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Color me shocked that the company whose reaction to the largest customer data breach ever was to put up a site (with even shittier security) that had no real function but to try to trick people into waiving rights to sue them had a prior track record of being incredibly poo poo with data security.
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Sep 19, 2017 00:23
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It's ancaps all the way up!
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Sep 19, 2017 00:31
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So I'm pretty sure the slack owner had a post a few years ago about how they didn't really need vc funding but since they were throwing money around there was very little downside to them taking the money.
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Sep 19, 2017 01:49
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a new summer of love is the only real way to disrupt capitalistic madness btw
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Sep 19, 2017 05:27
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the old ceremony posted:a new summer of love is the only real way to disrupt capitalistic madness btw If by summer of love you mean guillotine, then yes.
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Sep 19, 2017 06:03
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For all of the people asking about Slack, they offer 2 important capabilities: - Open ended integration. I can't find a good answer for whether the MS equivalent has it, but with Slack you have connectors already available for Github, SFDC, Dropbox, etc., plus you can write your own. If your company is already fully invested and actually using the MS stack, great - and I'm sure it's possible to connect it to all of those somehow. It's not something every company needs but I can see it being useful. - Compliance. Slack is responsible for saving everything, you set your own retention policies for compliance. This is a huge benefit for certain groups, especially at the executive level. It removes a huge hassle for the IT dept. for anyone whose communications need to be saved. This includes almost every executive at every large company. It's not the only solution, obviously, but those are significant benefits. There's also the maybe-it-is-maybe-it-isn't benefit of being a cloud/hosted/whatever you want to call it solution - some organizations love that, some don't. I don't work for Slack, FWIW, but I have a few friends who use it for work and are generally very happy with it.
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Sep 19, 2017 07:56
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Executives don't use Slack. And enterprises largely don't use Slack outside of individual teams managing to get permission to use it. It's a startup thing.
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Sep 19, 2017 08:00
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shrike82 posted:Executives don't use Slack. The deployment model is team based, sure, and no company uses it across the entire enterprise - but the friends I know who use it (or used it before changing jobs) work at places like IBM and NASA. I don't think either one of them counts as a startup.
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Sep 19, 2017 08:10
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Like I said individual teams might get permission to use it on a semi official basis but their compliance methodology isn't adequate for enterprise wide deployment as an official record of communications
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Sep 19, 2017 08:12
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shrike82 posted:And enterprises largely don't use Slack outside of individual teams managing to get permission to use it. A Self-Hosted Slack OSS branch is what we use at the enterprise level to stop people from requesting slack access. It's gaining traction.
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Sep 19, 2017 10:38
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Shooting Blanks posted:The deployment model is team based, sure, and no company uses it across the entire enterprise - but the friends I know who use it (or used it before changing jobs) work at places like IBM and NASA. I don't think either one of them counts as a startup. My company uses it enterprise-wide. The executives use it. Obviously not as an only means of communication, but it's expected that everyone is reachable on Slack. We were a startup until a little over a year ago, and a tech startup at that. But this is not unique to tech companies - many of significant size. I'm not sure where these "nobody uses it across a company" ideas are being informed.
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Sep 19, 2017 14:28
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i suspect we're also talking past each other when we say "enterprise" - i take it to mean more traditional large-sized companies
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Sep 19, 2017 15:02
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Like IBM, or NASA?
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Sep 19, 2017 15:09
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is IBM or NASA using Slack enterprise-wide?
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Sep 19, 2017 15:11
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shrike82 posted:i suspect we're also talking past each other when we say "enterprise" - i take it to mean more traditional large-sized companies And a Fortune 50 company I've previously worked for that isn't based in SV used the paid version of Slack for all of their technical staff, and it was fully integrated into their workflow using the Slack API to push alerts/updates into appropriate channels. I think they would have liked to use it for almost all of their employees but even with just the tech people Slack did hit scaling issues with large teams eventually, around 20k if I remember correctly. And execs used it as well; I know I spoke with Senior VPs personally via Slack and I believe everyone up to the Executive VP/CTO that led the technical group used it. Slack's valuation makes a lot more sense to me than other unicorns since they are a market leader in their field and actually have people paying for their service rather than just using the free version.
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Sep 19, 2017 15:27
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I wouldn't be surprised if IT teams are using it but my personal experience with large enterprise is they still default to solutions like Cisco Jabber at the company level because of the cross-over functionality with stuff like videoconferencing and web meetings. I don't mean to question people's experiences with it but I think tech people are overstating its current reach or addressable market.
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Sep 19, 2017 15:37
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shrike82 posted:I don't mean to question people's experiences with it but I think tech people are overstating its current reach or addressable market. Why do you think the fact that Slack is designed to be deployed at the team or org level instead of the enterprise level reduces its reach or market? It was a purposeful decision to concentrate on smaller groups and avoid the pain points of the enterprise solutions and a big part of why they've been so successful. You're judging their success based on a market they're purposely not targeting.
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Sep 19, 2017 15:48
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that's not true given the amount of effort they're putting in "enterprise grid" and compliance they're running out of runway with just targeting startup-land and are trying to expand into enteprise IT collab land which is the preserve of Microsoft and Cisco
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Sep 19, 2017 15:50
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You seem to be saying that they have poor market penetration, and also that their addressable market is small. And yet they have ~$200 million in revenue. It's hard for me to reconcile all three of those things. And where are you getting this information that they are out of runway, or is it baseless speculation?
