You can integrate your outlook calendar with slack?
There is a way to integrate the calendar into Slack, however it’s primarily for saying if you are in a meeting now, which some people where I work use it for. It doesn’t help with creating meeting rooms where the people attending are not all the people in the particular channel, which is a very common occurrence for us.
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Apparently it’s because IBM have switched all it’s employees to slack
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Turns out IBM have been Slacks biggest customer for years. Today’s jump what totally unjustified. They’ve just filed an 8k
And we’re on our way back down!
Surely, everyone working from home should be good for Slack? Apparently not.
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The IPO happened when the markets were in a “good” state so that the original backers and employees could cash out. Once it was out in the wild, people started asking questions, such as do we need to pay for Slack? Does it pass the “toothbrush test”?
I can recall a team in a company that uses the freemium version very effectively.
FT:
So, what is the value proposition of a thing that is effectively a commodity, can be free if you don’t mind the loss of archives, and is bundled elsewhere (MS Office, G Suite, etc)?
And most importantly:
Slack is a large memory hog, but Discord is relatively lightweight.
Tip: if you have to use Slack and it’s draining the battery on your laptop, you can use the browser-based app - it’s definitely lighter, though careful with memory-hungry Chrome.
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Could it be too e to tell if businesses are moving from the free version to the paid version? Maybe it takes a few weeks or months for companies to start paying?
The honesty of the CEO is refreshing
Of the 110,000 organisations that pay for the service, “there’s a possibility that we might lose 5,000 of those customers to bankruptcy in the next six months,” Mr Butterfield said.
This is a familiar feeling for me
Facing intense pressure, though, many workers will gravitate to the most effective tools to do their jobs, whatever their IT departments recommend.
With that, I’m interested to get a sense, which one do you use (and is it official or just the most effective tool)?
- Slack
- Teams
- Both
- Neither
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voters
I hope the people who voted teams are forced to use it. Otherwise I’d be losing faith in humanity 
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Teams because thats what the company has chosen
Yep, company decision!
We use both at work.
Teams was not forced by company, I like it.
We are increasingly using Teams for video conf.
Top tip: You can usually just google “ ir” to find investor relations sites, i.e. “slack ir”. It will save you an entire 500ms
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I was surprised after looking at Slack I’m actually put off by them as an investment. It’s just too much cash burn to get where want to be market place wise. Similar to Uber getting market share, but with a product that can be shifted by a corporation way quicker.
Even in there last report they had a story how a customer trailed them with 10k employees, then 30k on Microsoft teams, before shifting the whole business to Slack. Which sounds a great success story but goes to show how easily these customers can move between the systems when there is a big enough reason.
Without heavy R&D investment into Slack, will it always have an edge over teams or any other new competitors?
I ended up being pessimistic and going with a sell. I was on the fence with a hold but honestly I would rather do something else with my capital that has greater confidence!
Not the outcome I expected when I started looking but that’s the joy of it all I guess!
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I decided to invest at the recent lows after the IPO hype. Their burn is very high like you say - I think it’ll be a few years until they reach/target profitability.
MS teams is a competitor but I believe Slack’s product is much better and many features aren’t easily copied:
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Enterprise grid for large teams (workspaces)
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Shared channels for internal & external (e.g. contractors) teams to communicate
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Rich developer ecosystem
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Deep app integrations. From what I’ve seen compared to Teams, Slack has a much deeper integration for apps with lots of option for customization. Teams on the other hand it looks like you just get Webhooks which you can dump data into a channel with - I don’t think you can do much with the UI.
Block Kit | Slack -
At the recent Slack earnings call they mention that they are increasingly competing head to head with Teams and winning. Remember that many orgs will already have Teams for free (as they already have office 365) so this is particularly encouraging
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I think employees who have previously used Slack will advocate for it over other tools, especially developers. I might be biased here as a developer.
Nearly 60 percent of funded startups pay for Slack — much higher than the rate for Microsoft Teams.
- Slack doesn’t try to do too many things. E.g. they have video calling but actively promote Zoom Zoom and Slack: Building the future of team communication | Slack . They focus on being best in class Chat platform.
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I also think Slack would be a acquisition target from Google or Atlassian; more likely Google.
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Same for me. It should be a big tech acquisition target.
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I agree with this. They are a prime target for anyone wanting to grow their own ecosystem and is threaten by Microsoft, and frankly who isn’t these days.
The extremely heavy R&D is the big worry. While they are winning business, it’s coming at a high cost. They have great features today, but they aren’t unique.
Being developer friendly and allowing other to build out their ecosystem has worked fantastically, and I believe the biggest driver behind their fast growth. Long term is that defensible enough?
It’s a really tough one. I went into looking Slack expecting a buy because I love the product so much. I ended up walking away with more questions than answers.
As an investor and acquisition is the dream here. As a user I would want them to be as independent and innovative as possible!
Then again GitHub has done very well under the Microsoft banner and kept a lot of independence, so maybe it’s possible.