[mathattack]

Nothing new here. Look at Netscape, eventually being surpassed by Internet Explorer. (Which in turn was surpassed by Safari and Chrome)

It's very hard for large companies to do large scale decentralized R&D, so they copy and buy companies that are doing it. This isn't an awful thing. In many cases the original technologists get acquired. If the market is big enough, big players will want in too.

[seppin]

so who buys slack ?

[mercer]

Atlassian or Microsoft. Although I hope not.