Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

I think even Amazon realized how awful Chime is, given that they, as a company, switched to Slack just a few months ago.

My gut reasoning is that cloud infrastructure is not the same product as office productivity and the two use cases are not the same, the purchasing decisions aren't made by the same people (except at scale, I guess, I'll concede that), and the boots on the ground building shit in the cloud take the path of least resistance where that logic would never apply.

I don't really subscribe to the belief that a company should half ass a product or acquire something in a new market because they aren't already there, but I may be in the minority. Amazon has shown they can build a trillion dollar enterprise without caring about office productivity or chat, but they'll sell the shovels to anyone who wants to try and dig those holes.

Hosted AD on Azure and Office 365 are _so good_ that nobody is coming close, not even Google.

Eero devices require this customer support, but that can be merged with their IOT support team for all other in-home objects. I think Amazon made an exception to their “user support is never our priority” choice because they know it’s the only way to get a physical foothold in our homes, with Kindle and Echo, and I think the burden of Eero support was worth it to them for the mesh networking technology that has been harvested for Sidewalk.

Slack customer support cannot be easily integrated with any existing Amazon support team that I’m aware of, and does not offer a world-changing advantage to that degree.

Not sure why using Office would be a reason to prefer Azure over something else. Can you elaborate? Are there some useful integrations one can benefit from?

Regarding Amazon buying Slack. My guess would be it's too expensive. If you look at Amazon's acquisitions history, you would see they almost never spend more than $1B. The one exception I recall is Whole Foods which they paid ~$13B for.

While slack and Dropbox are customer facing and build on top of Amazon.

Theoretically that stuff is more value added, but I think their markets are smaller compared to what Amazon is going for.

If the goal is to be the buggy whip maker for the universe there’s a lot more there until they need to start vertically integrating and buying stuff that uses the buggy whips.

I truly hope not. I like discord for its informal, gaming, and specifically not enterprise or "professional" approach/atmosphere. I use it to chat with friends and talk in some communities (eg. programming ones).

/s

I think Salesforce compares itself to Microsoft and sees its ambitions to enter ERP, CRM and BI markets and they already have a collaboration platform with Teams, for better or for worse.

Are you suggesting an enterprise is going to leave Office for Dropbox and Slack? Cause that's not happening.

Which one?

Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?

- Slack wasn't going to survive as an independent. Their anti-trust efforts against Microsoft + Teams seemed to go nowhere.

- Salesforce is one of the only companies that can go to-to-toe with Microsoft in the enterprise - 80%+ of the Fortune 500, 150k+ customers, 200k+ people at their conference each year

- Salesforce already know your org chart so can roll out slack to anyone already on force.com easily.

- Salesforce are building out from a data-up direction to take up what employees have open on their screens at work. Slack/collab was a big part they were missing (so is video/conf - zoom would be perfect but it's overvalued, Workday also fits)

- Integrations with CRM, customer support, social media management, etc. are a no-brainer into slack

- Microsoft are weak exactly where Salesforce are strong so a lot of customers are across both and would be tempted by free Slack over free Teams

- They're issuing stock for half the acquisition and have a cap of 250B+ which is a bit bubbly but they're doing well P&L wise recently

Is that really true? I'm biased since I'm on the dev side, but everyone I know is using macbook pros, with very rare stragglers using windows or linux, and they use web clients for most stuff (e.g. gsuite, etc) rather than thick clients. I suspect with the push to working from home this will only accelerate.

This is a shame, since I like Microsoft Office products and am one of the few people I know who thinks VB is a great productivity tool, .Net is superior (in terms of language design) to Java, and Excel, Visio are better than anything else out there. But it's been almost a decade since anyone I know has needed to use that stuff in the office.

You can integrate this into the SF platform and your get a good defense against other players (MSFT, SAP, Oracle).

If I can schedule a customer call and register it inside salesforce it would be great. Today I have to enter all manually on their interface :-(

Google Chat? What’s that?

I’ll stick with Slack.

Some integration into core Salesforce might make sense for reps / teams.

Another useful product might be live chats based on Slack tech.

Seems good fit, but I do wonder how well they are going to integrate.

That is, unless some start-up dreams up some kind of revolutionary paradigm shift in how people communicate online.

Maybe something in the AR space ~10 years from now.

From a business perspective, data sovereignty and end-to-end encryption seem to be really potent differentiators for certain market segments, especially government. To wit, the French government has a massive Matrix deployment under the name "Tchap", and the German military began rolling out a similar initiative called "BwMessenger" last month: https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger-...

On the opposite end of the spectrum you've got Mozilla, who replaced their IRC network with open, federated Matrix and saw greater far greater community engagement as a result.

October also saw a commercial entity (Famedly.com) begin sponsoring the development of a third-party homeserver implemented in Rust (Conduit). So we're starting to see glimmers of a potential ecosystem around the Matrix protocol independent of Element.

We don't have the same pop culture buzz as Slack or Discord, but I absolutely think there is something of substance here.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "their advantage". Designing and promulgating an actual open federated protocol is way harder/time-consuming than doing the same for a closed proprietary one. So taking this approach has only hurt their flexibility and speed-to-market for features.

