Slack wanted to stay independent, but was unable to compete with tech giants

https://www.fastcompany.com/90584382/slack-salesforce-antitrust

by curiousigor • 6 years ago

270 255 6 years ago

treis3• 6 years ago

I think this is overblown. Slack was perfectly capable of remaining a stand alone company. They just wouldn't have been worth ~30 billion.

fennecfoxen3• 6 years ago

Slack has some pretty weird blind spots as a business, too, like that one where all your hundreds or tens-of-thousands of employees must be part of the same general chat channel, where anyone can ping the entire company.

iscrewyou• 6 years ago

Nobody has engineered a checkbox to disable that yet?

RKearney• 6 years ago

where anyone can ping the entire company.

It takes 5 seconds to change the permissions on that channel to restrict posting to admins only. We figured that out a few hours after rolling Slack out to a small subset of users to test.

Apocryphon• 6 years ago

Is it so weird? Surely #general must be a holdover from IRC or some other pre-Slack messenger.

spurdoman77• 6 years ago

Yeah, it is actually weird how these stories are getting written. By any sensible standard slack was insane success. Most founders dream about reaching market value of 1bln. Of course it would be cool to be worth 30bln and have control as well, but tbh many founders are insanely happy if they can get exit even for 30mln.

exogeny• 6 years ago

You’re missing the point. The outcomes and upside are irrelevant, what is relevant is that Microsoft’s only strategy to attack was to give it away for free and bundle it, creating a profoundly unfair (and illegal) advantage that continues the trend of consolidating power and reducing choice.

formercoder• 6 years ago

Predatory pricing is a component of anti trust but a very difficult one to prove legally. One must prove that by giving consumers a cheaper product they are being harmed. It's an interesting conundrum.

treis3• 6 years ago

Bundling is a legitimate market strategy and not inherently anti-competitive. So long as the overall package is not sold at a loss I don't think there's an issue.

There's room for independent apps in the face of a bundled solution. By focusing on one thing you can do it better and cheaper than the packaged solution. And indeed Slack, at least to many, was worth the extra money.

philg_jr• 6 years ago

Free? Office365 isn't exactly free. Its arguably the new/better (subjective, I guess, both kinda suck) version of Skype for Business.

Slack is actually free to use (last I checked), if you don't care about the chat history.

satyrnein3• 6 years ago

Whenever I build the next feature on my roadmap, have I now bundled and given away for free something that could have been a standalone company? Is there a bright line where it flips from incremental feature additions to anticompetitive behavior?

jasode• 6 years ago

Slack was perfectly capable of remaining a stand alone company.

It's possible that Slack's company insiders (founders, C-executives, investment bank advisors, etc) ... all concluded that continuing to compete as an independent company had a more risky outcome:

https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+not+profitable

In other words, let's give the benefit of the doubt and assume all those folks above are above-average intelligent and can use Excel spreadsheets to model user growth, revenue growth, expenses, new products in the pipeline, "what-if" scenarios, etc.

Also found a recent related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422092

EDIT REPLY to >"It seems like you stopped reading before my last sentence."

Yes, I read that but a healthy business needs to be an ongoing concern and _profitability_ is part of financial health. E.g. Blockbuster Video went from having a market cap worth billions to being worth nothing because of competition from Netflix. Blockbuster went from being profitable to losing money. In one way, Slack is even worse than Blockbuster as it has yet to turn a profit.

Setting your snark aside, what justifies your confidence about Slack's possible independent future more than the company's insiders who have all the internal metrics and private financial data to analyze?

treis3• 6 years ago

It seems like you stopped reading before my last sentence.

count• 6 years ago

https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-think-netflix-kill...

Heh, ironically, Blockbuster was almost never profitable either :)

javierluraschi4• 6 years ago

I completely agree, there is no way Slack becomes irrelevant due to Microsoft. Ironically, getting acquired might.

hpoe2• 6 years ago

So theres an interesting concept in the bible that I have thought about more and more that seems like it would help the problem of concentration of power and large firms.

In the Old Testament God commanded the israelites that every 7th 7th year (or every 49 years basically) was to be a year of jubilee. Included among the instructions for the year of jubilee was the requirement that all debts be forgiven and all land revert to it's ancestral owners. Basically the financial system gets reset every 49 years.

It seems to me that there are great things that can be done when a business has the right resources but at a certain point business stop competing and start regulating or burying their competition out of existance. Now of course we can't due it exactly how the bible outlines things but I've been increasingly interested in the idea of a regular societal reset on a half a century or so basis. This creates enough time for large firms to grow innovation to happen and wealth creation to happen. Whilst at the same time it prevents eternal dominance by a handful or large players .

What would y'all think of a societal reset?

lostcolony2• 6 years ago

So there are some noted problems with doing so. Namely, reset starting -when-? At a time of large scale inequality? I.e., millionaire owners of much of NY get locked in as owners for all future generations, and are unable to sell the land, only lease it? Does that lack of salability reduce their economic power sufficiently?

Likewise individuals; for anyone who doesn't own land at the start of the system, is there a path to land ownership?

hpoe2• 6 years ago

Well to be clear I'm not saying we should just take what is directly in the bible and lift and shift it, there would obviously be substantial differences between the implementation now and then. As for the when I would say a regular calander cycle, every 50 years or so. Again this is more of the kernel of an idea than a fleshed out plan.

mikem1707• 6 years ago

It can reset on a schedule. Everybody knows it's coming. It ensures that debt's don't grow so much that they warp other aspects of the economy. I believe it was done in the past to avoid the large scale virtual enslavement of the poor via debt. It was meant to be a relief valve of sorts.

giglamesh2• 6 years ago

https://www.weforum.org/great-reset - not based on jubilee, but rather seeing covid-19 as an opportunity to fix some of the problems which the pandemic is bringing to (more) light.

munificent• 6 years ago

I don't know about a complete societal reset, but I sure would be interested in a corporate reset.

Forest fires are good for forests over the long term. They remove large old trees that are full of rot, dead wood, and parasites. Those old giants aren't using the sun's light and other resources efficiently, but they block too much light for smaller trees in the understory to grow tall enough to compete. A forest fire clears those out, returns the nutrients in them to the soil, and provides a level playing field for smaller trees to grow and compete.

