
Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public - tempsy
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/slack-work-earnings-q2-2020.html
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liquidise
> Earnings: Loss of 14 cents per share, excluding certain items, vs. 18 cents
> per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.

> Revenue: $145 million, vs. $140.7 million as expected by analysts, according
> to Refinitiv.

So they beat estimates in both cases and the stock fell? Am i misreading this?

~~~
sheikhoo
They issued a weak guidance for next quarter. Expected loss is $0.07, their
guidance is $0.08-$0.09.

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robomartin
Can someone please enlighten me?

I am having trouble understanding the myriad communications/chat apps out
there that don't seem to do much more than what we older folk used to do on
USENET.

Then there's all the clones of more modern platforms. Things like Whatsup.

It just seems to me there are, as a friend of mine used to say, "too many
useless duplicates". Meaning, most of it is a huge waste of time.

So, what am I missing about Slack specifically? What unique differentiation
makes this worthy of anyone investing their nest egg on their stock?

I honestly want to know. BTW, I have used Slack. I think it's horrible. I
don't see much improvement over, say, a phpBB site (which can be deployed
privately inside of a network or on the internet).

~~~
okabat
Slack is great at managing "read/unread" state across my 4 devices even in
messy mobile networking situations. Good threading tools allow conversations
to remain sandboxed and not gum up entire channels. Do these improvements
justify the valuation? Maybe not, especially given how many other comms apps
have a similar feature set. But for the vast majority of realtime modern
workplace communication use-cases, IRC or a bulletin board will not cut it

~~~
writehappycode
I’ve missed important messages at critical times due to their mobile app not
providing me notification as configured (ios). Syncing across devices is
handled nicely though.

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hackernewsrocks
I just don’t understand investing in chat app companies. Throughout my life
the popular chat app has totally changed every few years: ytalk, aim, icq, msn
messenger, yahoo messenger, gtalk, bbm, skype, fb messenger, sms, group me,
iMessage, whats app, slack, discord

What is the chance that people will still be using slack in a few years. Esp
considering mattermost is free and discord people argue is better today.

It’s great they tried to build a biz on office chat, but it seems overpriced
considering it’s just another chat app

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someonehere
As someone who tracks system outages of Saas for my company, Slack has been
really bad the last few months.

I’m consistently seeing problems on the back end that manifest to users of the
service.

Critical functions like direct messages, search, mentions, app integration,
app approvals are always popping up in their system status feed.

The only reason Slack caught on was businesses prior to that had AIM, Skype,
or Hangouts at their disposal. AIM was agnostic across devices but depended on
the user to set it up. Skype was either the personal version or the business
version but you then were locked into using that to communicate. Hangouts
requires Google services, which not a lot of businesses had.

Slack came out of nowhere and offered a myriad of services. It integrated with
a lot and made it like AIM from 2008 when I used it at a company I worked for.

Slack seems to have something going on internally on the dev side because the
consistent errors I see daily indicate they’re fixing something. Either
addressing long term problems or just day to day fires.

I’ve considered Mattermost self hosted for my org. Works just like Slack but I
can manage updates and I own all the data we put into it.

Interested to hear what others are using.

~~~
empath75
> The only reason Slack caught on was businesses prior to that had AIM, Skype,
> or Hangouts at their disposal.

At least in the case of AIM, that’s not true, as aol switched to using slack
from aim internally quite a bit before aim was decommissioned. Aim was
absolute garbage for work communication and pretty much every team started
using slack organically before the company bought an enterprise license.

Adding chat history and search was game changing.

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writehappycode
Desktop only applications that allow you to chat in rooms/channels/teams but
just as, if not more buggier/slower/featureless than irc/aol on a computer and
modem i had over 10 years ago. Can someone explain to me why anyone would use
this outside of work or was it simply not designed for personal use?

~~~
empath75
It’s a mobile app.

~~~
writehappycode
On mobile it’s essentially a chat application that you’re forced to use for
work, most likely on your personal cell phone. I’m willing to be convinced of
the enormous valuation.

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crb002
Haven't used slack for a while. Too spammy.

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dmitrygr
One cannot continuously make millions cloning IRC? Whodathunkit?

~~~
dang
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done that a
lot, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly. I don't want to ban you, so if
you'd please review
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and use HN more as intended from now on, we'd be grateful.