However, if done right, an open protocol can be way more advantageous to the global community as a whole! IMHO Matrix started out as just another crazy moonshot. "Let's make something like email and xmpp only better." But, fast-forward to now and they have built a very usable chat ecosystem with multiple server implementations and many clients.

My hope is that things like this Slack acquisition (and the inevitable cooperate shenanigan that will follow) will continue to push individuals and companies to invest in open federate-able alternatives.

Matrix was focused on things that deter enterprise customers while Slack built a machine for locking them in.

Anyway, I think it's still here and growing, but it pops into the HN consciousness every now and again. That doesn't mean it's popularity is similarly varied :)

One thing that really stood out to me is that you can cross-sign your device certificates! That means your chat partners don't need to verify the signatures of all your device keys, but only one. Even though this is the only good option (in my opinion), the only other messenger that does this that I'm aware of is iMessage.

I wish more people used it. Not just individually, but for their communities. There's a couple of good bridges which I intend to try, to bring my Signal/Telegram/... contacts all into one place, but you need not only the bridge, you also need to host your own homeserver and I haven't made the dive into all of that yet.

[1] https://thelounge.chat/

Corporations don't want to spend the manpower to run something like this, considering Slack is relatively cheap and Teams just comes with their Azure/Office365 license.

It's more for hobbyists and hacker types. If you want a nice mobile client for Matrix, try out FluffyChat. It supports room emojis!

It's a shame -- I'm hopeful that the situation will be better in the next year or so, but if these issues aren't corrected I can't see how they won't forever be in the shadow of mainstream apps like Slack, who have much stronger sensibilities around UX and accessibility (dark patterns and lack of E2EE notwithstanding).

[1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/issues/3762

In the meantime, Matrix makes it possible (not trivial, in my experience) to bridge to other chat services. Bridging requires a fair bit of technical know-how.

Meanwhile, we're about to finish the main milestones of making Gitter natively speak Matrix (planning to announce on Thursday), and on the FOSS side in general, Mozilla has successfully moved over entirely to Matrix for community facing work (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/03/03/moznet-irc-is-dead-long-l...), and a few other similar sized open source projects are in the process of finalising doing the same manoeuvre; watch which this space for updates. https://element.debian.social/ looks to be a thing, for instance :)

In terms of naming, it's really not hard: Matrix is the protocol; the core team set up a company called New Vector who made a flagship Matrix client called Riot, but we then renamed both the company and the app to be Element in order to simplify things. Hopefully most people have forgotten the renaming and moved on by now.

In terms of what's next for Matrix:

* Loads of effort making Element more mainstream-friendly; going through improving the UX and making it consistent cross-platform and predictable for new users. The approach we're taking is to film new users using the service, and literally tight-loop fixing the thinkos that they trip over until they stop tripping over. It sounds obvious, and we should have done it years ago, but it's starting to make a big difference. The first wave of changes ship in the next 2 weeks.

* Social login - implementing OIDC Connect to simplify onboarding if you're willing to hand over your identity to an existing identity provider (Github/Gitlab/Apple/Twitter/Google/FB)

* We're in the middle of implementing Spaces - super fun feature to define arbitrary hierarchies of rooms; a bit like discord servers, or slack workspaces, or possibly a usenet hierarchy or IMAP folder tree depending on how you squint. We're hoping to get the first cut out by the end of the year, which is super fun.

* We're also working hard on freeform threading (you too could implement HN/Reddit/Email/NNTP/Twitter on Matrix if you want!). https://github.com/matrix-org/cerulean has some details for the intrepid.

* Peer-to-Peer Matrix is going great guns; we've just finished the first cut of a new P2P overlay network called Pinecone (based on Yggdrasil, but using source routing).

* We've almost finished a wave of work to make 1:1 VoIP not suck; fixes are already shipping in Element on all platforms, but we're almost at the point where VoIP is robust and reliable rather than a quick proof-of-concept which we'd not had a chance to ever really polish.

* Finally, lots of work queued up to make end-to-end encryption more usable. Particularly, chasing bugs where encryption fails (we just fixed a major one in iOS for instance, which shipped a few days ago, thanks to the Push service extension sometimes racing with the main Element process desyncing). We're also looking at simplifying the E2EE key recovery process and just switching to using the same password to both login and decrypt your messages, rather than separate login password & security passphrases as we have today.

I could go on, but TL;DR: I think "the only one with an open protocol seems to be Matrix, but it hasn't proven to be to their advantage, apparently." is bogus. We'd just be another random open source chat webapp if it wasn't for Matrix; instead it's a global open network with 25+ million users and about 60,000 servers. So not yet as big as Email or the Web, but bigger than (say) bitcoin, and continuing to grow exponentially.

Is it? I regret every time I have to search for some information in past chats. Even M$ Outlook is better.

I have to chat with like ~10 vendors on a weekly basis for short-burst communication and end up having a bunch of weird shared slack-room things. Salesforce could clean that up and it'd be a great b2b messaging system.