I wouldn't go full Fight Club Project Mayhem, but I'd love something like a cleansing fire that periodically breaks up or disbands all corporations above a certain size.

edmundsauto• 6 years ago

What makes you think the forest fire metaphor is applicable? Seems like a "firebombing Dresden" metaphor could just as easily apply.

mxuribe2• 6 years ago

...corporate reset...

You read my mind: this is exactly what is needed! I could not think of the right phrasing (because i, too, agree that a societal reset might not be the right thing here)...and the forest fire cleansing is an apt metaphor here. So thanks for sharing this thought!

mikem1707• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what you're thinking of when you say a "societal reset". I've heard of this as debt forgiveness. No other property is interfered with. I believe it acts as a limit on how carried away, or long term entrenched, a society can get with debt.

matmatmatmat• 6 years ago

Except this is not what happens at all. Older, larger trees tend to have thicker bark, which lets them survive the fires, while clearing out the understory and ground level.

Forest fires reset competition at the ground level while mostly maintaining the status quo for large, established trees.

novia3• 6 years ago

After thinking about this idea for a while, it occurred to me: couldn't the same thing be accomplished by banning inheritance? Debts are already forgiven upon death. The average human life isn't that much longer than 50 years, and the resets would be happening continuously.

Invictus0• 6 years ago

Yes, estate taxes are progressive taxes. See Bernie Sanders' proposal:

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/a-pr....

agarden• 6 years ago

This is an entirely different idea. Banning inheritance makes corporations even more powerful, as they can increase their wealth from one generation to another and families cannot.

briefcomment3• 6 years ago

What about just limiting inheritance to, say, 500k per child?

csomar• 6 years ago

Debts are already forgiven upon death.

Not quite. You should have life insurance and something the bank can seize to be able to get financing. So even if you die the bank can recover some of the principal. You can also file Chapter 11; that's actually a reset.

heavyset_go2• 6 years ago

Debts are already forgiven upon death

The dead person's estate is responsible for paying back creditors, even if that means liquidating the estate to do so.

hnracer6• 6 years ago

I wonder if this would massively increase conspicuous and frivolous consumption. Some may go the direction of Bill Gates, but others may not be so benevolent. At least when wealth is conserved in the family unit it's mostly passively invested in the economy as capital supply.

brundolf• 6 years ago

I feel like the US has a similar (if incidental) cycle around antitrust. When the market is humming along regulators turn a blind eye, the public doesn't really care, etc. Over time the big companies get bigger and bigger, eating more and more smaller companies, until a breaking point is reached and suddenly everyone cares again and we have major action taken. Then the cycle starts again.

nostromo• 6 years ago

Is it necessary though? The biggest American companies 50 years ago:

1. IBM

2. AT&T

3. Kodak

4. GM

5. Standard Oil of NJ

6. Texaco

7. Sears

8. GE

9. Polariod

10. Gulf Oil

Not a single one of these companies is in the top 10 today. (Edit: correction, one is: Exxon.) Many of the current top 10 didn't exist at all 50 years ago. Thankfully our economy seems to be dynamic enough that companies must continue to compete or lose marketshare organically.

triceratops• 6 years ago

I don't know what these are "biggest" by (revenue? market cap?). If it's revenue, AT&T and Standard Oil of NJ (now ExxonMobil) are still in the top 10. Gulf Oil and Texaco (both now Chevron) are both in the top 15.[1] So 40% of that group is still around and quite successful.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...

mikem1707• 6 years ago

The idea of a debt jubilee does not wipe out corporations, it wipes out current outstanding debts only. The idea would be that nobody would loan corporations so much money that they wouldn't be able to pay it back before the debt is wiped out.

Something like that could counter a lot of financial games that are played to the detriment of so many, which is why some societies had things like dept jubilees.

Xavdidtheshadow• 6 years ago

I'd wager there were bigger societal changes between now and 50 years ago then there were in the 50-100 range. Do you have a list of top 1920 companies and if so, how does it compare to the above list (presumably 1970)?

sjy2• 6 years ago

50 years ago the two top companies in that list had just started defending expensive and long-running antitrust cases. IBM changed its behaviour to settle these cases, transforming the computer industry, and in AT&T’s case the litigation led directly to the breakup of the company. These companies didn’t lose market share “organically.”

paxys4• 6 years ago

Almost every company on that list was the target of comprehensive antitrust action by the government, so you're proving the opposite.

AnimalMuppet• 6 years ago

I kind of like the idea, in principle. But in practice...

Let's say you wipe out debts. And let's say that my pension was invested in those debts. That's going to be a bit problematic.

Let's say you reset companies. Including, say, Intel and AMD. The CPU monopoly is wiped out. Oh, yeah, and Microsoft. But next month I want to buy a computer. Can anybody make me an x86 chip? Can I get Windows, assuming that I want it? Or do I have to run Linux on a public-domain chip?

It's not going to be easy to maintain continuity of supply while shaking up firms that dominate important markets.

mikem1707• 6 years ago

There are other and more recent precedents for this - all debt periodically being forgiven. Graeber mentions this in is book "Debt: The First 5000 Years". Everybody knows it is coming, so the market works around it. I imagine it acts as a check on inflation via too many financial games.

iso1631• 6 years ago

all land revert to it's ancestral owners

Because those who's great great great great great grandfather did well out of knowing Henry 8th don't already get enough headstart in life?

Land shouldn't be owned by the people, with rent paid yearly to the people based on its unimproved value.

onlyrealcuzzo• 6 years ago

So you're born 15 years into the reset.

When you're 18, you're about halfway through. If you work hard for 10 years to accumulate wealth, add value, whatever, by the time you're ~40, it's about to all get taken away. What's the point?

kansface3• 6 years ago

I wonder what that did to financial transactions in the 48th year?

jelliclesfarm• 6 years ago

How about banning debt? People live according to their means?

No debt. Just gifts or charity.

satyrnein3• 6 years ago

No mortgages, just pay rent to the landowning class forever?

