Slack Files for IPO

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
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The New York Times reports that Slack has filed paperwork for an initial public offering. Assuming everything goes well, you'll be able to buy shares of Slack relatively soon, and the Times points out that Slack's financials are already in a good place. A "person with knowledge of the details" told the Times that investment firms think Slack is worth about $13 billion dollars. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors these past few years, and the company allegedly made more than $350 million in revenue last year.

Slack also plans an unusual form of public offering called a direct listing, the person added. Unlike most I.P.O.s, in which firms sell stock to public market investors in advance, direct listings let a company begin trading its shares on an exchange without raising new funds. Spotify, a provider of streaming music, went public in 2018 in a direct listing, paving the way for other high-profile start-ups to follow. With a direct listing, shareholders can also sell their stock immediately after the public offering, instead of waiting for what is known as a lockup period to expire.
 
I haven't been using the desktop version of slack for very long, but I'm curious what bugs you've noticed?
For Windows: notifications don't work, searching is too slow, saving a file to your local machine through Slack is awkward, it likes to prevent Windows from restarting, and it doesn't minimize to the notification area when you click the "X" (it stays on the task bar). These things happen even with a fresh install of Windows 10, not only on my computer, but client machines as well.
 
I have an irrational dislike for anyone stealing our name. I use Slackware exclusively as an OS and have for nearly 20 years. Get off my lawn Chatty Cathy.
 
I didn't know people still used Slack, we ditched it for Teams because it did everything better for less
 
I have an irrational dislike for anyone stealing our name. I use Slackware exclusively as an OS and have for nearly 20 years. Get off my lawn Chatty Cathy.

Yeah, I'm intimately familiar with Slackware.

I've never heard of this other Slack before.

From context it sounds like they are some sort of collaboration tool? Something like Sametime?
 
Slack = Facebook Messenger like chat app that allows you to easily share documents, screen or start a conference.

I haven't been using the desktop version of slack for very long, but I'm curious what bugs you've noticed?
Video conferencing on a Mac with multiple users always crapped out for me. Otherwise, it was a good chat app.
 
Slack = Facebook Messenger like chat app that allows you to easily share documents, screen or start a conference.

Video conferencing on a Mac with multiple users always crapped out for me. Otherwise, it was a good chat app.


Wow,

Does the world really need yet another collaboration suite.

I've used so many of them, including Lotus (now IBM) Sametime, Microsofts Lync, Microsofts Skype for Business, CenturyLink, AT&T ConnecT Meeting, etc. etc. etc. Google even had one they killed off a while back.

In the summer we are supposed to transition from IBM Sametime to Microsoft's Teams which I have heard good things about.

I'm all in favor of competition, but how many of these different services are really needed?
 
Wow,

Does the world really need yet another collaboration suite.

I've used so many of them, including Lotus (now IBM) Sametime, Microsofts Lync, Microsofts Skype for Business, CenturyLink, AT&T ConnecT Meeting, etc. etc. etc. Google even had one they killed off a while back.

In the summer we are supposed to transition from IBM Sametime to Microsoft's Teams which I have heard good things about.

I'm all in favor of competition, but how many of these different services are really needed?


Agreed, Microsoft Teams, IBM, Jira, Slack, Basecamp, Trello, Asana... list goes on and on with the collaboration / project management tools. I have only found these useful in the short term or for very specific projects/needs. I always find myself closing the application and following up with an email or phone call anyways.

Slack is still somehow weirdly inconvenient to use for me, it seems to be integrated with everything but I still find myself just wanting to go to the native app.

MS Teams has improved a lot, it started as what felt like a featureless version of Slack with O365 integration. From the admin side of things, Teams is a bit frustrating though. MS really needs to clean up and simplify the way permissions are handled... Teams takes all the mess of synced permissions from AD to O365 and Sharepoint Online and then adds another layer of confusion.
 
I can only imagine how they're going to monetize what you type into Slack to increase shareholder value.
 
Microsoft is certainly betting the farm on Teams, as they are basically killing off SfB and making Teams their one stop shop for collaboration. Between Teams and Slack though, IMHO, Slack is a lot more intuitive.
 
Slack is huge in the software development world and frankly I love it. It has fantastic integration using webhooks with a lot of software development, project management, and logging tools.

I can't imagine not having it in my day to day job. I have been keeping an eye on Teams but it doesn't seem to have the same level of integration that we need at this point in time.
 
We use slack here at work. We have a small team spread across multiple states. For us, the appeal is the speed and ease it offers. There's no infrastructure to set up, no contracts or payments to deal with, no applications to install, etc. It's just a tab in the browser and an app on the phone.

