Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public
Shares of Slack, maker of the popular workplace chat app, plunged as much as 16% on Wednesday after the company issued its first earnings report as a public company, briefly dropping below the reference price from its direct listing.
Here are the key numbers:
- Earnings: Loss of 14 cents per share, excluding certain items, vs. 18 cents per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
- Revenue: $145 million, vs. $140.7 million as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
Slack said in a statement that its revenue grew 58% year over year in the second quarter of the 2020 fiscal year, which ended on July 31.
Slack debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in June through a direct listing, following the path taken by Spotify last year. A few days before its listing, Slack forecast second-quarter revenue of $139 million to $141 million, representing growth of about 52%.
The company's main competitor is Microsoft, which includes the Teams work chat app in Office 365 business subscriptions. In July, Microsoft released statistics suggesting that Teams is more widely used than Slack. On Wednesday Slack did not provide updated user statistics
"We see an equal opportunity for both Slack and Microsoft Teams to grow as alternatives to traditional e-mail and argue a duopoly-like market structure could form around the two most popular messaging-centric in platforms at maturity," KeyBanc Capital Markets analysts led by Brent Bracelin wrote in a note to clients on Aug. 25.
Slack's uptime — a measure of how frequently the service is operating normally — slipped below 99.9% in June and July, wrote the KeyBanc analysts, who recommend buying the stock. Slack provides customers with credits for future use when uptime is below 99.99%. Those credits can impact revenue. Slack said its revenue for the quarter was negatively impacted by $8.2 million of credits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @09:12AM
But we have mattermost so, meh.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @11:14AM
Hopefully whatever they are doing ends with them changing their name. It was very confusing as they got popular, as 'Slack' was already the popular short name of 'Slackware Linux' and I had no idea why everyone was talking about it, let alone what it had to do with replacing IRC.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @11:50AM (2 children)
If you can't work those out it's not the tools that's the problem, it's you, your project lead and your team.
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Friday September 06 2019, @06:55PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday September 07 2019, @05:23AM
IRC is what the unofficial chat server runs.
That happened at a previous job. An old P4 running Debian that was salvaged out of the scrap heap, inconspicuously humming along under someone's desk.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday September 05 2019, @12:05PM (2 children)
If I were them, I would use this stock price to buy all of the stock, and then next year after I had started selling all of the private conversations off the back of a truck, cash in big time when the revenue actually kicks in.
OR WAIT BETTER YET, give the data in a truckfull of disks to some mafia organization front for an international spy ring, launder that money *through the international spy ring*, and then let slack the company go bankrupt and be forgotten about.
OR WAIT BETTER YET, *be an international cult mafia spy ring from the very getgo*.
Then rinse repeat with new company names until out of possible words to makup or commercially appropriate. All you need really is a near complete lack of technical journalism on your planet, up front capital, and a functioning internetwork. And be an awful person I guess too, but the sad thing is there can be 1000 people working in a company but all it takes is one.
So it's good to check out the founders, let's have a look at who slack is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accel_Partners [wikipedia.org] (owners do not have their own articles, but has funded facegag and many other surveillance platforms, gofundme, atlassian)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Horowitz [wikipedia.org] (has worked for the us army, former vp of HP, son of)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz [wikipedia.org] (the most batshit idiotic neocon and/or most obvious propaganda turf distributer in the english language.)
Yeah, so I wouldn't let these people mow my lawn, all of your slack conversations have already been leaked to at least 100 people you would rather didn't have it. This is a blueprint for how you want to make a prison intercom system that just happens to have emoticons, not an internet.
thesesystemarefailing.net
(Score: 3, Touché) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday September 05 2019, @02:03PM (1 child)
Almost interesting, if it weren't for the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday September 06 2019, @09:18AM
drive by non-contributer throwing half-assed dismissive slurs - check
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday September 05 2019, @02:08PM (1 child)
I wonder what their plan for profitability is? They didn't get there in 2018. [investopedia.com] Which would explain why any loss in revenue causes a greater percentage of people to jump off now. Not saying they won't go there, just wondering how and when that might happen - hopefully before the investor money runs out....
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Thursday September 05 2019, @03:28PM
Subscription-as-a-service. The more ignorant "IT Leaders" they can get to believe in their "hold company data for ransom and make them pay for access to it" business model, the more likely they are to survive.
I mean, once you become dependent on them, just try to cut the subscription and keep functional without fulfilling the needs of that dependency. You'd need someone local that knows how to set up something similar and migrate your staff to it, and that guy was outsourced to the cloud a while ago.
They keep historcal data at slack, but don't let you have the logs or anything unless you keep paying. I am not sure what they do with the data... I haven't read the EULA closely. But they seem to provide a service that can be easily replaced with a little effort. Some companies, like Microsoft, are promoting their own subscriptive services that provide integration into the rest of their hard-to-cancel services.
Even if the master is different and the subscriptions are more of the same, there are other companies doing what slack does and doing it better. Slack seems to have a fan base made of ignorant IT experts that say to focus on what you do best, but sometimes you need to cut costs during an economic downturn, and when you cancel subscriptions you depend on to function at work and essentially create revenue via using those tools... you hasten your businesses demise. Sometimes it is best to plant some seeds and grow a little garden even if it doesn't feed everyone with the results, but really, you don't have to do it all. It can make a tough time experience a little less belt-tightening if there are fewer recurring mandatory expenses.
Slack is particularly galling to me, because they've replaced one of the oldest useful and social functions--an instant message client and file sharing service pretty much -- and locked it behind a subscription per user per month, if you want to access the data you generate over time--ie chat logs.
The fact that chat logs are not even saved locally--heck every chat client (for the most part) up until recently at least saved something you could read later if you wanted to remember what you talked about or promises made or whatever reasons you have, but now, with popular services like Slack getting away with it, basic functionality now costs money to access, and its part of a recurring fee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @08:26PM
"Going public" is just a different name for "on death bed" or "changing money's owner"
The only worth for any public offering is to maximize revenue, from the lowest point to the highest one. Once shares reach their highest possible value then it's time to pack and get your earnings which leave the company at the same point it was when it just went public.
What's the difference? People that invested after would have given money to the people that left before them. That's it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @04:55AM
I wonder if their drafts "feature", which rearranges your sidebar when you start a message has anything to do with this. Everyone in my org hates it, as do many others it appears. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1135955676545585164 [twitter.com] is basically everyone asking how to disable it, with the response that "you can't". Remind me again why we moved away from running a Jabber service - oh yeah, that stupid "animals" commercial from a few years back.