but they have gone subscription. (I don't have a problem paying for an email client, but once should be enough, thanks you.)
Browser client is fantastic and has all the features of the desktop client (including desktop notifications, if they are your thing).
Your comment sounds like what I hear from non-tech people. "My computer is terribly slow. Must be viruses. Could you clean it up?". No, your computer is fine and (mostly) malware-free. It's just the continuous cosmic inflation of website bloat.
(And then I think: if you were inclined to learn some tech, I'd teach you how to use NoScript or uMatrix. Alas, you'll probably need to buy a new machine instead.)
Edit: Apparently they did shut it down...
> On Wednesday October 10, we’ll shut down our Astro apps for Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa, and Slack. As of today, we’ve also disabled signups of new users.
The team is focused on making the experience of working in email and Slack seamless. Unfortunately, we're not able to support the existing products. Apologies about any inconvenience this causes.