JanisL4• 6 years ago

Currently we have a debt based monetary system, so banning debt means we would need an entirely different monetary system. This might be worth doing but there's a lot of challenges, specifically debt in some small amounts allows flexibility and options that don't exist otherwise. Some other mechanism to fund future work would need to be created to fill that gap.

erentz• 6 years ago

This would make huge waves of distortions around these events. Who is going to be able to get a 30 year mortgage to buy a house if the debt reset is in 15 years? Now only people who can afford 15 year mortgages. As you get closer it gets worse. Then it all resets after.

I think the problems you’re trying to address with this need to be addressed in a more fundamental and continuous way.

greedo2• 6 years ago

You would buy fractional ownership in a house.

greedo2• 6 years ago

This would cause even more short term thinking than we currently have. We need more companies that take on long term goals and projects.

labster• 6 years ago

Sure, the societal reset would start with promises of local manufacturing jobs but pretty soon they’d be getting guillotines imported from Shenzhen.

Ideas of large social changes always sound good in the abstract, but once you propose a real plan the devil is always in the details. In the US, we can’t even agree to let the government forgive student loan debt it already owns — but somehow completely reworking corporate debt and property will work/help/ever possibly happen?

thrower1232• 6 years ago

You want a societal reset? WW2 was a societal reset. The Bolshevik Revolution was a societal reset. Napoleon was a societal reset. The 30 Years War was a societal reset.

I hope I never see a societal reset.

oblio• 6 years ago

Agreed . Yet we all benefit from these past resets.

strictfp• 6 years ago

It would be great. We need a way of preventing "death by a thousand cuts" by bloated organizations and processes. I also think it would be good to upturn most processes since people learn how to exploit systems quite quickly.

But maybe it would be better to reset in a cascading fashion, rather than all at once.

apsurd• 6 years ago

Late to the party but wanted to make sure to contribute this excellent talk by the late David Graeber about the history of debt. It includes the concept of Jubilee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs

jonas21• 6 years ago

I suppose it's all a matter of perspective. As a bootstrapped company, we often worry that someone with lots of venture funding (like Slack) will enter our space with a free product, making it difficult for those of us who actually have to turn a profit to compete.

judge2020• 6 years ago

No doubt this happened with both Google Chat and Microsoft Teams - Google and Microsoft continue to gain marketshare from companies that previously were running their own email/file servers, so any attempt to get them to move to slack is going to be an uphill battle.

jiveturkey• 6 years ago

if you often worry about that, you should consider that you are a feature, not a company. build your erm product appropriately. ie be more attractive to acquire than compete against.

Finnucane• 6 years ago

"Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative products will prevail over less effective ones released by entrenched firms like Microsoft."

Wait, what? When did that start happening?

giglamesh2• 6 years ago

Trading on the assumption does not require the assumption to be actually true.

floydnoel• 6 years ago

Who even makes that assumption. Not economists afaik

loehnsberg• 6 years ago

Me and my team use both, Slack and Teams, but only because Slack‘s video call feature is really poor compared to its competitor(s). I never really quite got why Slack dev was not able to at least close the gap to Teams in this area. The video call feature is still buggy and lacks important features, such as inviting externals (by calendar invite) or sharing screen AND video, not to mention a whiteboard. If Slack had been a bit more ambitious in this respect, Teams would never have been an option.

borroka• 6 years ago

Don't forget the thousands/(millions) of companies who have enterprise contract for Office 365 and for which Teams comes for "free". Like the company I work for of hundreds of thousands of employees.

acomjean2• 6 years ago

This is a good point. Office 365 seems to have a lot of free applications we don’t use (we tried teams 3 years ago...). They have a trello like thing and a file sharing like thing and a whole host of other stuff bundled in.

staplers• 6 years ago

It's really beyond me how bad Slack's video feature is. If it worked well, most companies could leave behind Zoom.

mustacheemperor• 6 years ago

I can vouch that delivering quality, scaled, enterprise video conferencing is a much bigger technical challenge than it seems after, say, a weekend or two hacking with WebRTC in a hobby capacity. It combines the challenge of supporting a huge landscape of differing hardware devices with that of supporting a huge landscape of differing network environments. There's a near-infinite combination of corner cases that can cause problems and handling them poorly creates the impression of severe instability for the users who experience them. The nature of video conferencing/collaboration software means if 1 user's environment makes the experience unusable, the value for everyone who needs to collaborate with them is also seriously hampered.

That said, when we started dogfooding our own conferencing product it was partly because Slack consistently had issues dropping calls after 5-10m of group video. I'm kind of surprised to read such similar complaints 18 months+ on. Presumably it's harder to solve those problems at mass market global scales, we're pretty vertical specific.

hajimemash• 6 years ago

Yes it must be very hard for one dude, but if anyone's in a position to make even just a decent version, it should be a billion dollar company who's core product is already pretty stable..

antoniuschan993• 6 years ago

I felt that Slacks innovation never went beyond stage 1-2. The app was thrusted onto stage by upending chat and the momentum was sustained against teams by its 3rd part integrations implementation.

Innovations that could have carried the company further could be digital whiteboarding, google docs like editing, dropbox style storage, squiggle like remote teams collaboration.

Also the atlassian merger via hip-chat sunset could have resulted a stronger integration between the two organizations.

Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned

NickM• 6 years ago

Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned

I'm still mad about this. It was such a great piece of software, and then Slack bought it and literally killed it without offering anything to replace the lost functionality.

pmart123• 6 years ago

Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack.

noneeeed• 6 years ago

This is one of the small number of takeovers (along with Sparrow and Dark Sky) that actually make me angry, because they deprived everyone of something really great, for little apparent benefit.

The fact that so many people use Slack, but then do all their voice, video and screensharing in Zoom or some other tool says a lot about Slack as a tool and company.

My wife uses Teams for work. It's rubbish in many ways, but when she's using it they do everything in it. Somehow slack has failed at this despite having many of the same features built in.

nateabele• 6 years ago

Then maybe knowing that Screenhero's founders went on to create Screen[0] will assuage some of the anger.

Also, maybe it doesn't make it better, but it sounds like Slack didn't intend[1] to do this.

