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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

The stock market is so odd.

We have 2 cloud communication companies with radically different stock results (Slack vs Twilio).

Slack, who has ~50% revenue growth and haven't turned a profit and their stock is ~0% flat YTD [1].

Then you have Twilio, they too are having 50%+ growth and have never turned a profit, yet their stock is up ~130% YTD. [2]

The stock market is a funny beast.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WORK?.tsrc=applewf [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWLO?p=TWLO&.tsrc=fin-srch

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Twilio is a suite of infrastructure services. Slack is a chat app.

Twilio is in a league of their own while Teams is looming over Slack.

I think Microsoft is basically giving teams away because it’s such a piece of Shiite. Our school district is using it and everyone hates it. Hard to compete with free though

In contrast, most of the medical workers I know use Teams for telehealth...and they love it.

It's a better app than Google Whatever (Hangouts? Meet? Duo???) and Cisco WebEx, though Zoom is much easier to use for larger meetings.

I think Teams is my favorite video app, but I find it lacking in persistent chat.

My org uses Teams and I’m now a member of probably 30 teams with lots of channels each. I ignore them all as there’s too many.

Slack is different because I just join specific communities.

Also text search is bad right now in Teams, but is handy in Slack.

I find Teams far more effective than Slack.

School districts will almost certainly hate everything they were forced to start using over the last few months because their entire workflow has changed dramatically. From top to bottom and they’re having to invent new things on the fly. They will almost certainly get stuff wrong.

Normally, such a radical change would have involved months if not years of planning, followed by months of trials, before even being deployed in 1 class for 1 subject.

Why are Twilio's competitors not doing so well?

It's less about that and more that Slack has to compete with free. Twilio does not.

Slack was free before Teams was free. They thought they had won the war before the first battle took place. Slack could have been Zoom, but instead it was just a pretty web client to IRC

Slack is a though sell for a enterprise organisation with a large suite of Microsoft tools. Of course Slack is better than Teams the person making the decision doesn't care. Also Teams is good enough.

This is really the key here. Teams and bing search come free as part of the package so big corporations use it dispite not being very good

The idea that Teams is not very good is BS. Is it not as good as Slsck. I disagree. I find it better than slack for my usage. However, there are enough people I know who use both that have said it’s not as good as Slack.

But that does not mean Teams itself is not excellent software. It just means Slack is slightly more excellent.

And once you throw in how rapidly Teams has been improving, I think it’s a matter of months before Teams surpasses slack in almost every way.

The moat is very different. Picture 10 years down the line. Which do you feel more confident generating returns?

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