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by OliverJones 3357 days ago
I'm a member of a team that pays for Slack. Don't forget, if you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I am sick, sick, sick, of being somebody's product.

And with Slack, I don't have to be somebody's product. I don't have to already use Lookout xxx Outlook. I don't have to cope with messages from recruiters sending spam. Any fake nuz that shows up was faked by somebody I know.

Go Slack. Please figure out how to make your business sustainable: you're helping make our business sustainable.
2 comments
joelrunyon 3357 days ago
Part of what I like about Slack is how they raised money when they didn't need to (at very advantageous terms).

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/is-slack-really-wo...

> This is the best time to raise money ever. It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history,

He basically knows he didn't need to raise 200M, but if you can take that, put it in the bank and don't have burn rates the likes of Uber - you've got a while to figure out the exact route to profitability.

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Sir_Substance 3357 days ago
So the problem slack has is that chat is so foundational to the web that it's one of those things that doesn't really make sense to farm it out to third parties.

It's not hard or expensive to run yourself, and it's not difficult to securely expose on the web. That's why Lync has such a head start and why Atlassian's on premises option is gaining traction. Ultimately I suspect Mattermost is going to end up the main winner here. Slack, Teams and Hipchat will all have their userbases, but they'll have been in a three-way bar fight to get them, which is expensive.

Meanwhile, all those 12 person offices that farm their IT out to third party support companies? They're gonna start getting given Mattermost servers, because that's easy for the IT shops to license and install, yet also still under their direct control, which is important because IT support companies don't have a tonne of bandwidth to educate all 100 client companies if slack suddenly changes something.

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empath75 3357 days ago
I'm going to tell you how hard it is to get chat right. I work at the company that more or less popularized internet chat. We use slack internally pretty much exclusively, and have for years.
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inopinatus 3357 days ago
Goodness me. I had no idea that Mirabilis still existed. What is is doing these days?
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