I can only imagine how they're going to monetize what you type into Slack to increase shareholder value.
Yeah, my first thought was "well, there goes the neighborhood..." Just like every internet startup that's gotten big before developing a business plan (see: facebook, twitter, youtube, etc) I anticipate pain in the near future.
 
People have been reinventing IRC for the last decade. Why would I want a message to go all the way to the US, or anywhere really, when all I wanna do is tell my wife what I need in my cave.

We live in a sad, sad world
 
We use slack here at work. We have a small team spread across multiple states. For us, the appeal is the speed and ease it offers. There's no infrastructure to set up, no contracts or payments to deal with, no applications to install, etc. It's just a tab in the browser and an app on the phone.


Yeah, my first thought was "well, there goes the neighborhood..." Just like every internet startup that's gotten big before developing a business plan (see: facebook, twitter, youtube, etc) I anticipate pain in the near future.

What happened to the good ol' days of IRC?? Let me go dust off my mIRC license and install it!
 
Microsoft is certainly betting the farm on Teams, as they are basically killing off SfB and making Teams their one stop shop for collaboration. Between Teams and Slack though, IMHO, Slack is a lot more intuitive.

What ever happened to Lync?
 
My god I hate this app.

Millennials keep tagging everything with animated color changing parrot heads. It remains unclear why I need animated parrot heads in a technical discussion. I know, I'm the oldie who doesn't "get" the new tools.
 
My god I hate this app.

Millennials keep tagging everything with animated color changing parrot heads. It remains unclear why I need animated parrot heads in a technical discussion. I know, I'm the oldie who doesn't "get" the new tools.

What kind of place do you work that is that unprofessional?

No smileys, emoji's, emoticons, animations or memes ever belong in a professional correspondence.
 
I rolled my middle aged eyes when my new job taught me what Slack was. I have to admit that I find it pretty useful though, and I'm pretty anti-IM. In my case, it displaces a lot of the non-relevant email I used to get.
 
What kind of place do you work that is that unprofessional?

No smileys, emoji's, emoticons, animations or memes ever belong in a professional correspondence.

It's not visible to customers, it's informal internal discussions. And they like emojis. <shrug>
 
My company is getting a lot of push from employees to use Slack. We already have Teams, but seem to be moving towards Slack. Oh yeah, we also have Skype used in parts of the company.
My vote would be for Teams - it works just fine.
 
What kind of place do you work that is that unprofessional?

No smileys, emoji's, emoticons, animations or memes ever belong in a professional correspondence.

I can’t imagine working in a place where people are unable to use humor in internal discussions.

Also my team uses the rainbow parrot head a lot too :eek:
 
If you want humor at work, become a comedian. Solved :p

FE2E9362-91C4-47E5-9806-CA2737405E1B.gif
 
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand another one bites the dust!

So far it looks like every disruptive initiative goes mainstream and just plain cliche after a successful IPO.
 
What kind of place do you work that is that unprofessional?

No smileys, emoji's, emoticons, animations or memes ever belong in a professional correspondence.
Just places that aren't uptight about themselves and allow people to have some fun. I do remote software development for a company and we use slack. We use the emojis for fun. What harm is there in that
 
Microsoft is certainly betting the farm on Teams, as they are basically killing off SfB and making Teams their one stop shop for collaboration. Between Teams and Slack though, IMHO, Slack is a lot more intuitive.

That's why we use Slack. Tried Teams, everyone hated it, moved back to Slack. Also works better with bringing in client guests since they have almost all used Slack and nobody has used Teams.

Glad to hear the garbage pile that is SfB is heading to the grave, though. If Teams does nothing but kill that off it will have been a worthy project.
 
Just places that aren't uptight about themselves and allow people to have some fun. I do remote software development for a company and we use slack. We use the emojis for fun. What harm is there in that

Some emojis probably aren't hurting anything, but I do have one story that's related. We did some work for a client whose internal Slack was filled with stupid memes and shit all day. Part of our job was to help their dev team become more productive. People were saying they didn't know what was going on in the projects (didn't see important messages, couldn't really follow conversations that weren't directly with them but the knowledge was useful team-wide, etc). We advised that they banish all of that stuff to #random. They did, everything got better immediately.

So all I can say is be cognizant of the impact an abundance of noise has on meaningful team communication.

*cue "use memes responsibly" commercial*
 
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Just places that aren't uptight about themselves and allow people to have some fun. I do remote software development for a company and we use slack. We use the emojis for fun. What harm is there in that

Having parrot seizure animations intermixed with important content seems like it would be extremely distracting and annoying to have to deal with. That animated parrot above was enough to make me seek another thread, because I found it highly abrasive on my eyes.
 
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