It’s still mind boggling that all these unicorns haven’t found a way to make money even after being in business for years and having a mature product. It’s a strange world.
But "net loss" already takes revenue into account! "Loss" is not the same thing as "expenses".
The revenue increased substantially, but so did expenses, resulting in a slight decrease in loss over the past 3 years.
At the current rate, the company would reach break-even profitability around the year 2070.
If you created a business that simply bought $1M worth of Stocks (e.x. ETFs) and bonds, the first quarter when you made the initial investment you'd show a "loss" of $1m. You might sell those 10 years later for $2m (or maybe the value goes to $0). You wouldn't know if it was a good or bad investment until much later. Seeing a $1M quarterly loss from that first quarter of investing wouldn't give you any insight at all.
To make matters worse here, the way that quarterly accounting works generally hides what are investments and what are actual losses. Some pre-profitable companies do better than others here but it's fairly difficult to understand what parts of spending are investments and what parts are just burning money when looking at quarterly accounting statements.
No, that's not how accounting works. If you buy $1M in stocks, then you move the amount from one asset account (cash) to another asset account. You have $1M in assets both before and after, with no losses.
With just modest revenue growth they'll be able to optimize towards profit whenever they choose.
Video chats and screen sharing are better (Screenhero is all that was around on Slack and it stunk). Video recordings save right to OneDrive for important meetings...
Oh and if you use Office 365 it’s a no brainer, everything is integrated!
It is imposed on people whose organizations have Office 365 subscriptions, it is not chosen.
The bugs do need mentioned though. It constantly crashes for me, constantly loses sync, will just straight-up freeze for no discernible reason, will decide it doesn't really feel like actually sending my messages, and so on. It does not at all feel like a mature product.
Our team dropped HipChat and has moved to Teams along with the rest of the org. Our dev team (of 7) had used HipChat as a simple persistent chat app, sandboxed away from the rest of the company. Now we are on Teams with not only Ops guys, but also HR, marketing, and so on. It's fine at being sort of an organizational tool, but we dearly miss having our own private chat-only app that we can make use of as we want/need. Partly this is contextual to our organization, but the way we use Teams now feels far more formalized, and not in a good way.
Teams might have parity in a vacuum, but everyone already knows what slack is and how to use it, including people you might hire in the future.
They switched to MS Teams, but at least two years ago, it felt unusable. Or, the team's Slackness couldn't translate. No one used it.
Neither Slack nor MS made money in this exchange.
Maybe Teams has gotten better and more usable, but I wonder if Teams is taking off in business environments, whereas Slack definitely is more common in tech environments?
And I pay for both Office365 and G Suite at my business, and Google just invited me to Currents. I know better than to dump something like Slack for any new (like, first 3 years) Google product, but... Slack's getting some real competition.
Is it markedly worse in any area? Seems like for any business that's already entrenched in slack there isn't much incentive to move off. I'm assuming in your case there must have been some large benefits in order to spend a multi-month effort forcing a migration.
Sure for companies already using Slack there's probably not a whole lot of reason to move off. But Slack seems to be relying on continued huge growth numbers to become profitable.
I don't think I follow your logic. Why would this lead to Hipchat being completely shutdown?
- an optimization is considered lower priority than feature work and bugs, so never gets staffed
- it's considered risky even when it's not
- it's difficult to quantify the value until the works done
Aside from that, just because it may be more cost effective to use 1000 servers and 1 developer versus 200 servers and 3 developers, doesn't mean it's a sound choice. One invests in people using their brains, the other mostly disappears into raw material supply chains, building servers and infrastructure and burning fuel to run them.
They have a very hard problem on their hands of estimating the revenue growth new features will bring, and compare them to costs savings from better code. I don't think anybody here has enough data to decide on this - it's not impossible that nobody there has enough data either.
Never will be sure of the exact numbers but a great deal of the sales is no doubt driven by startups and cash they are spending (do they still call this runway?). When that stops what happens?
Bingo bango
https://qz.com/1196256/it-took-amazon-amzn-14-years-to-make-...
> Keep in mind that Amazon consistently lost money for its first several years as a public company. It first reported a quarterly profit in the fourth quarter of 2001 [...]
If only. Their COGS may be low, but marketing expenses and R&D are 2/3 of slack's expenses. Also, cloud gets very pricey at scale.
Profitability will probably come post-IPO in some form of a hiring freeze (or quotas), and cuts in perks/food per capita.
If 80%ile studio rents in San Francisco were closer to $800/month than $3400/month then maybe salaries could be 70% of what they are, and Slack would be almost break-even.
It's worth noting that profitability isn't the only useful way to run a publicly-traded business. Telecoms are typically swimming in debt, but they're (mostly) fine because they have cash flow (monthly payments; making it impossible to quit).
In general many profitable businesses swim in debt. If you finance each project to 1/3 with your own capital and 2/3 dept you can do three times as many projects, and for established companies with lots of assets (production facilities etc) banks will happily lend that money.
On the other hand there are companies like Nintendo and Apple with huge cash reserves and nowhere to spend them.
The implication is that they could invest less in growth and get to profitability, but then they’d be leaving addressable market on the table.
Slack... sure you can just spin up a rocket.chat or matrix instance, but operating those costs money and attention by employees that YOU need to hire and pay. And suddenly the Slack bill you have doesn't seem that high. Quite many companies are in such a situation. There are institutions in different situations, like the French state for example which employs millions (sic) and really wants to keep the data out of foreign hands so they use matrix instead and have staff to maintain the instances. With the costs being irrelevant for most institutions, they select for other criteria instead, which is quality of the product. And Slack for some reason is market leader here. I definitely prefer to use IRC but I'm not delusional, most people aren't like me.
that's a very bad long term strategy :-)
The business model already exists e.g. in the form of American cable companies. They offer crappy services for super expensive prices, but the moment a competitor gets into town and invests heavily, they invest as well and outbid them. This way they ensure that no competitor can make profits and grow beside them in that specific town. So they are safe. Add in government mandated monopolies and "you get counties abc, I get counties def" type deals between cable companies and regulators looking the other way. Same will likely happen for Uber vs Lyft.
And if your answer to that problem is self driving cars, well then I’ll happily point you to the auto-rental market as roughly what kind of a business you’re investing in.
If slack becomes an email replacement (instead of an ephemeral IM client), and a repository for historical knowledge, then it becomes very difficult to replace. In the workplaces where I have used slack, it definitely starts to take on that role (links to discussions are placed in tickets and documents, for example).
When your entire history of communications, way of tracking tickets, and document repository is stored in a desktop application, replacing Slack may not be as simple as switching to another messaging program.
Could you "replace Outlook" -- it's just an email client after all.
Absolutely. There is always pain in transitions but some are easier than others.