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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: 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..