(Yes, I appreciate it's not a unique observation, and that reality is slightly more nuanced than that, but nonetheless, prima facie crazy.)
Did you check today's weather forecast specific to your location?
Compared to what the 2,000 active satellites enable, Slack is just chatter.
and spacex doesnt plan on going public
and technically it's russian engines that launch them
in any case company valuation is not based on aspirations
It kind of is though. Valuation is based on future discounted cash flow. Aspirations inform how much future cash flow a company can generate.
No but I used Slack today.
Slack is obviously very useful, but it's also trivially replaced. The ability to put stuff in space is not easily replaced. Conquering the inherit business risk of space operations and engineering when others won't is part the value of space companies.
Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware.
You don't use phones, digital maps, or are glad that your national defense is up and running?
Satellites don't last forever. SpaceX launched 10 gps sattelites in 2018... (or more, not sure, that's just one launch)
Thanks!
I guess I'm old, moldy and miss the productivity and work ethic before the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, and Slack were excessively popular and overly accessible.
You can always quit out of the program for a while if you need to really focus, I do that often.
However, complexity of a product does (or at least should) inform risk of future competitors. The market for instant messaging systems is relatively low-cost to enter, has lots of serious players, and seems to be moving towards a subscription model, which is easier to disrupt.
Perhaps a free protocol will win sufficient mindshare to commoditise the market, though I'm not optimistic - most players' profitability rely on walled gardens.
Either way, the market is replete with its varied biases, unfounded optimism, and information asymmetry.
I’ve got nothing against Slack, but they are just another Snapchat.
They provide a useful service, don’t get me wrong, but suffers from the same disease as many other software companies that grew via venture investment.
The market is more often correct about future earnings over any meaningful window than any individual on Hacker News.
They're both easily replaceable communication services.
In case you didn't know, Oracle has lock-in over their customers because their platforms expose proprietary features not delivered by competitors, or because they have certifications demanded by law in certain industries.
The cost of switching from Slack to something else is insignificant and there's nothing that Slack can do to prevent competitors from emerging, short of burning cash to acquire them like they did with Hipchat.
Slack does not even target the market of Oracle, because big enterprises prefer and even require on-site solutions. I've worked with German companies threatening to fire employees if Skype or Slack were found on company owned computers.
Comparing Slack with Oracle is like comparing Snapchat with Microsoft Exchange.
Ridiculous!
(I appreciate that the reality is slightly more nuanced than that.)
> Ridiculous!
> (I appreciate that the reality is slightly more nuanced than that.)
You are hilarious. Ignore the people that say poor analogies doused in sarcasm make for weak arguments.
If you had literally dozens of dozens of paid-for, or hundreds of free, brains at your disposal, any of which could be dropped into place and be fit for the purpose of letting your body bits talk to each other, then that may be a slightly more appropriate analogy.
Unless you're implying a chat app is analogous to the renal system? It's not really clear what point you were trying to make.
And as others have pointed out, there are most likely teams working on putting stuff in space who use Slack, and Slack or its employees couldn't function without the services like communications and weather data that satellites provide. So just like vital organs in a human body, one can't really function without the other.
But their relative valuation or weight is unrelated to how important one is to the other or to the rest of the world or body.
Each company or organ's valuation or weight is entirely determined by what it needs to be to carry out its function.
> If you had literally dozens of dozens of paid-for, or hundreds of free, brains at your disposal, any of which could be dropped into place and be fit for the purpose of letting your body bits talk to each other
It's a common trope to argue that Slack is easily replaceable by a competitive product or open-source protocol like IRC.
When people say things like "any of which could be dropped into place" or "Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware" [1], we're entitled to ask "so why don't they"?
The reasons are to do with network effects, cost-of-ownership, security, scalability, easy-of-use, and countless other factors - but all those factors add up to the reason why Slack is valued at its current valuation.
But a nature metaphor applies here too: the evolutionary forces of creation and destruction have meant that a player that may only have been slightly fitter than what was there before has become completely dominant, and made it extremely difficult for another player to challenge it.
We can all sit back in our chairs and scoff at how easily another player could replace Slack's function in any individual context, but that tells us nothing about just how the alternatives will usurp Slack's present market dominance in reality.
My original comment was intended to be a succinct yet expletive-free reflection of the despair engendered by this story.
I disagree with a few of your claims - mostly some assumptions that I do not share.
> .. it's meaningless to compare ... two companies that serve very important but completely different functions.
This is the fundamental one. You think Slack serves a very important function, whereas I do not.
I also have a different stand on 'cultural relativism'. I believe you can, and probably should, compare individuals and organisations doing wildly different things.
> When people say things like "any of which could be dropped into place" or "Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware" [1], we're entitled to ask "so why don't they"?
This assumes two things:
1) That people don't replace Slack with better alternatives. This is clearly not true - there are myriad cases where people eschew it outright, or abandon it after some time, with regular posts on HN describing same.
2) That people not actively replacing Slack is proof positive that it's qualitatively a good thing. It should be obvious why this isn't compelling.
> The reasons are to do with network effects, cost-of-ownership, security, scalability, easy-of-use, and countless other factors ...
Perhaps.
Though Network effect in a communication context makes me think a) vendor lock-in, b) proprietary protocols, c) designed difficulty in integrating with existing messaging systems, and d) middle-management FOMO.
The rest are obviously contentious -- otherwise there'd only be one player in the market.
Fitness in an evolutionary sense may not mean what you think it means. A Cronus related metaphor may be appropriate to locking your customers into a walled garden to discourage potential future competition.
To some of your points:
- Communication is about as important a function as there is. Nothing else happens without it. Indeed it's one of the main reasons satellites exist.
- We can argue about whether Slack's communication service is important/good/valuable, but at the end of the day it's a waste of both our time; the market doesn't care what you or I think or say, it only cares what consumers/companies use/buy, and revealed preferences indicate that many people/companies use it and pay for it, and that's the whole reason it has a high valuation.
- A few posts on HN about people stopping using Slack tells us little; HN is a narrow audience, and people who write posts about stopping using popular products is orders of magnitude narrower again.
- I expressed no value judgements about whether or not Slack is good thing and investors don't either; they just care that it's a successful business that will likely keep getting more successful.
- That said, I understand why they make that assessment; I'm in around 10 different Slack instances across all the different projects and networking groups I'm in. I neither love it nor hate it. I don't spend much time in it most of the time. I use it when I need to and don't use it when I don't, and it's no big deal.
- But it's now always the go-to product people fire up when a new project or collaboration group comes together. It is now the default product for that type of communication. I couldn't name a viable competitor these days, and I've been online and working in tech for 20+ years, and have used IRC, Campfire and HipChat in the past, as well as others I don't remember.
So, none of this should be surprising. It's just a popular product that investors want to invest in. The valuation of other, different kinds of companies is totally irrelevant!
https://twitter.com/johnbarton/status/1092641187482095616
Many HN users go to great effort to contribute deeply-considered, carefully crafted, highly insightful comments based on a wealth of experience and expertise.
Those are the comments that make HN great.
It's a shame when middlebrow dismissals get all the attention.
Capitalism profits from giving people what they want. There are more people that want to chat with others from their computer than there are folks who want to put stuff into space. There are quite a few more people who want to ruin their health, rasp up their voice, make their clothes & apartment stink, and give themselves cancer than want to chat with others from their computer.