Salesforce Deal to Buy Slack Expected to Be Announced Tuesday After Market Close

It's a chat app that integrates to most other services you use and ends up being the most extensive repository to all of the information shared inside your company.

As someone who pays for Slack, it would be VERY hard to make a switch. The impact of this in retention and opportunity to monetize the 'integrate workflows' increases the multiplier. Salesforce has probably calculated how this opens up revenue to their existing product line and Slack itself is growing.

I'm not saying this is science but is part of the rationale that goes into the price.

I think it is a _little bit_ off to just consider Slack to be a chat app. Sure chat is the core function...One thing I find super valuable about Slack is that it is a searchable archive. When a new person joins a company, they have literally years and years worth of searchable content. This helps get up to speed, cuts down on time spent asking questions etc. I find myself searching Slack many times a day pretty much every day at work. Not to mention automated workflows, calendar, drive integration etc.

This isn't about a chat app: this is a platform valuation.

Salesforce is betting that Salesforce + Slack is worth more than the aquisition price. And more than the cost of letting a competitor acquire it.

Especially since chat app users seem to be quite fickle. My workplace has been through about 6 chat platforms in the past 10 years.

Enterprise SaaS is “just an app” + a ton of integrations + SSO authentication with a bunch of systems + SOC2 level compliance (or better.)

Combining all of these things into one offering is very difficult, and highly valued by both customers and the stock market.

I wouldn’t trust any of those numbers.

The Zoom metric is totally incomparable (they’re definitely killing it, but that metric counts each user many times over), and Teams is included for free with O365 and the product boundaries are getting blurry - so who knows how much how much actual engagement those users have with the chat or video features.

Teams is completely failing to replace Slack in my experience. I think it's must closer to replacing Zoom. I use all 3 daily. Teams is strong in file storage, direct messages and video calling. Slack is strong in channel messaging. I would argue they barely compete, the Slack file storage and video are not great, and the Teams channel messaging is unusable and appears unfixable.

Slack is still just about a better standalone product, but the Teams integration (and bundling) with 365 makes it a very strong product overall.

Yet the mobile app version seems to allow team switching pretty easily. So disappointing, as I've had multiple clients switch to teams over the last year. It was easier to keep multiple slack channels open and jump between as needed to keep an eye on things. Teams is really only focused on 'internal teams at one company' - users external to a company are, at best, an afterthought.

> multiple orgs in Teams

Microsoft's IAM features have always suffered from design by committee. See: Team Foundation Server, SharePoint.

The only explanation I've been able to come up with for how such a technically competent company can repeatedly generate such UX incompetent output is that they source all their IAM features from talking to (1) PMs & (2) HR.

I would agree with the low barrier to switch. At my last company, we switched 3 times within a year. Away from Slack, then to Stride, and back to Slack (due to stride being discontinued). The point being that it wasn't too difficult to switch. We didn't suffer from "lock-in" or anything.

Much of the narrative compares Teams w/ Slack.

While that's true, the better narrative compares Teams w/ Zoom. And Teams has done a good job making video seamless and easy to initiate.

Small correction - Slack's valuation is $25B after the bump from the Salesforce acquisition rumors. So the premium is likely already factored in.

That's just the HN/startup echo chamber doing its thing. Out there, MS's offerings have never been stronger for small/medium businesses.

IIRC sometime last year teams passed slack for daily & weekly users pretty comprehensively.

Office 365 is heading close to 200m users. Slack and Teams use is both in the low 10s, but teams is growing fast into that 200m since it is bundled and interacts with the other parts.

Slack is getting eaten by both the top and bottom.

From the top, Teams has been effective in beating Slack, especially with Office 365 subscribers.

From the bottom, Discord is doing a pretty decent job.

Slack is increasingly stuck in the messy middle.

Or when they removed the IRC and XMPP bridges?

Well that's a shame. Now I'm stuck with Teams.

I was just trying to understand if you could share some of that reporting? I wasn't able to find anything very specific.

Former Heroku employee. They just released streaming data connectors (https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-streaming-data-connectors) which is pretty cool.

They're maintaining the platform fine I'd say, which is quite a bit of work when you consider the frameworks and databases they offer.

As far as I am aware they had python 3 available a long time ago (long before the competition) and they have beta versions of some tools so you can test in advance.