[0] https://screen.so/

[1] https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-Work-57df16351a884bc...

somehnguy• 6 years ago

I completely agree. I've been using Slack for a couple years with a couple of niche groups. Besides the occasional small UI changes it has felt dead for a long time. I suppose to make it not feel like that I could get more involved with adding integrations & whatnot. But on the surface it just feels like a dead chat product without any major improvements in a very long time.

mrkurt2• 6 years ago

I think they did innovate, just not in ways that we-who-post-on Hacker News benefit from.

1. Shared channels are amazing

2. The "Enterprise Grid" was the first viable enterprise chat product. Slack made chat ubiquitous at places like IBM.

It's easy to blow off #2, but I think it's big. It was big enough to threaten MS Office.

realityking• 6 years ago

I don’t have experience with Enterprise Grid but shared channels are absolutely amazing. We have shared channels with vendors, partners and customers and across all functions I haven’t heard a bad word about them (except that only IT can set them up but that might be a permission thing on our side)

thrower1232• 6 years ago

Made chat ubiquitous at IBM?

Maybe I'm a greybeard, but IBM made their own chat product that was ubique-itous* enough that Sametime became a verb there...

* Ubique is the company Lotus bought before IBM bought Lotus, before IBM sold the scraps to HCL.

an_opabinia• 6 years ago

That's because the thing that killed Slack wasn't Microsoft - it wasn't a bunch of horseshit executives say just before their retirement into angel investing - but Discord.

Wowfunhappy• 6 years ago

Interesting! Do you know of any workplaces using Discord?

lock-free3• 6 years ago

Discord isn't enterprise software and I feel really bad for anyone who wants to use it as such. Microsoft Teams is without a doubt the only thing threatening Slack, Discord is an entirely different beast.

paxys4• 6 years ago

On the contrary, I'm happy that Slack chose to do one thing extremely well rather than stretch itself thin releasing half-baked an unnecessary products. There are plenty of good services for docs, storage, whiteboarding etc., and I don't need any of them shoved in my Slack client.

pas• 6 years ago

But they are not doing it "extremely" well. It's shoddy, spotty, resource-hog. It's (is/was) innovative, but it's no longer an amazing added value over running your own (RocketChet) or picking a cheaper option.

antoniuschan993• 6 years ago

I agree with you, maybe Salesforce will let it continue focusing on its niche. It’s working for Heroku.

amw-zero• 6 years ago

Why would a chat app do any things? Why does an application need to continuously grow to be useful?

antoniuschan993• 6 years ago

Because it’s a public company now. Shareholders demand growth or they’ll just invest in other high growth companies.

Bootstrapped products/companies like Campfire by 37Signals didn’t need to grow, but they also stopped innovating and the chat frature became just a feature inside basecamp.

I think it’s really how companies are structured.

The way Slack was positioned, it also had to grow or it will get taken over by a competitor like teams, or risk getting bought out which is what happened. Maybe the stakes are different when you’re #1 vs #10 in tech!

llaolleh2• 6 years ago

I completely agree with you on this. Companies have to innovate or they die. To me Slack had plenty of chances to go beyond their initial product. Imagine if they incorporated Screen Hero into Slack and poured resources to reduce latency and better real time collaboration as if you were a feet away from your coworker. Would Microsoft be able to replicate all of that from scratch?

You also have to consider that if you're a startup you can be a lot more agile because you deal with a lot less bullshit. Microsoft probably has tons of red tape and they are also spread thin. Their design space is also restricted in that they have to follow existing patterns. Slack should have been able to roam the earth however they wished. But they didn't. Slack had the lead and momentum but they blew it.

I don't see Teams as necessarily a bad thing as the article implies. Every product we have is a derivative of something else. It fosters innovation.

benhurmarcel• 6 years ago

I find it funny that HN can criticize Slack for sticking to their main product without adding new collaboration features, while criticizing Dropbox for doing exactly the opposite.

foolmeonce• 6 years ago

I'm not very familiar with Dropbox, but I would not be surprised if both were in fact wrong.

In the closest strategy to what slack did, one would define a main product and then optimize away any prototype bloat. As far as I observed, Slack's clients stayed pretty awful and they were trying to do Dropbox's strategy without success.

babesh2• 6 years ago

I think most of the value of Slack was cultural rather than technological. It was in getting people to discover/communicate via these abstractions of channels rather than point to point. This provides a lot of value in a company when you don’t know the specific person to talk to or want to talk to a group rather than one person.

EDIT: It also allows bystanders to learn from or keep abreast of the conversation.

However, this cultural practice can be easily transferred to another tool.

As an external observer, Slack seemed to have various issues that prevented it from innovating further.

One was lack of vision of how to innovate further. I think this often happens when someone stumbles onto an idea. They don’t have deep reasoning or conviction of where to go further.

Another issue is that they seemed to have other cultural preoccupations for a time. Look at the cultural discussions brewing when their growth was exploding. They have since stepped back from that but I think it slowed them down.

I don’t think these helped when you have a competitor that can integrate their entire suite of products into their chat system while effectively selling the chat for free. Slack didn’t even integrate as well or as quickly.

Slack wasn’t innovating enough to not be overtaken.

tracer4201• 6 years ago

It was in getting people to discover/communicate via these abstractions of channels rather than point to point.

Do you mean Slack is or was the first to get users to communicate over channels (vs point to point) in a business or enterprise setting?

I’m honestly not sure about what innovation came out of Slack. I worked for a startup in the early 2000s, and we ran our own IRC channels.

I’m only vaguely familiar with Slack, but what am I missing?

bryanmgreen• 6 years ago

The dark reality is NOT that people can't compete against monolithic companies.

It is that companies have tens of billions of dollars they can spend to acquire companies that are hundred-million-plus net-losers.

That lump sum of acquisition money could have been spent in significantly more meaningful ways.

esja• 6 years ago

It's classic malinvestment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinvestment

wolverine8762• 6 years ago

Eliminating market advantages for incumbents and wealthy seems to me to be obviously in society's interest: It creates a more competitive marketplace for consumers, reducing prices and increasing innovation, it creates more opportunity for innovators, and it's fundamentally more fair - a meritocracy. I think it should be aggressively pursued, but very carefully - we don't want replace one distortion and unfair system with another.

