Today, June 15, 2017, AroniSmartInvest in Action Sentiment Analysis has flagged Slack as one of the most interesting companies (see the sentiment cloud attached) to watch in upcoming days, and probably months and years.
Slack's Story
Before it was questions like: Slack? What is Slack? Then followed Slack? for workplace chatting? Then it became the talk of the employees in conversations: yeah, Slack, of course?
Since then, the privately owned and start-up Slack Technologies, or just Slack, has become the standard workplace chat platform in major companies.
According to most tech media and surveys, Slack, created in 2013, has become the fastest growing tech startup in recent memories. With more than 5 million daily users, including at least 1 million paying users, Slack has become or slowly becoming the preferred chatting, sharing, and on line communication workplace platform of several big corporations, including, according to Slack, 77 Fortune 100 companies.
Facebook tried to compete with Slack when it launched "Workplace" in 2016. Slack responded with a new feature, Highlights. Slack now allows users to communicate and work more efficiently with the ability to focus on the most important items, collaborate, and catch up on anything they miss. Slack also expanded less commercial uses where Slack groups can discuss everything from podcasts to role playing games. Slack focuses on how teams work and collaborate. Workplace took the social networks approach. Slack appears to be winning the competition.
Acquision Rumors
In late 2016, Microsoft was rumored to be thinking about acquiring Slack. Instead, it launched Teams, a collaborative group-chat service. What happened? Teams has so far failed to catchup for small businesses, freelancers, and agile organizations. Teams was a feature of Microsoft Office, Slack is product with many features.
Now, stories have been spreading about an impending $9 billion acquisition of Slack by Amazon. It appears that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may have been using Slack in his own companies, including The Washington Post and Amazon. Amazon's Echo home device Alexa, has also Slack integration.
Several Google’s apps integrate with Slack, even though Google has its own Hangouts Chat.
If Amazon acquires Slack, it will be a huge technology disrupting integration. Think about Amazon e-commerce, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Cloud, Amazon Music, Echo's Alexa, Amazon delivery, all connected with Slack. Slack acquisition by Amazon would also allow Amazon to challenge Microsoft Office and Google Gsuite in the business productivity softwares area.
Slack, on top of being one of the fast growing startups, is among the most diverse tech companies in Sillicon Valley.
According to Slack statistics (see here), 45% of all managers at Slack are women, 4% of the workers are African-American, 19% Asian, 7% Mixed-Race/Other 10.3% , members of the LGBTQ community.
AroniSmartInvest in Action Sentiment analysis of the stories of Amazon's Slack acquisition has, as shown on the tag cloud, estimed a positivity index of 86 overall, pointing to a general enthusiasm about the acquisition.
