If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely profitable for Slack.
This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.
I disagree with them giving such a short notice period, of course. However I’m not surprised to see them choosing to trim the free or highly discounted accounts at this stage.
There's a reason Apple still gives pretty solid educational discounts even as the largest consumer hardware manufacturer.
They try to pack more and more features and realize that when their customers start using these, it costs them money.
Them keeping the _chat logs_ history hidden has nothing to do with bandwidth costs. They store the data, they already pay for that, and it's not that large to begin with. The reason they do this is to hold you hostage so you have to pay them a ton of cash. It's extortion. You can defend it all you want, but they're all pretexts, not the real reason.
The value for me is in the search, recall, history.
If it was just a chat app I'd much sooner use matrix or IRC.
Search, recall, history... of what more exactly? Of... could it be.. _chat_ logs?
I don't think there's anything stopping someone implementing a powerful search like that over IRC logs, or matrix logs or whatever. Just that slack were the ones who did it, and marketed it well so it took off.
Saying that, if I was launching a project or startup I probably would not choose to use slack.
It's hard to imagine being GPT-4o.
Now you can argue choosing a Salesforce product is not a good idea and that I agree with.