Painting my impressions with a very broad brush: It seems that capitalism was formerly sold to the public as good for society: It provided economic growth, opportunity, and fairness. Those were the goals, and where there were market failures (such as monopolies or prejudice), society would step in and correct it, to further those goals. Now capitalism itself seems to be the goal, the religion, the ideology. It serves no higher purpose - the highest purpose effectively becomes the capitalists. If society steps in, it's rejected as a perversion of capitalism.

missedthecue3• 6 years ago

Lets say im a current Teams user. If you write a law that forces Microsoft to make me start paying for teams, who are you helping? Me, the consumer? No, you're bailing out Slack using my wallet.

That's not pro-consumer. That's anti-consumer. It makes me poorer and both Microsoft and Slack richer.

wolverine8762• 6 years ago

Monopoly abuse doesn't lower prices for the consumer; it reduces innovation and raises prices. It's only 'bailing out' Slack if you accept that abusive monopoly practices as a norm, in which case arresting thieves who steal and sell goods is 'bailing out' the jewelry stores.

varispeed• 6 years ago

Companies should not be allowed to buy other companies unless it is absolutely essential. This is a flaw in capitalism that creates duopolies and hurts consumers. We then get companies that are too big to fail, can afford creative accounting and plethora of other not so nice things, like lobbying government to change legislation in favour of them. We also need a rule that once company goes over a certain threshold it should be split. I don't think we have ever experienced something like this before that's why there is no regulation and we can see from our experience that companies do not behave nice, so we need a law that forces them to behave.

ogre_codes• 6 years ago

With the current tech atmosphere, so many people want to call Facebook, Google, and Apple monopolies and Microsoft sort of gets forgotten. Microsoft still has a ton of levers they can pull to influence buyers.

Microsoft has the ability to include teams as part of a bigger integrated bundle which businesses find more appealing.

politelemon• 6 years ago

It's because MS have had their run from >10 years ago, and now act less like they used to. Certainly not zero, but certainly nowhere near the F/G/A realms of monopoly and cartel like behavior that we see today.

thethethethe3• 6 years ago

These giants, armed with nearly limitless funds and extensive client relationships, frequently abuse their advantage and bully smaller upstarts into oblivion.

I don’t really understand this viewpoint. Companies are _choosing_ to use Microsoft’s products for various reasons. Maybe they already use Office and the integration with Teams made Teams the best choice over Slack. Maybe the company had an existing relationship with Microsoft so onboarding Teams required less Administrative overhead. There are probably many more that I am not listing. These are legitimate reasons to choose a product over another, not Microsoft abusing its power.

Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem. Lone, un-integrated startups, like Slack, still pop up and shake up the market. Then big companies replicate their product and integrate it into their existing software suites and sales pipelines, providing value that the smaller startup cannot. In this case the smaller startup merged with a larger company and will likely be integrated with their systems, providing value that both companies could have easily created alone. This all seems like it’s working as intended to me.

Barrin922• 6 years ago

Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem

It's a chat app. (And Slack itself is a huge company) Teams, as a product on its own merits, is not necessarily better than Slack. I very strongly disagree with the notion that integration into a locked-in ecosystem is a legitimate reason and not an abuse of power.

When you switch from product A to product B only because product B integrates with proprietary protocols or services you rely on and not on the merit or price of the product itself then that's bad, and it's harming consumer welfare and competition. It also is a positive feedback loop in that those services just keep claiming more and more space and the claim of space alone diminishes the value of everyone else, because you're forever locked into a web of, in this case, Microsoft products. Which is of course one of the reasons the company is so powerful.

You can ask yourself this, if every software company waas forced to implement transparent protocols and APIs, so that clients can freely choose their end-user software, what would the market share look like? If it would look different than it does now I think you can make a strong case that consumers are being deprived of choice.

warkdarrior• 6 years ago

When you switch from product A to product B only because product B integrates with proprietary protocols or services you rely on and not on the merit or price of the product itself then that's bad, and it's harming consumer welfare and competition.

Slack could have integrated with LibreOffice Online and ownCloud. They chose not to.

thethethethe3• 6 years ago

It's a chat app

I think you are reducing my argument a little here. I mentioned in my previous comment there are other benefits to working with large b2b companies other than the raw merits of a single provided app by itself.

I very strongly disagree with the notion that integration into a locked-in ecosystem is a legitimate reason and not an abuse of power.

I disagree with you here. There are many legitimate business (and personal) reasons to stick with an ecosystem. If that wasn't the case, then people wouldn't pick those products. Open standards with interchangeable clients and servers do exist right now, IRC for example, though nobody uses them because companies like Microsoft provide a hosted solution that provides more value.

You can ask yourself this, if every software company waas forced to implement transparent protocols and APIs, so that clients can freely choose their end-user software, what would the market share look like? If it would look different than it does now I think you can make a strong case that consumers are being deprived of choice.

This would be nice but I don't really think things would change that much. As I mentioned above, open standards already exist. We have email protocols, IRC, RTF, LaTeX, etc and people don't use them (with the exception of email). Forcing companies to open their APIs wouldn't force them to integrate with each other and, if they did, imagine being Slack in a world where Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, etc all had different APIs you had to integrate with and their products were already integrated with each other? That would be pretty expensive to implement and maintain and would definitively put you at a disadvantage due to your relative lack of resources.

Also, if all APIs were forced to be transparent, companies would still be able to build ecosystems that are more comprehensive and desirable than a patched-together set of disparate clients and hosts setup by some IT admin. A company which does one thing well, even if compatible with all other, like services (which would be an incredible feat) would never be able to ensure that their product would integrate better into every major company's ecosystem, putting them at the same disadvantage.

Additionally, there is real value with consolidating your software services under one company. You only have to manage one account, you might get a better deal because you are buying multiple services at the same time, all support would be centralized and bundled with other services you are buying.

mensetmanusman• 6 years ago

I wish there were more well run 501.3c open source initiatives that relied on major donations from organizations wanting to diversify their risk to being forever beholden to major software providers.

