Are Venture Capitalists Crazy or Is Slack Really Worth $3.8B?
"It's a product that struck at the right time with the right slant towards simplification," Constellation Research analyst Alan Lepofsky told CMSWire. He likened it to how Google became popular when there were other search engines already on the market.
"While Slack is essentially 1990's IRC with a more modern look and feel, perhaps that is what people are looking for," said Lepofsky, noting that chat applications such as Microsoft Skype/Lync or IBM Sametime, and social networks like Yammer and Socialcast have been available for years.
The problem, he explained, is that people rarely found a real "business fit" for them, and that vendors tried to sell them as company-wide tools. Slack, on the other, he noted, started out very focused on technical teams like developers, and was happy to be used by small groups of people.
Slack's success, in Lepofsky's view, is due at least partly to its integrations into systems that developers use like Github, enabling people to have discussions around events like code checkins.
"This 'business value' is what makes Slack stick," he told CMSWire, noting that while collaboration platforms like IBM Connections and Microsoft Office365 have grown complex, "a simple application like Slack can offer a compelling alternative, unless it also becomes too complex."
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