That letter Slack wrote to Microsoft after they rejected a $$$ takeover a few years ago has not aged that well.
But it looks like Microsoft considered paying about $8 billion back in 2016[1].
Slack held out, Microsoft built their competitor and Slack are still around. And now Slack are going to sell for $24 billion or more.
I'm not sure that puts Slack in too bad a light.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/04/source-microsoft-mulled-an...
I still can't quite grasp these acquisition numbers. At that price you expect Slack to generate 1.5-2 billion in profit per year. That's 4 times their current revenue. When you factor in risk and time value of money it becomes more like 3+ billion per year. I just can't imagine a chat app driving that level of profit.
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.
IF your company is paying to preserve it. At my not-very-tiny employer we only pay for something like 1 year of retention. I have no idea if that's a legal or financial decision, but either way it seems like a dumb one.
Salesforce is betting that Salesforce + Slack is worth more than the aquisition price. And more than the cost of letting a competitor acquire it.
Combining all of these things into one offering is very difficult, and highly valued by both customers and the stock market.
For another perspective, from a WSJ article on Friday:
>"Zoom has grown to more than 300 million daily active participants—a broader measure than daily active users—from around 10 million before the pandemic. Microsoft’s Teams, which offers Zoom and Slack-like features and comes at no extra cost for users of its Office 365 suite, grew from 32 million daily active users at the beginning of the pandemic in March to more than 115 million last month. Slack stopped updating its daily active user number late last year when it reached 12 million." [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/slack-missed-out-on-the-pandemi...
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.
Obviously public education couldn't use it because of a lack of hardware or internet connection on both sides so it was broadcast over TV.
Sure, it could be that they are lying, but considering how Zooming has become a synonym for video chat, I don't think it is that farfetched.
See: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/30/21242421/zoom-300-million...
(Of course this was all back in April, and especially with their adoption in education maybe they _do_ have 300m DAUs by now - I'm just responding to the metric in the original article.)
They've built a compelling competitor in Teams that is more capable of competing with Zoom than Slack can.
This whole thing is dripping with condescension and ego. It reads like a nasty letter written to an ex-girlfriend about how you're super successful now and gee I'm glad you're doing well too. Yuck.
This is my favourite post demonstrating just how awful their 'voice' is: https://api.slack.com/changelog/2017-09-the-one-about-userna...
They come across as egregiously sardonic. I feel that same voice was evident with the whole fuss around their shitty WYSIWYG addition before they gave in and allowed you to turn it off.
This is so cringe-inducing, I can't believe they paid to have this in the NYT. Microsoft stock up to all-time highs as Teams eats Slack's lunch (for better or worse), while Slack bought for scrap by a company way worse than MSFT. Maybe don't publicly shame potential acquirers in passive-aggressive paid advertisements?
Although on another side, MS Teams is still miles behind Slack. While you can be signed into multiple orgs in Teams, switching orgs literally restarts the program which means that switching from your org to a client's org is super disruptive. If you are in a video call your only option is to open teams in the browser to view another organization.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/compa...
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.
About four months ago, the edict came down, everybody was being moved to Teams. Usually you hear a lot of grumbling and lots of internal postings about how much better Slack or other tools are, this is a stupid move, etc.
This time? Exact opposite. People liked the integrating of most of their MS tools in once place. The transition was pretty smooth and people were happy about moving to Teams. Now, instead of using several different tools, I basically just use Teams now for most of my daily workflow.
I'm not sure how the move went at other companies, but it went a lot smoother than I thought it would here.
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.
Slack’s today’s valuation is ~25B so my guess is Salesforce would buy them for around 30B. If that’s scrap to you then dip me in it 24*7 and never take me out
Another day in PR cringe. Yet another zero information statement.
Is this true? I thought Slack was dominating corp chat+?
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.
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.
https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/jobs-apple-welc...
Personally I thought we should have moved forward, but it wasn't anything I had a say in.
No proof, you'll just have to take my word for it.
It was a sad, sad day when our CVP forced our org to cancel our Slack plan and move to Teams. What a garbage piece of software it was back then. Probably still is, but it's been years since I was last subjected to it.
Teams is a solid piece of software, and Microsoft has done a good job making it unique in a crowded marketplace.