E.g. if an O365 subscription costs your organization $10MM per year, why not donate $100k per year (along with 10 of your peers) to a group writing open source bare bones versions that handle 90% of your employee needs.

The world would seem to benefit in this model...

Zhyl• 6 years ago

Ah, the Valve Proton model!

save_ferris• 6 years ago

The adage "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM" rings true here. Management at companies that pay $10MM per year on O365 don't see Office as a risk, they see it as foundational to their work. For that amount, they're probably also getting special deals from Microsoft to further integrate into their ecosystem and are constantly sold on all of the features that Microsoft products provide.

marcinzm• 6 years ago

As the saying goes "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."

An organization that pays $10MM per year has a lot of leverage and likely has long term contracts to hedge risk. So why, basically, waste $100k?

jtsiskin• 6 years ago

The world really would. I wish there was a way this could work and could pay the same salaries as FANGs do. I think you would like https://www.fsf.org/

acomjean2• 6 years ago

If you look the reaction when Red Hat wanted to force the move from free CentOS clone to paid RHEL... That incoming cash would help Linux get better.

Free though helps businesses start. Though economies of scale in tech are so huge now.

yalogin• 6 years ago

Slack missed the opportunity to add video communication and replace webex. They somehow didn't take that next step after conquering chat. I thought with video + enterprise integration they would have become the de facto tool for all collaboration. I guess that is still there on the cards for them. Instead they left that door open for Microsoft to add Teams.

javierluraschi4• 6 years ago

Would have love to see ZM and WORK merging, maybe in a parallel reality.

agapon• 6 years ago

IMHO, we all want to live in the "ever after". I think that's why many successful startups (or startup-like companies) get sold by their founders to mega-corps.

The existence and seemingly never-ending expansion of mega-corps is a different story though.

crazygringo5• 6 years ago

As Matt Stoller notes in his newsletter “BIG“, Microsoft has a track record of giving “away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and [bundling] it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal.”

That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist -- you'd be forced to buy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all separately.

Or by the same logic, an OS shouldn't be allowed to have any applications at all -- not even a calculator app, because that would be anticompetitive against other calculator apps.

In what universe should Microsoft not be allowed to add a chat component to their office productivity suite? When that's clearly an essential component of such suites these days? Sheesh.

Slack has had an amazing outcome. And awesome products, historically, tend to be absorbed by large corporations simply because it's more efficient and therefore profitable for everyone involved. There's nothing wrong with that.

mrkurt2• 6 years ago

The purpose of antitrust laws is to limit how much damage powerful companies can do.

So yes, if we had functional antitrust laws in the US, Microsoft may not be allowed to do certain things. Like bundle a Slack competitor with an existing product.

The universe where this should happen is one where we recognize that a healthy capitalistic society is good, and putting constraints on concentrated power helps keep things healthy.

The real question behind all this is: are we as a society better or worse off now that Salesforce owns Slack?

lefrenchy3• 6 years ago

That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist

It's not that they should not be allowed to exist. Rather, they should not be able to undercut competitors by using their leverage as massive tech companies to subsidize losing money on something while they starve out competitors. Stoller's article has much more nuance than you are attributing, and he outlines that in a world where these tech corporations were not allowed to get as big and powerful, you wouldn't have to be left with binary decisions like this one.

This sort of behavior is akin to Amazon selling items at a loss in order to starve out some competitor and then buying them out afterwards in order to benefit from their infrastructure and logistics.

crazygringo5• 6 years ago

I read his article, and unfortunately his nuance essentially comes down to:

The loss of an independent Slack is sad, because Slack’s strategy wasn’t just a standard attempt to gain market power. As a company, Slack’s team thought carefully about product design, and that care showed.

That's not an economic argument, it's an aesthetic one.

The fact is, it's natural in many industries to coalesce around 2-3 major competitors. And as we can see, that's exactly what's happening here. Slack isn't being snuffed out. It's living on as part of one of the ~3 major players in the space, which is a natural and desirable outcome for consumers who want simple bundled all-in-one solutions.

And Microsoft hasn't been "losing money" by including chat functionality in Office -- what you're describing is predatory pricing which is simply not the case here. Office is an expensive product that companies pay tons of $$$ for.

the8472• 6 years ago

you'd be forced to buy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all separately.

You can already do just that. What's the problem with that?

TheRealDunkirk• 6 years ago

That's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous that you think it's ridiculous. No, I don't think Office should exist. If Microsoft had been forced to sell Word separately from Excel, we might all still have a choice to run Lotus123, or QuattroPro. There's nothing enshrined in the Constitution that says that companies have to be allowed to bundle whatever they want into their other products. I think it's the job of our government, in fact, to prevent it this sort of thing. Microsoft bought lots of companies during the 90's (good for them!), but ran a least a dozen more -- and prominent ones, at that -- out of the market by duplicating their software, and absorbing their business. Yes! Absolutely! Microsoft can make their own disk defragmentation product. Or antivirus. Or whatever. But put a price tag on it, even if it's $0, and let it compete with everything else that's already in the market. Don't bundle it. I mean, did the browser wars teach us nothing?

crazygringo5• 6 years ago

But then where does it end?

Why should Word be allowed to bundle a spell-checker? Why shouldn't you have to buy that separately?

And why should the spell-checker be allowed to bundle a dictionary? Shouldn't that have to come from a separate company?

Should Photoshop be allowed to bundle a set of default filters, when there are companies that produce third-party filters? Should macOS be allowed to bundle ZIP compression, when there are companies that sell standalone compression software?

You're right we don't have Lotus 123. But we have Google Sheets, and we have Tableau, and we have Jupyter notebooks.

Literally every product is bundle of things that were combined into it, until you get either to raw physical materials or perhaps single functions in code.

I don't know how you're going to come up with a standard that allows Macs to include a menu option to compress a folder, but doesn't allow a bundle of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

tus88• 6 years ago

Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative products will prevail over less effective ones released by entrenched firms like Microsoft.

What a bizarre statement. The only think the free market assumes is that the market decides. Nothing else.

remir3• 6 years ago

The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don't really need a chat service. It's not a must for them.

