For Skype I think it was mostly about rounding out the office suite, MS doesn't want anyone else getting a toehold in workplace collaboration and expanding from there - if you get real classical about it MS Office is the true DNA of the company even more so than Windows/infrastructure. Same reason they bought Yammer and why they were so early on in trying to move on Slack (with the $8B offer that Bill Gates intervened in and shot down).
[Edited slightly for clarity]
Whatever gadgets they might hang off the app, they're fundamentally a way for people to talk to each other. If you don't have the people, why would you need a slick implementation? As you mentioned, the app would go out of vogue and users would move on.
Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.
Which is ironic, because their properties would play a lot better with one than, say, Google or MS. And starting with something like Slack (bottom up vs top down) is an interesting move.
Honest question, since I might be out of the loop here in Europe, but what user engagement pieces does Amazon have then ? I use Amazon for shopping and AWS, and would have no idea what other products they have that are dominating a market. Is this about Kindle ?
If you're going to launch social, you could do a lot worse for a starting point...
And in a broader sense, I'm much more optimistic about building a social network to unify disparate features that people already love, vs imposing one from the top down (e.g. G+). FB only got away with the latter because of being first, and seems to be pivoting to backfill as much functionality around it as quickly as possible.
Well they do own twitch & good reads, right?
Sounds like they really want in on the communication game.
One reason why I think Slack may survive longer than ICQ, Skype etc is how well integrated it is with all other services. For a tool to replace Slack, it should also provide the same level of seamless integration with GitHub, Google Docs, and a hundred other services. That's much harder to do than just building a messaging app.
Also messengers aren't as N-N since you end up only talking to a small number of people after a while and don't actually want to move all your contacts.
I don't want to move all my FB contacts either but the number of connections I sort of care about is still likely more than 100.
Exporting your Facebook profile is a labyrinthian effort few would consider.
Switching chat providers is as simple as getting everyone to use the new thing and going from there, there is little to no baggage to bring with you.
Not yet. We used to think MySpace is huge and not going away anytime soon
That said, if they make ~15M per month directly then up to 1 to 4 billion is probably completely reasonable purchase price. And depending on how things are evolving and internal costs etc 9B while probably high is not crazy ridiculous.
Given how deep it is in a company's workflow you could think of it almost like an operating system where apps can attach to.
It would perfectly fit to eg salesforce, google etc
Unsure what Amazon's goal would be - maybe "enterprise as customers" are the interlinking part between ecommerce and webservices
Internet access is deep in company workflows as well, but that doesn't mean they can't change ISPs.
Are companies building their ordering systems to depend on slack API's or something?
Off the top of my head, both mattermost and rocketchat provide compatible webhook apis that make them drop-in replacements for slack.
So not that deep into peoples workflow...
WhatsApp's support for J2ME ended in 2016[1] - it is now smartphone only, because it requires "advanced features" (or bloat) to compete with Snapchat and complete Facebook's flanking manoeuvre (along with Instagram).
What is the point in buying a messaging app?
- instant messenger
- ICQ
- Skype
- Yammer
- WhatsApp
They all seem to be popular for a short time and then fad away.
What does owing one of these get a company?
The case against owning them is that they all go out of favour and you only have a small window, say up to 5 years, where your platform is dominate before everyone moves onto another solution.
At one point the theory was it got people to use a companies proprietary login, when companies thought there was value in having people use their login.
At this point, if I said Slack would be a shell of its former self in 5 - 10 years would anyone put up an argument , if so what's the argument that this time its different.
I'm a happy slack user, but i"ll move to a new platform tomorrow if a better one comes along, there is almost no network effect or lock with these apps so switching has almost zero cost.
Plugins might provide a slight lockin but time has shown again and again the same plugins will move to the next popular messaging app, which seems to negate any benefit.