Now instead they can get more efficient at wasting time by using both slack and crm at the same time!

I've been on the receiving end of boring acquisitions, and I can assure you that the financial upside can excite people quite effectively.

It's statistically likely to happen.

It's interesting to read through lists like this and see what happened:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electr...

Very unreliable at times eg latency, missed out of video calling, did not take advantage of WFH boom at all, document search was bad.

Why does every business have to be a $100G business? Can we support a model in which we have a lot of $100M businesses that are doing great things and delivering quality instead of quantity?

Investors seem to not like that idea, but customers would love that idea. It's unfortunate that our markets are not optimized for customers.

...now?

1. $2679 in cash (100 * 26.79)

and

2. 7.76 shares of CRM (100 * .0776)

The current value of WORK doesn't matter, it's the closing price on 11/30. The stock price will effectively be pinned at that now since nobody will want to trade at another price.

This transaction shouldn't be the catalyst for regulatory action; regulators should have already taken action.

As it turns out, UX matters and Slack delivers far better UX than IRC since one single entity can control the entirety of the communication pipeline (from protocol to how messages are displayed).

You can have IRC-style chatbots that parse messages and do things but Slack "integrations" are a lot more powerful and "magic" if your mental model of Slack is just fancy shmancy IRC.

Slack bundles basically all the features you'd have to implement out of band with IRC like chat history, search, user statuses, notifications for mentions, formatted content, media content like gifs and videos, reminders, attachments, pastebins.

Then there are things that you can't really do with the IRC protocol like reactions, threads, editing messages, messages with dynamically updating content (our Github bot for example changes the color of PR messages as the status changes), and embedded content like Polls that only take up one message and don't spam the chat with votes, shared history across devices.

The later will work the same for half a percent of the users, but the 99.5% left would be crying tears of blood. I remember Mozilla employees’ blogs about the contraptions they had at individual levels to make IRC fully work for them, and you just can’t ask that to the HR recruiting intern.

1. You can't send IRC messages to people who are offline (yes you can work around this with bouncers etc. but that's beside the point). You can send Slack messages to people who are offline.

2. Slack is a proprietary, centralized system. Slack, the company, decides who is allowed to participate, and at what cost. IRC is a federated protocol, where different servers can be part of the same network, or part of a different network. You can set up a server or client by yourself if you want.

The one feature I wish they'd clone from Slack are threaded replies. I know they're rolling out a new way to reply, but it still makes the chat flow messy. I really enjoyed the way Slack allows for breakout threads/replies to a particular message. It was a great way to display enough context, but not make the flow confusing.

Our smallish company has used Discord all year long for our company communication and I could hardly be happier. They have an excellent bot API, a super clean yet playful interface, instant search and just don't feel/smell as "enterprisey" as Slack already felt (and that was well before now being acquired by Salesforce).

If Discord can maintain all those things and add a bit more Microsoft integration, they have a huge opportunity here.

(Either that or Microsoft can preempt the whole thing and acquire Discord).

Discord's entire business model seemed to be geared toward toppling Steam by perfecting community features and then expanding into digital sales. Right when they launched their game store, Epic Games started one too and was throwing around Fortnite money to lock in exclusives. Discord quickly retreated and has seemed rudderless for the past year.

They already started shifting away from their gamer branding. Earlier this year they generalized to online communities. And they have a formidable architecture. Some game servers have 6 digit user counts. Their permission model is also way more robust than Slack's, and that's not an easy gap to close given how tightly woven into the architecture a permission model needs to be.

In comparison to Slack, this all could have been had for pennies on the dollar. They must really want the brand, or the customer base, or to already have the enterprise feature gap closed.

maybe they'll spin off a business oriented division with a different name,

It will be interesting how this impacts Mattermost [1] though - an open source developer collaboration tool for Enterprises, a closer competitor to Slack.

[1] http://mattermost.com/

That's only about 3x growth in almost 5 years. Don't get me wrong, this is a massive acquisition, but I still say "only" given the hypergrowth experienced by many adjacent tech companies.

So I think Microsoft may be quite happy they decided not to acquire Slack at such a high tag price nearly 5 years ago.

No, really.

That's an unreal price. Slack benefits little from network effects. Deployment has no fundamental secret sauce.

This is a crazy number. This does not make sense.

It really says something about a company that people see their name getting close as a sign they should stop using a product.

I'm just complaining, but... Why do people write things like this? I see it in my own employer and our marketing material, too. It's confusing bullshit that is devoid of any meaning.

I am also surprised, as I'd think the COVID pandemic would have boosted its use. Though, after thinking about it I've seen MS Teams everywhere outside of Open Source and startups. A post-mortem of why they sold, and the events leading to it, would be an awesome thing for one of the founders to do.

"We'll still be Slack. I'll still be the CEO."

Source: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/1333901107978936320

The clash of meaning in those two words says it all.

The place where this does seem to be evolving is in customer support. When you chat with a representative, they have a lot of context. Your account, order, possible issue, etc.

It doesn’t even have a pricing section.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270708

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/jun/20/digitalmedia.y...

https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-announces-fourth-quarter-a...