On the other hand, what knowledge worker today can function without video conferencing, desktop sharing, file sharing and VoIP?

No that many.

Teams provide all of that natively. That's why they're wining.

Let's be frank, if Teams had been just a chat application, it would never have had the success it currently has, even as part of O365. Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that.

The reality is that MS made Teams a complete collaboration platform and Slack couldn't do the same with their product.

snowwrestler• 6 years ago

Slack seems like they already had everything they needed. You can do video calls natively in Slack. You can store and transfer files. They just didn’t put the pieces together; everything was kept as a minor complement to chat.

That said, I’m not sure they could have competed with Teams in MS corporate deployments under any circumstances. If a company is already using Outlook, Exchange, AD, O365, Teams plugs in very nicely. But, seems like that still leaves a pretty big market.

dexterdog• 6 years ago

Plus it is zero marginal cost for those places where slack has expensive per user pricing.

rightbyte• 6 years ago

How important is Office365 interactivity really? Calendar is nice but otherwise?

JMTQp8lwXL• 6 years ago

I don't want more collaboration. Slack is enough of a distraction. Something integrated with even more tools sounds like a detractor to me.

Kiro• 6 years ago

The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don't really need a chat service. It's not a must for them.

I don't understand this. Chat has always been an integral part of work in all my jobs. Before Slack it was Skype. I can't imagine working through email only. It would be hard enough when we were sitting in the same office but impossible now when we're remote.

remir3• 6 years ago

I'm saying a lot of organization don't see value in something similar to IRC like Slack. Obviously IM is different, but I work for an MSP that is, among other things, deploying Teams, and this has been my observation.

dismantlethesun2• 6 years ago

Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that.

Not sure what the example of IE would entail. IE was insanely popular during its prime of 2006-2008. Even today, Chrome has not captured as much of the market as IE6 did at that time.

It was only years of neglect (i.e nearly the entire IE6 team was reassigned to other projects), and governmental intervention that allowed other browsers to even have a significant plurality.

So yes, you can win merely by being bundled for free with another popular product.

If Slack for instance just came preinstalled on iOS/OSX, then people would have standardized on it so long as it was also available on Windows.

gshulegaard• 6 years ago

To add to this, bundling IE with Windows effectively killed the browser market. Netscape anyone? Microsoft was even subject to an anti-trust case centered around their IE handling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

remir3• 6 years ago

Yes, you CAN win by being bundled with a popular product, it helps tremendously. But I said it's no garanty.

Android is the most popular mobile OS on earth and I remember when Google+ was bundled as part of the base OS image. Even that and the huge marketing Google did wasn't enough to popularize the service and Google ended up killing it.

wyclif2• 6 years ago

It proves Jobs' adage that "this is not a company, this is a feature." He was talking about Dropbox at the time, but he might as well have been referring to Slack.

pchristensen• 6 years ago

At my current job, you would have to pry Slack from my cold, dead hands. I would rather deal with conference calls on personal cell phones than go back to e.g. Chime that Amazon used. For me, it's not just about communication (although there are 1,000 ways that Slack reduces friction), it's also about the searchable archives. It's the equivalent of Stack Overflow for our internal issues.

m463• 6 years ago

That's funny because there's a stack overflow for business and it was passed over for slack.

Another thing is -- the public stack overflow is really nice for reference, but in my experience I don't like the culture around it. It isn't inclusive. The thing that turned me off was when they would shut down a question because it would lead to extended discussion.

Now slack allows extended discussion - properly off in a thread - and through that fosters a corporate culture in a good way.

com2kid• 6 years ago

I've seen teams go from mailing word files back and forth with "revision dates" on them, to using Teams to manage their files.

SharePoint has always been too complicated for most people to use, but part of Teams is an easier to use UI over SharePoint.

Huge problem solved, right there.

sjg007• 6 years ago

Yeah, slack needs this badly.

nemothekid• 6 years ago

I disagree that Slack couldn’t have survived when Zoom exists. We will see where Zoom is 5 years; but Slack never expanded beyond Chat and their video calling product just isn’t competitive.

From the outside, Teams (and Zooms) growth was accelerated because video conferencing became way more important. People didn’t need video conferencing pre-COVID because that would have just been a meeting. When they suddenly did, Slack wasn’t that good. My pet peeve continues to be that on Slack I cannot see someone’s screen on iOS - that one annoyance had us move to Zoom then teams.

An argument could be made that Slack was ultimately unable to compete in video by virtue of not having an army of high paid engineers to throw at the problem like MS does, but the features that Slack chose to focus on (like the WYSIWG editor) doesn’t say that to me

calciphus• 6 years ago

My suspicion is that slack has hit the wall with their core product. User growth has flattened and that's why we're seeing a pivot to random experiments in layout and UI and no meaningful new features. Video conference is barely usable, but somehow adding user icons and a command pop-up (that doesn't support all their commands) all made it out to production.

The most meaningful thing they've had recently is the cross-org shared channel thing, which is awesome when it works but still onerous to manage. That was two years ago. And it doesn't open up that many new users, it just keeps people in slack longer (good for stickiness, bad for growth).

arrty88• 6 years ago

Slack will add the calling capabilities of Zoom and Zoom will need to add the chat system of slack.

mariallery• 6 years ago

while i do love slack, it seems like ms teams was the iphone(smartphone) to blackberry. ... then again, not at all apples to apples, since ms was already mastering the corporate world.

tootie• 6 years ago

I don't think any enterprise can survive without chat.

brown9-2• 6 years ago

Wait, so Slack has single-digit million users and sold for $27 billion?

segmondy• 6 years ago

Slack sold because they are not the future, the future of work is video. the pandemic showed that zoom, hangouts, team is much valuable than chat. Those all have chat as well, might not be as good as Slack but if any org had to keep one, it would not be Slack.

0xTJ• 6 years ago

I very strongly disagree. Even in a physical workplace, quick text messaging has a place. Saying that the video services are more valuable than chat is comparing apples to oranges. And I don't know of a mainstream video conferencing service with text messaging as good as Slack. (Maybe Teams? I was strongly encouraged to used it over the previous option that worked fine, and have intentionally avoided it since out of protest.)

