
Slack Says Board Member Made Unauthorized Comments to CNBC - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-08/slack-says-board-member-made-unauthorized-comments-to-cnbc
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rsweeney21
When i joined Netflix in 2011 I asked my manager what they used for chat. "Oh
we use Yahoo Instant Messenger. There is a Confluence page where everyone has
listed their user name so you can add other team members."

Wat? I had just come from Microsoft where we had been using Lync for years. I
could instantly IM anyone at the company. The Netflix way seemed like madness.

So I immediately started working on a easy to use business chat application.
Just kidding. I shrugged it off and installed Yahoo Instant Messenger, added
my user name to the confluence page and went back to work.

Dang it.

~~~
jkarneges
Around 2007-2010 I worked on the business IM product at Barracuda. We offered
an IM server and client software for Windows, Mac, and Linux. We were known
for selling security products and had an "in" with the kinds of companies that
ought to care about securing their IM usage. Unfortunately, our IM product
wasn't very popular and eventually it was canceled. Barracuda had some 15
products at the time, and it made more sense to focus on the popular ones.

Today, Slack is worth more than all of Barracuda.

~~~
Eridrus
Slack is a really interesting company IMO. They were very late to the space -
I was using Flowdock when they became a thing, and felt like Slack's lack of
threads was a deal breaker. But Slack raised a boat load more money than their
competitors, offered a free product and spent a huge amount of money on
marketing and now they are the top dog.

They're still losing money, and both Microsoft and Google have competitors
rolled into their productivity suites, but I think they've largely crushed the
smaller competition.

I'm still not very bullish on Slack since I don't see how they build a
defensible moat against competitors for what is a fairly simple product,
particularly when Google/Microsoft have basically free versions for their
enterprise customers, but all I know is that I have no idea how to evaluate
anything even remotely like a consumer company!

~~~
tonyarkles
Unfortunately for me, Slack’s moat seems to be its network effects. We have
tech community groups setting up Slack instances, and other alternatives are
rejected because “everyone already has Slack at work and it’s easy to add
another one”. Between my handful of clients and the communities I participate
in, I am currently signed into 9 Slack instances. It’d be fine (I’m also on
about 9 IRC channels), but the RAM... and the slowness of switching around
between them. X-Chat is my baseline, and it makes Slack feel really bloated
and clunky.

~~~
Eridrus
But I feel like this doesn't make them any money.

If Slack started charging money, people would jump to something else pretty
quick.

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tonyarkles
If Slack started charging money for community groups, then sure, some of them
would definitely jump ship. But... looking at my Slack here, I've got 4
clients and 6 community groups that I'm connected to. If a new client asks me
what I'd prefer for a group chat, I'm probably going to say Slack. Not because
I love it, but because I've already been sucked into the ecosystem.

The free tier is definitely a marketing tool. Get people into the ecosystem
and make it easier for someone to choose Slack rather than something else.

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jgalt212
don't get between Chamath Palihapitiya and a microphone.

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akavi
I'm a little confused. As far as I can tell, the time between publicizing the
S-1 to IPO _seems_ to be 28 or 29 days for 99% of companies. This was true for
Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, and PagerDuty, plus the 3 companies I spot checked on
Nasdaq's IPO page just now.

So, given that, isn't it an all but forgone conclusion that Slack's IPO will
be on May 24th? Why's this a big deal then?

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blihp
The issue isn't about giving away any big secret, it's about violating the
'quiet period' rules. It's a 'if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile'
situation regarding what some insiders will try to sneak in to
interviews/statements if they can get away with it. So the potential
punishment of having their IPO date pushed back (or worse), even for something
seemingly as trivial as saying 'soon', generally keeps people in line.

