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Comment by ternus | Hacker News Reader

Slack is a strange example here, as it certainly seems to be thriving; do you think it's lost/dead?

Slack is a great product/company, but as Parker Conrad of Rippling explains in this podcast [1] (about 13 minutes in), Microsoft has been able to fend off Slack with an arguably inferior product, just by having an ecosystem that so many companies/orgs are already fully bought into.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/tt/podcast/20vc-ripplings-parker-...

I think it's less about the "ecosystem" they the bought into but rather the bean counters saying "Hey, we have free access to Teams, why are we wasting our money on Slack?" (That might have been what you were saying but it read more like "We love all things MS, why not move our chat to that too?")

No doubt several factors/motivations were/are at play, but I think what Parker is talking about is that for companies/orgs (particularly big corporates and government bodies) who already had a Microsoft operating environment and who weren't already using Slack, they would be much more comfortable adopting Teams, for reasons of cost, interoperability and (perceived) security, than adopting Slack, even if Slack was superior as a standalone group chat app.

That’s fair, I was more-so talking to the companies that have dropped Slack and moved to Teams (I have a number of friends who have experienced this first-hand).

At one point a company I used to work for tried to get us to move to Hangouts (or whatever Google was calling it that week) since we already paid for Google Workspace accounts for everyone. Thankfully there was enough pushback to kill that idea early.

Your counter to "ecocsystem" is literally "because ecosystem"

Wanting to switch into an ecosystem because of cost is different from wanting to switch because it integrates better with other products. For myself, when I hear "ecosystem", I think more of the latter which is why I commented. Cost might be a factor but it's not the first thing that comes to mind for me when using that word.

I agree with you. There is something about Salesforce in particular I feel people don't trust to be a good steward of acquired products.

I don't feel it's deserved even though I worked for an acquired company that certainly did fail because of their leadership—I think we were the exception though. For Mulesoft, Tableau, Quip: I don't think it's clear these would be successful companies on their own.

They paid a ton of money for Slack and need to protect that investment.

Is there a clear example of Salesforce failing at an acquisition? Or do people see the examples I gave above differently than I do?

My take is that once salesforce acquires a product at best it’ll remain stagnant and unchanged.

It’ll never get better, the smart people working on it quit and go elsewhere.

Salesforce is the rich guy at the table eating off of other people's plates and making people uneasy. Bloated, bald, disgusting, but just enough money to keep being relevant.

It’s more of a Disney/Pixar situation

Slack is the wedge the Salesforce product team is using to reinvent itself.

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