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Sep 19, 2017 16:40
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They're pretty richly priced compared to publicly traded collaboration IT companies like Atlassian with 200 million of extrapolated 12-month revenue against a 5B valuation. Like they have a nice technical platform and they aren't a Juicero or Uber but they need to deliver growth which is why they're trying to penetrate the entreprise market.
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Sep 19, 2017 16:46
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Ha, successfully canceled my free Blue Apron. Another success story for customer retention!
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Sep 19, 2017 16:56
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shrike82 posted:I wouldn't be surprised if IT teams are using it but my personal experience with large enterprise is they still default to solutions like Cisco Jabber at the company level because of the cross-over functionality with stuff like videoconferencing and web meetings. This is probably why Cisco is hard at work on Spark, which has a lot of the functionality you're talking about with Jabber but is more similar to Slack in overall concept.
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Sep 19, 2017 17:12
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Eletriarnation posted:This is probably why Cisco is hard at work on Spark, which has a lot of the functionality you're talking about with Jabber but is more similar to Slack in overall concept. there's like three things named spark now spark spark spark
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Sep 19, 2017 18:06
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Steve French posted:You seem to be saying that they have poor market penetration, and also that their addressable market is small. And yet they have ~$200 million in revenue. the implication is that slack addresses most of their market (let's call it 2-500 employee companies) but doesnt have sufficient inroads into the enterprise market, which is an order of magnitude or so larger. or at least that's how i read it.
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Sep 19, 2017 18:28
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FamDav posted:the implication is that slack addresses most of their market (let's call it 2-500 employee companies) but doesnt have sufficient inroads into the enterprise market, which is an order of magnitude or so larger. or at least that's how i read it. Right but the assumption there is that they won't be able to penetrate that market. It was sort of stated as fact by someone that they haven't and can't, but with nothing to back it up, and it was also contradicted by at least one person claiming that it is used in some enterprise firms. And slack claims to have a "foothold" in some large percentage of fortune 500s. I mean, maybe true, maybe not, I'm just playing devils advocate against what appear to be unfounded statements and assumptions about their potential for growth.
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Sep 19, 2017 18:50
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If nothing else, actually making a profit at all makes Slack better than 90% of overvalued tech companies.
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Sep 19, 2017 19:08
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Speaking of new IRC clones, whats the deal with Discord? Their product is pretty good (integrated community text chats and voice chats mostly for gamers), but I have no clue how they are supposed to make money. Are they just comsuning VC funding to get big enough that they'll get bought out by a big tech company as a competitor?
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Sep 19, 2017 21:07
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Selling data like crazy, a premium service that I don't know if anyone uses, and probably burning VC cash
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Sep 19, 2017 21:09
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nothing to seehere posted:Speaking of new IRC clones, whats the deal with Discord? Their product is pretty good (integrated community text chats and voice chats mostly for gamers), but I have no clue how they are supposed to make money. Are they just comsuning VC funding to get big enough that they'll get bought out by a big tech company as a competitor? You have to buy emotes and a bunch of other little things that you only run into if you're running your own server.  let's you personally use emotes from any server you're on.
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Sep 19, 2017 21:11
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corn in the bible posted:If nothing else, actually making a profit at all makes Slack better than 90% of overvalued tech companies. They're not profitable yet.
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Sep 19, 2017 21:50
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Slack does have a historically similar company in terms of their go to market strategy: Salesforce.com. SFDC also got footholds in departments, and then went after big rollouts, which then gave them the quals to sell big enterprise deals from the start of a new customer relationship. A significant difference is that they never had a free tier. Even then they weren't profitable for, what, 10 years or so?
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Sep 19, 2017 21:57
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That's like false on first glance to the point I'm wondering why you brought it up. Salesforce was founded in 99' and IPOed in 04 for which they announced being profitable for FY04.
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Sep 19, 2017 22:05
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shrike82 posted:That's like false on first glance to the point I'm wondering why you brought it up. I thpught the question was around Slack's viability. I didn't claim they are a prrfect analogy, only that there are some similarities to how they got into the enterprise space. I also realize SFDC had some good enterprise successes fairly early on (e.g. Japan Postal).
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Sep 19, 2017 22:51
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Of all the stupid unicorns where is the only design to crush SAP and make good business software.
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Sep 20, 2017 03:27
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sbaldrick posted:Of all the stupid unicorns where is the only design to crush SAP and make good business software. Trillions of dollars and manhours have been spent to prove good business software is impossible.
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Sep 20, 2017 03:32
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Condiv posted:there's like three things named spark now
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Sep 20, 2017 04:05
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Its also an advertising company. Spark is an overplayed word in English.
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Sep 20, 2017 04:40
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sbaldrick posted:make good business software haha yeah
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Sep 20, 2017 06:49
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sbaldrick posted:Of all the stupid unicorns where is the only design to crush SAP and make good business software. Imagine that you're going into the office on Monday and pitching this new piece of software to your existing enterprise-scale organization. It'll be so much better than what you're currently doing; all you have to do is manage the transition of your systems from SAP to the new software. The company likes the idea, and then they tell you that it'll be your task to lead the transition project. You get to figure out a way to move your business away from three decades of SAP without loving up everything. Breaking into a cold sweat yet?  I've had nightmares like this.
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Sep 20, 2017 07:00
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We don’t know how to write good software period. Software like Slack and Spotify being Chrome instances (Atom) is a good example of that - how the gently caress does a music player and glorified chat app consume over a GB of ram???
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Sep 20, 2017 07:41
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