Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

> Revenue: $145 million, vs. $140.7 million as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.

So they beat estimates in both cases and the stock fell? Am i misreading this?

I am having trouble understanding the myriad communications/chat apps out there that don't seem to do much more than what we older folk used to do on USENET.

Then there's all the clones of more modern platforms. Things like Whatsup.

It just seems to me there are, as a friend of mine used to say, "too many useless duplicates". Meaning, most of it is a huge waste of time.

So, what am I missing about Slack specifically? What unique differentiation makes this worthy of anyone investing their nest egg on their stock?

I honestly want to know. BTW, I have used Slack. I think it's horrible. I don't see much improvement over, say, a phpBB site (which can be deployed privately inside of a network or on the internet).

What is the chance that people will still be using slack in a few years. Esp considering mattermost is free and discord people argue is better today.

It’s great they tried to build a biz on office chat, but it seems overpriced considering it’s just another chat app

I’m consistently seeing problems on the back end that manifest to users of the service.

Critical functions like direct messages, search, mentions, app integration, app approvals are always popping up in their system status feed.

The only reason Slack caught on was businesses prior to that had AIM, Skype, or Hangouts at their disposal. AIM was agnostic across devices but depended on the user to set it up. Skype was either the personal version or the business version but you then were locked into using that to communicate. Hangouts requires Google services, which not a lot of businesses had.

Slack came out of nowhere and offered a myriad of services. It integrated with a lot and made it like AIM from 2008 when I used it at a company I worked for.

Slack seems to have something going on internally on the dev side because the consistent errors I see daily indicate they’re fixing something. Either addressing long term problems or just day to day fires.

I’ve considered Mattermost self hosted for my org. Works just like Slack but I can manage updates and I own all the data we put into it.

Interested to hear what others are using.