Heroku pipelines are great and I believe they were added after the acquisition

It feels like Heroku has lost its market leadership. These days seems like Netlify is the winner.

I get that people want this, I just don't get why. After 20 years of work as a sysadmin/coder/DBA, I've never even remotely wanted this.

Documentation is the key. Wikis. Code comments. Bug/issue trackers. I've never considered walking up to someone's desk, and talking to them, as something I need documented, and searchable.

And that's what slack/irc/IM/etc is to me. Walking up, and talking to someone at a desk.

Not to mention, if you want any REAL functionality with Slack, you have to pay. And you thereby outsource all backups, and additionally loads of confidential conversations to an external company.

Which then cuts you off if you cancel your account!

Most of the people I know who use Slack, use it "because that's why SV uses".

People always mention Slack's search as if it's a great selling point. Any time I use it, it seems adequate but nothing really to write home about.

If you want publicly accessible histories I can think of a few better ways. The (very) old school way was to have indexed logs accessible over HTTP. You can almost certainly still find IRC logs on google this way --

If it’s internal just stick an ELK stack behind an authentication proxy it’s 20 minutes of work, an hour most with the addition of a log bot which joins public channels.

This is for IRC though, better options exist for things like Zulip or Matrix. (non-exhaustive list, obviously)

Side note though: I find it weird that this is the bar. It comes up every thread but it’s tantamount to a “ha! Gotcha!”, because no -sane- messaging system logs its history in a way that is retrievable immediately because indexing -all that content- is expensive and better off being centralised; additionally chat history (almost by definition) loses relevance quickly.

It’s almost certainly an anti-pattern when you feel the need to refer to things you said 2 years ago, immediately, in the same client you used to write those things.

I don’t know how you’re using slack though, so I guess it’s pretty central to your flow.

EDIT: am I wrong? Is this normal? Someone correct me please if you’re not happy with what I say.

> So, how do search every public channel, regardless of whether you were even a part of the company at the time, with as convenient of a workflow as Slack has?

How likely is that scenario? Chat is far less organized compared to email or forums and it's difficult to find the result you're looking for unless you've seen it and have a vague memory of what it was and when it was posted.

When I try to use Slack's search feature, I typically get a bunch of irrelevant results. In fact, I've had better luck scrolling back and finding the message I'm looking for.

The groundwork is there, I don't know that anyone has written a client to implement it in a single gui. Today you'd dump the logs into a central repo (splunk/database/whatever) - likely pushed by a bot in the channels you want to log but there are also IRCd servers that will do logging - and users would search logs there while chatting in the main client.

I'd imagine someone could write an extension to Hexchat to integrate it directly into the client.

https://hexchat.github.io/

There's always Mattermost. It'd be funny to see Pega or some other Salesforce competitor fund Mattermost development to try to make Saleforce's acquisition of Slack less valuable.

LOL, having worked with SF for the last two years I can completely see them killing the free plan. They care only about licensed seat count, at ALL COST!

> What would Slack's brand and standing be if it weren't for the availability and ease of onboarding?

potentially, profitable.

What ease of onboarding? Slack has one tenth the daily active users of Microsoft Team. It has already lost on volume. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/technology/salesforce-sla...

I suppose the value of Slack is now that some of its customers are very committed, even if they're not many.

absolutely. One thing that does temper this is that companies want to disproportionately reward the strategic businesses, so Microsoft will likely give higher commissions for selling Microsoft Teams than SQL Server. They have controls to prevent gaming that internally, although obviously not 100% effective.

+ Concur

I think Zoom is actually appreciably better than the competition. And I also think there's still a lot more space for video conferencing to innovate. Company's like Zoom that sell integrated conference setups can integrate themselves pretty thoroughly into an enterprise.

I don’t think software would be so fad-oriented if there wasn’t a culture of infinite growth and expansion.

Discord is an interesting case compared to Slack. Slack is, from my understanding anyway, built out in PHP. Fairly lingua franca for the web.

Discord, on the other hand, seems to have built a "technical moat" of sorts for themselves by using Erlang/Elixir and other non-standard tech. Suppose SF or a company like them were to acquire Discord. If and when the staff were to leave once their vesting period or whatever is over, who would take over the codebase from them?

It'll at least be 50% cash, as the article says.