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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

You mention Slack, but they had losses of $140M/year prior to IPO:

Slack says it may not turn profitable; IPO filing reveals $139 million in losses, Microsoft primary competitor

The Slack IPO filing shows annual revenue of $400.5 million, up 60% from the prior year, with a net loss of $138.9 million, for the 12-month period that ended Jan. 31. Slack's actual fiscal year-end date has yet to be determined.

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Slack grew their workforce too quickly.

Actually the Slack I remember from when it first came out is more or less the same product they have now. I'm not really sure what all of those people were doing for all of those years.

Why slack? I never understood.

I never liked IRC. But to not like it and pay for it? I do not understand.

Am I a fossil?

Most people don't get to choose, in my case, it's our corporate IM system, so I have to use it whether I want to or not.

It's got a lot of enterprise features that companies like, like SSO integration, message retention policies, security certifications like HIPAA and FedRAMP, and more.

There are also a lot of pre-made apps for integrating with corporate apps like Jira, Gmail, Salesforce, etc.

It's fine, I haven't looked at a lot of other options, but it seems more usable than Google Hangouts (or messenger or whatever they call it now) or Microsoft Teams.

> Most people don't get to choose

Is that a case of business people making technical decisions?

That I understand. Do not like, but I understand

There was some technical evaluation done, but some features like retention policies and SSO were deemed requirements. Not sure what all of the criteria were or what all of the candidates were, it was a while ago.

The big sells for Hangouts and Teams is that they have video. Slack doesn't so you have to find a video conference provider as well like Zoom. Also Teams integrates more easily with the existing Microsoft stack (office, outlook, etc.) that a ton of non-tech companies are on.

I think a lot of tech companies struggle to break into the non-tech world. Slack might be ubiquitous for SWEs but my SO who works in traffic engineering will probably never use it (they use Teams).

https://slack.com/intl/en-au/video-conferencing

They do. They acquired ScreenHero for screensharing, and then fucked up the integration.

> https://www.xda-developers.com/slack-working-on-video-suppor...

They've only just got it right - check out Huddles. No doubt with their next yearly annual conference they'll be releasing the video version for this.

It's definitely turned into a slow behemoth. I remember it being snappy in the early days and everyone wanted to use it.

You realize that there is a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes, right?

They need to scale their systems, maintain reliability, scale their processes, build internal tools, run experiments, work with 'legacy' code and within the existing architecture, etc.

It's not surprising product development has slowed down. In almost all cases it seems like the speed of product development is asymptotic.

Hiring too many people is still the number one thing that can kill your growing business. The communication costs alone eat a bunch of headcount so if you don't desperately need the people then you shouldn't hire them.

The problem generally starts when you hire a bunch of people without fixing broken processes first, these people then push back against fixing said processes, and the rot sets in.

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