Slack made a surprise announcement today that it’s acquired HipChat, once a primary competitor to its workplace chat service, from enterprise software giant Atlassian. As part of the partnership between Slack and Atlassian, HipChat will be shutting down and the two companies will work together to migrate all of its users over to Slack. The same goes for Stride, the chat and collaboration successor to HipChat that Atlassian launched last year. Atlassian clarified that Slack is only buying the intellectual property behind the two products, and that the two companies will be working on future integrations together.
Slack is buying, and shutting down, HipChat and Stride
HipChat, the workplace chat app that held the throne before Slack was Slack, is being discontinued. Also being discontinued is Atlassian's own would-be HipChat replacement, Stride.
News of the discontinuation comes first not from Atlassian, but instead from a somewhat surprising source: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. In a series of tweets, Butterfield says that Slack is purchasing the IP for both products to "better support those users who choose to migrate" to its platform.
Butterfield also notes that Atlassian will be making a "small but symbolically important investment" in Slack — likely a good move, given that rumors of a Slack IPO have been swirling (though Butterfield says it won't happen this year). Getting a pre-IPO investment into Slack might end up paying off for Atlassian better than trying to continue competing.
Slack announcement. Also at Bloomberg, Android Police, and Wired.
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Benjamin Pollack has blogged about why he hates the proprietary chat tool, Slack, which competes with IRC. He covers six points as to why you should too:
"Yeah, that’s right: there’s finally something I feel so negatively about that I’m unsatisfied hating it all by myself; I want you to hate it, too. So let’s talk about why Slack is destroying your life, piece by piece, and why you should get rid of it immediately before its trail of destruction widens any further—in other words, while you still have time to stop the deluge of mindless addiction that it’s already staple-gunned to your life."
[Ed. addition] I had troubles accessing the site, even wget failed to download anything... but lynx.exe on Windows 7 Pro worked on the first try!?! For the curious, here are the six points from the blog post alluded to above:
1. It encourages use for both time-sensitive and time-insensitive communication
2. It cannot be sanely ignored
3. It cannot be sanely organized
4. It's proprietary and encourages lock-in
5. Its version of Markdown is just broken
6. It encourages use for both business and personal applications
Software startup Slack Technologies Inc said it raised $250 million from SoftBank Group Corp and other investors in its latest funding round, boosting the company's valuation to $5.1 billion.
The latest fund-raising, led by SoftBank through its giant Vision Fund and joined by Accel and other investors, lifted Slack's total funds raised to $841 million, the enterprise messaging operator said in an emailed statement.
The fund provides resources which will help Slack to run as a cash-generating company and the raise will reduce its dependence on outside financing, Slack Chief Executive Stewart Butterfield said.
Also at TechCrunch and Bloomberg.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 28 2018, @03:23AM (1 child)
Ask a Mexican which task is more difficult: A physical labour-intensive task or a task consisting mostly of tedious calculations. They will always be more aversive to the labour. That Mexicans are hard workers is a myth, leisure is a large part of Hispanic and Latino culture.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @03:00PM
Mexicans were never the hard workers, that was always the Central/South Americans who were scared to death of being sent back.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Saturday July 28 2018, @03:35AM
This is why getting kidnapped by aliens is such a chore. It's not the anal probing that's the big problem, but getting dumped in alternate realities that are vaguely familiar. I guess it's good enough for their regs on human experimentation. Well, at least you aren't all drinking blue-green carbonated goat milk and forehead-ramming greetings. That place was a real headache!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @06:02PM (1 child)
But the young upstarts like Ubuntu (and its many derivatives), Red Hat, SuSE and so forth are the ones "mopping up the competition". Does anybody install install Slack as a first choice Linux distro these days?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @07:17PM
I think the Slack they're talking about is the corporate Discord, which is the gaymer's Slack, both of which are IRC that support reposting repost inline repost meme reposts.
If we need inline memes, can 2019 be the year of XMPP? So we can get rid of this centralized crap? I can't get Discord working on my Gentoo box because it's programmed with the hipster philosophy of preventing users from seeing error messages. Maybe I should try Slackware instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 29 2018, @03:13AM (1 child)
I have checked out modern multi-platform text messengers and inevitably stumbled upon HipChat and Slack as being the preferred corporate solutions. Why is that? Why would a company send possibly sensitive internal communications via some cloud service without a proven security track record (or the guarantee that chats won't be "mined" and the resulting "anonymised" data sold to third parties?
The only one of the more well-known products that looked remotely acceptable to me is Mattermost, although I will probably set up a self-hosted Matrix server instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 30 2018, @02:38PM
We use Skype
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 30 2018, @02:41PM
This is what happens when you become a billion dollar company