I just don't get what there is to despair about :) It's just a company that investors have judged is valuable based on the data they've seen. It's no big deal.
To some of your points:
- Communication is about as important a function as there is. Nothing else happens without it. Indeed it's one of the main reasons satellites exist.
- We can argue about whether Slack's communication service is important/good/valuable, but at the end of the day it's a waste of both our time; the market doesn't care what you or I think or say, it only cares what consumers/companies use/buy, and revealed preferences indicate that many people/companies use it and pay for it, and that's the whole reason it has a high valuation.
- A few posts on HN about people stopping using Slack tells us little; HN is a narrow audience, and people who write posts about stopping using popular products is orders of magnitude narrower again.
- I expressed no value judgements about whether or not Slack is good thing and investors don't either; they just care that it's a successful business that will likely keep getting more successful.
- That said, I understand why they make that assessment; I'm in around 10 different Slack instances across all the different projects and networking groups I'm in. I neither love it nor hate it. I don't spend much time in it most of the time. I use it when I need to and don't use it when I don't, and it's no big deal.
- But it's now always the go-to product people fire up when a new project or collaboration group comes together. It is now the default product for that type of communication. I couldn't name a viable competitor these days, and I've been online and working in tech for 20+ years, and have used IRC, Campfire and HipChat in the past, as well as others I don't remember.
So, none of this should be surprising. It's just a popular product that investors want to invest in. The valuation of other, different kinds of companies is totally irrelevant!
To some of your points:
- Communication is about as important a function as there is. Nothing else happens without it. Indeed it's one of the main reasons satellites exist.
- We can argue about whether Slack's communication service is important/good/valuable, but at the end of the day it's a waste of both our time; the market doesn't care what you or I think or say, it only cares what consumers/companies use/buy, and revealed preferences indicate that many people/companies use it and pay for it, and that's the whole reason it has a high valuation.
- A few posts on HN about people stopping using Slack tells us little; HN is a narrow audience, and people who write posts about stopping using popular products is orders of magnitude narrower again.
- I expressed no value judgements about whether or not Slack is good thing and investors don't either; they just care that it's a successful business that will likely keep getting more successful.
- That said, I understand why they make that assessment; I'm in around 10 different Slack instances across all the different projects and networking groups I'm in. I neither love it nor hate it. I don't spend much time in it most of the time. I use it when I need to and don't use it when I don't, and it's no big deal.
- But it's now always the go-to product people fire up when a new project or collaboration group comes together. It is now the default product for that type of communication. I couldn't name a viable competitor these days, and I've been online and working in tech for 20+ years, and have used IRC, Campfire and HipChat in the past, as well as others I don't remember.
So, none of this should be surprising. It's just a popular product that investors want to invest in. The valuation of other, different kinds of companies is totally irrelevant!