from the money-for-nothing-is-not-just-for-MTV dept.
Putting a Price on Chat: Slack is Going Public at $16 Billion Value :
In just five years, Slack has grown to have more than 10 million users and has become a verb in the process. "I'll Slack you" is shorthand for sending a message via the workplace chat platform.
On Thursday, the company will take that popularity to the New York Stock Exchange, where its shares will be publicly listed for the first time.
At a starting price of $26 per share set Wednesday, Slack Technologies would be worth about $16 billion.
Instead of having a conventional initial public offering, Slack will enter into the market as a direct listing, which means the shares will simply be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Most firms that pass on an IPO are widely known companies that are in good financial shape.
[...] In the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, Slack nearly doubled its revenues, to about $400 million. But it had a net loss of nearly $139 million.
[...] Slack, which was publicly released in 2014, stemmed from an internal chat platform created by CEO Stewart Butterfield during a failed video game development. The software was created to avoid the confusion of email and, per its acronym, provide a "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge" for the team, which had people working all over North America.
A company that lost $133 million on revenue of $400 million is worth... $16 billion? I must be doing something wrong.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Thursday June 20 2019, @04:56AM (11 children)
Maybe others are getting more out of it, but where I've seen it used it's basically IRC with recorded logs, emoji, and embedded images.
How can that cost so much and still lose money?
(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Thursday June 20 2019, @05:10AM (1 child)
It's a completely shitty UI, terrible "threading" support, and offers nothing of value (to me) that LysKOM [wikipedia.org] didn't back in the '90s...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @01:30PM
kom.lysator.liu.se is still up! But the Emacs client bit rotted: (
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @05:13AM
This is what people have been saying... There is going to be a blow off top then crash coming. After the fomc meeting today btc is just below a 1 yr high, gold shot up to a 5 year high, the s&p 500 melting up to just below all time highs, 30 yr and 10 yr treasury yields dropped to just above all time lows... It's either that or hyperinflation.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 20 2019, @06:58AM (3 children)
How can that cost so much and still lose money?
Cooked books.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pslytely Psycho on Thursday June 20 2019, @08:44AM (2 children)
With those numbers they must be cooking them in a fucking blast furnace!
The new normal. Lose a shitload of money on a shitton of revenue and yet be worth several metric shittonnes of money.....
When I grew up in the sixties, this formula was called 'Closed for Business.'
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:38PM (1 child)
It's real name is 'tax evasion'. With our system, "losing" money will make you rich!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday June 21 2019, @01:58AM
or POTUS
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday June 20 2019, @10:13AM (1 child)
Maybe because price is a construct, and not a logically calculated valuation? Assigning a ridiculous high value to something prepares the public to paying a (far) higher amount than they normally would. It's called priming [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday June 20 2019, @10:48PM
It's been done ever since the first person discovered that there are people desiring to profit on the labor of others. If you read up on the history of mining in the US you will find many examples of this sort of thing. Venture capitalism has turned to IP these days rather than hard rock mining, but the process is the same. I suppose the difference now of course is that a large part of the risk is foisted off on taxpayers somewhere along the line.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:44PM
I ask myself this all the time. However the value has nothing to do with the software or the products, it is based on the company itself and how well it performs at business tasks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Thursday June 20 2019, @04:25PM
Oh well the reason it costs so much is that those recorded logs--well you don't actually get them. Unless you pay.
What they do with your data that they hold for ransom is something one can speculate about, but you can't look at the data unless you pay for it.
Most companies are better off using an actual... well. I get it that most companies don't have the IT staff anymore that can set up a few different tools that may even cost money, but don't hold data for ransom.
I think the $16 billion valuation is due to people that use it being ignorant to the fact that better options exist, and more importantly, the ones that do know recognize those options are usually free and thus can't provide a return on investment. I mean who invests in skill anymore? You shareholders can't put a monetary value on free (software), but they certainly can on ignorance. This is likely an example of that.
They know the ignorant will be willing to pay for their own data, and keep paying, even if the options exist to never hand out that data in the first place. It's just easier to subscribe to a problem than it is to retain the skilled staff to maintain something that works.
*for the record, I've set up local XMPP servers and used pidgin and other chat programs that people accessed over a VPN, as well as more "professional" communications tools, but that wasn't without hearing complaints that it was inconvenient to log into the VPN first to access file servers and chat windows and... Slack is something else, it's like exploitation of the lazy and ignorant, and could be something sold by J.R. Bob Dobbs himself--while cackling that the pinkos bought it hook line and sinker..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @05:12AM (1 child)
The one time I worked at a place where people advocated chat, and it was like being in a meeting all day long. Really hard to stay in the zone. Fortunately it was a small company and I had the power to say "no". This sounds like some kind of Millenial nightmare of not only having no walls, but of having every worthless blabbermouth in the office right there on your desktop.
Maybe I'm just telling y'all to get off my lawn; but I'm skeptical that any kind of "chat" could ever be anything other than negative for productivity.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 20 2019, @07:28AM
I see your point, but let me point that's not the fault of the tool.
(yes, I know it first hand)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Funny) by Arik on Thursday June 20 2019, @07:10AM
In the meantime, the real thing is right where it always was, and still Free: http://www.slackware.com/
See also https://subgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Slack
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by Only_Mortal on Thursday June 20 2019, @12:58PM (1 child)
I'm going to be honest... I've never heard of them.
Not sure why I'd need another chat app given I have WhatsApp and iMessage. Maybe it's not like those?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @05:19PM
As far as I know they started out as an IRC client and somehow made a business out of that. Very impressive.. the business part of it that it.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Thursday June 20 2019, @01:45PM (1 child)
The additional metric that the thing's value is somehow $1600 per user seems a bit over the top...
That doesn't seem anywhere close to sane to me. These valuations are nuts.
:facepalm:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:36PM
I am concerned that these turds end up in my portfolio. I like index funds, but something like 26% of SP500 is tech now.
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:06PM (1 child)
Slack can also do voice or video calling between users as well as establishing different channels for group and teamwork. Plus it allows for third party plugins. It's not "just a chat platform," but rather a next-generation connectivity tool for business users.
It's competitors are Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook, and to a much lesser degree Salesforce which is a prior-generation tool AFAICT. Plus Discord. (I've used Slack and the environment I'm part of moved over to Discord once Slack started demanding cash. For our uses Discord has been better, providing the same functionality with more services. But someday Discord will have to face the question of how they're going to monetize also).
And does that make it worth $16 Billion? We will certainly find out. But I don't see how we're not climbing Tech Bubble 3.0 at this point.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:40PM
When was 2.0?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday June 20 2019, @04:43PM
Does yet another real-time interrupt style communication tool really help modern day business?
Status = busy.
And get off of my lawn.