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A comment on Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss. Parent comment

Re:Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss by rchaud on Thursday September 05, 2019 @10:28AM (#20886973)
Slack is different from those companies of yore. Back then, if you created a chat program and went to an investment bank, they'd laugh you out of the office, or advise that you take whatever acquisition offer you can get, because a chat program with tons of competitors isn't enough to build a profitable business on.
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Re:Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss by mattmanser on Thursday September 05, 2019 @10:35AM (#20887045)
Skype got investment from VCs in 2003, 16 years ago. is that "yore" enough for you?

https://www.vcgate.com/Bessemer_Venture_Partners.asp

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Re:Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss by otabdeveloper4 on Thursday September 05, 2019 @10:43AM (#20887159)
Skype wasn't a chat program.

Skype was a P2P phone calling program over TCP/IP.

I.e., a neat trick that might have killed traditional telecoms.

Then Microsoft bought Skype and killed it instead.

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Re:Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss by DangitBobby on Friday September 06, 2019 @02:58AM (#20893627)
Thank you for reminding me that Skype was a good product at one point.
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Re:Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss by rchaud on Thursday September 05, 2019 @10:52AM (#20887278)
Skype never went public though. Investment from VCs happens well before going to an I-bank with the intention of going public. VCs can invest in anything, investment banks are the ones who create the initial public offering.

Even so, Skype was a household name for video chat for years (despite it's sometime shoddy quality) until FaceTime, Gchat and others implemented video towards 2010.

What's Slack done that's different from other chat platforms available today? Stuff like Jira integration is of interest only to a small portion of its target market, and it's that exact market that will complain about the pricing, that it's non-federated, heavy on resources, intrusive in its tracking, etc.

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Re:Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss by phlakaton on Thursday September 05, 2019 @11:57AM (#20887978)
Then Skype got bought by eBay shortly thereafter for gobs of money, in the somewhat blind hope that synergies would develop between eBay, PayPal, and Skype. Never quite panned out that way.

Btw, although I've seen little difference between HipChat and Slack in my day-to-day, the switch from Skype to HipChat was a profound improvement. Messages sent on Skype could and would frequently vanish into the ether, and/or arrive in the conversation thread way out of order. Imagine troubleshooting production issues under those conditions!...

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