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

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.<p>Innovations that could have carried the company further could be digital whiteboarding, google docs like editing, dropbox style storage, squiggle like remote teams collaboration.<p>Also the atlassian merger via hip-chat sunset could have resulted a stronger integration between the two organizations.<p>Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned

The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don&#x27;t really <i>need</i> a chat service. It&#x27;s not a must for them.<p>On the other hand, what knowledge worker today can function without video conferencing, desktop sharing, file sharing and VoIP?<p>No that many.<p>Teams provide all of that natively. That&#x27;s why they&#x27;re wining.<p>Let&#x27;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.<p>The reality is that MS made Teams a complete collaboration platform and Slack couldn&#x27;t do the same with their product.

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.<p>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&#x27;s ancestral owners. Basically the financial system gets reset every 49 years.<p>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&#x27;t due it exactly how the bible outlines things but I&#x27;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 .<p>What would y&#x27;all think of a societal reset?

I suppose it&#x27;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.

I think this is overblown. Slack was perfectly capable of remaining a stand alone company. They just wouldn&#x27;t have been worth ~30 billion.

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.

I absolutely do not buy into the idea that &quot;poor Slack&quot; failed to &quot;overcome giants&quot; and that any harm was actually done.<p>$27bn <i>is</i> actually successful for a company that&#x27;s just a few years old.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s a for few individuals to dream about...

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.<p>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.<p>The world would seem to benefit in this model...

This is speculation. It is not an interview with the decision makers at Slack.<p>It&#x27;s an opinion piece.<p>We definitely could do a better job of &quot;championing the little guy.&quot; But the title here -- which is not as click-baity as the actual title, is something I experienced as <i>misleading.</i> I expected this to be an interview with someone in the know, not speculation by an outsider based on previous public statements.<p>You can infer a lot based on public statements, but there may be things that weren&#x27;t being said publicly. It can be impossible to know &quot;the real motive&quot; behind something without a direct statement by the person who made the decision.

The dark reality is NOT that people can&#x27;t compete against monolithic companies.<p>It is that companies have tens of billions of dollars they can spend to acquire companies that are hundred-million-plus net-losers.<p>That lump sum of acquisition money could have been spent in significantly more meaningful ways.

&quot;Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative products will prevail over less effective ones released by entrenched firms like Microsoft.&quot;<p>Wait, what? When did that start happening?

It COULD compete with tech giants, it COULDN&#x27;T live up to the valuation and had a fiduciary duty to take the offer.<p>Slack&#x27;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.

&gt; “How will you compete with the tech giants?<p>The one and only thing people who are concerned with the tech giants should be talking about is ending #ImaginaryPropertyLaws.<p>Anyone talking about problems with big tech but not talking about ending IP Laws are just paying lip service.<p>I worked at Microsoft. Great and brilliant people. They don&#x27;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.<p>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.

Slack missed the opportunity to add video communication and replace webex. They somehow didn&#x27;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.

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.

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

&gt; Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative products will prevail over less effective ones released by entrenched firms like Microsoft.<p>What a bizarre statement. The only think the free market assumes is that the market decides. Nothing else.

In Slack&#x27;s case I&#x27;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&#x27;s a very cloneable piece of software.<p>At least something like Zoom seems to not be as easily cloneable (the alternatives don&#x27;t compare yet, in my opinion at least).

IMHO, we all want to live in the &quot;ever after&quot;. I think that&#x27;s why many successful startups (or startup-like companies) get sold by their founders to mega-corps.<p>The existence and seemingly never-ending expansion of mega-corps is a different story though.

Well Microsoft teams is free if you already have office 365 so of course it&#x27;s now one of the most used systems.<p>I wish calls had native support for Apple pencil as I&#x27;d like to use my iPad to draw on screen or a board during meetings

&quot;it’s time to rebalance the playing field&quot;<p>OK sure, but the author doesn&#x27;t say how. She&#x27;s involved in a whole bunch of initiatives to help the little guy, so surely she has a lot of experience to share?

Eliminating market advantages for incumbents and wealthy seems to me to be obviously in society&#x27;s interest: It creates a more competitive marketplace for consumers, reducing prices and increasing innovation, it creates more opportunity for innovators, and it&#x27;s fundamentally more fair - a meritocracy. I think it should be aggressively pursued, but very carefully - we don&#x27;t want replace one distortion and unfair system with another.<p>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&#x27;s rejected as a perversion of capitalism.

Enterprise guys can bundle solutions together. Slack can&#x27;t.<p>Example: Atlassian can bundle Jira, Confluence, Hipchat.<p>Microsoft can bundle Office 365, Exchange, Teams, etc.

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

&gt; 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<p>That is the flawed assumption. Consumers never had a choice for Slack. It was an enterprise decision

J.R. &quot;Bob&quot; Dobbs is not amused.

Doesn’t everyone want to stay independent?

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

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&#x27;t involved, something bad is about to happen

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&#x27;t think we have ever experienced something like this before that&#x27;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.

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.

&gt; <i>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.”</i><p>That&#x27;s ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist -- you&#x27;d be forced to buy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all separately.<p>Or by the same logic, an OS shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to have any applications at all -- not even a calculator app, because that would be anticompetitive against other calculator apps.<p>In what universe should Microsoft not be allowed to add a chat component to their office productivity suite? When that&#x27;s clearly an essential component of such suites these days? Sheesh.<p>Slack has had an amazing outcome. And awesome products, historically, tend to be absorbed by large corporations simply because it&#x27;s more efficient and therefore profitable for everyone involved. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with that.

&gt; These giants, armed with nearly limitless funds and extensive client relationships, frequently abuse their advantage and bully smaller upstarts into oblivion.<p>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.<p>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.