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

Enterprise guys can bundle solutions together. Slack can't.

Example: Atlassian can bundle Jira, Confluence, Hipchat.

Microsoft can bundle Office 365, Exchange, Teams, etc.

ApolloFortyNine• 6 years ago

In Slack's case I'm not sure how much this played a role. Slack itself really seemed like the kind of project a team of developers could write at a one week hackathon. So of course Slack was going to have to compete with essentially clones from all the major vendors and more, it's a very cloneable piece of software.

At least something like Zoom seems to not be as easily cloneable (the alternatives don't compare yet, in my opinion at least).

catchmeifyoucan• 6 years ago

And if a company like Slack can’t stand up to the consolidation of corporate power, consumers’ ability to freely choose the best and most useful product is at risk

That is the flawed assumption. Consumers never had a choice for Slack. It was an enterprise decision

DoreenMichele• 6 years ago

This is speculation. It is not an interview with the decision makers at Slack.

It's an opinion piece.

We definitely could do a better job of "championing the little guy." But the title here -- which is not as click-baity as the actual title, is something I experienced as misleading. I expected this to be an interview with someone in the know, not speculation by an outsider based on previous public statements.

You can infer a lot based on public statements, but there may be things that weren't being said publicly. It can be impossible to know "the real motive" behind something without a direct statement by the person who made the decision.

breck2• 6 years ago

“How will you compete with the tech giants?

The one and only thing people who are concerned with the tech giants should be talking about is ending #ImaginaryPropertyLaws.

Anyone talking about problems with big tech but not talking about ending IP Laws are just paying lip service.

I worked at Microsoft. Great and brilliant people. They don't need #ImaginaryProperty protection. End that and sure, shareholders of MSFT will be worse off, but the world will be better off—a ton of people there will go off and start their own companies and there will be a lot more competition in the space.

Same for Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. All of these companies rely on #ImaginaryPropertyLaws for the root of their power. Such laws are just plain wrong (we could enable every child on earth to have the same access to information as the richest with a snap of our fingers, but everyday we choose not to), but putting all that aside, if all you care about is ending the monopolization going on in the tech industry, this is the thing you should be looking hard at.

paxys4• 6 years ago

IP laws are a negligible factor in the dominance of tech giants. When was the last time Google or Facebook sued a startup for violating one of its patents? It's far easier to just buy them out.

breck2• 6 years ago

It goes far deeper than that.

These companies have absurd amounts of proprietary information on everything going on in the world, and it's near impossible to compete. You are right, they will generally just buy you out, but if you don't accept, they will buy out your competitor and then your competitor will suddenly have access to all your customers (and many more), your potential customers, your usage numbers, data on your employees, your financings, et cetera.

It's not a fair fight, and it is the way it is because of ImaginaryProperty laws.

nbs_tar• 6 years ago

It COULD compete with tech giants, it COULDN'T live up to the valuation and had a fiduciary duty to take the offer.

Slack's worth $27bn (which is in the top 100 GDPs by country) and was FCF positive. With the right cap table it could stay private and self fund. But it went public, and by the rules of the game it chose to play ended up valued at like 30x forward revenue. To maintain that valuation it had to sell.

paxys4• 6 years ago

Yeah, while I agree with the article overall Slack is a bad example to use. It sold not because it was on its last legs but because Salesforce made an absurd offer. There are plenty of smaller companies that die or get acquired because they have no other choice.

intellix• 6 years ago

Well Microsoft teams is free if you already have office 365 so of course it's now one of the most used systems.

I wish calls had native support for Apple pencil as I'd like to use my iPad to draw on screen or a board during meetings

ashtonkem2• 6 years ago

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if Salesforce manages to kill Slack; I’ve come to hate it over the years.

javierluraschi4• 6 years ago

Curious, why?

ashtonkem2• 6 years ago

Slack was supposed to save us from email. It actually made things worse on its own, and email never went away either. Slack has turned into an unrelenting firehose of noise and distraction, and it lacks the tooling necessary to make it actually serve all the roles it fills in most orgs.

Something slower, more purpose built, with a much richer set of controls around notification processing (read/unread isn’t enough when it’s a work ask) would serve us all much better.

My7thAccount• 6 years ago

I like the feature on slack where you can see a graph of private vs public discussions. If the private discussions suddenly increase dramatically while public discussion cease and you aren't involved, something bad is about to happen

rapht• 6 years ago

I absolutely do not buy into the idea that "poor Slack" failed to "overcome giants" and that any harm was actually done.

$27bn is actually successful for a company that's just a few years old.

The competition that was stirred during those years ended up with Microsoft developing what is now a good product for 80% of use cases, with integration with tools (Office) that 80% of companies use, and all those companies benefitting from it did not have to shell out a single additional penny.

From the eyes of consumers, I would call it a success of competition rather than a failure. Sure, it has now run its course, but making $27bn out of it is not what I would call a bitter end - the dream of independence aside. But that's a for few individuals to dream about...

heavenlyblue• 6 years ago

Doesn’t everyone want to stay independent?

cybert00th• 6 years ago

"it’s time to rebalance the playing field"

OK sure, but the author doesn't say how. She's involved in a whole bunch of initiatives to help the little guy, so surely she has a lot of experience to share?

zwu23• 6 years ago

My current employer is the first company I work at that uses Slack. I used to envy my partner who raves about Slack. However, when I start using it, I wasn’t too impressed. I worked for a Chinese company in my last role, and I have to say I love their internal chat tool (which is a copycat of WeChat) way better than Slack. It doesn’t have the cool and modern interface of Slack, but it’s way more functional. For example, my favorite feature of the WeChat copycat tool is taking screenshots and able to do sketches on the screenshots. It’s integrated within the chat tool and it’s so convenient. With Slack, I have to rely on my Mac’s screenshot feature and Preview for editing, and then drag it in Slack’s chat window. Also, for shared channel, I saw that was innovated by WeChat long time ago, so I wasn’t that impressed with that feature.

chachachoney• 6 years ago

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs is not amused.

Slack wanted to stay independent, but was unable to compete with tech giants

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