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Slack is Buying HipChat and Stride From Atlassian (bloomberg.com) 67

Posted by msmash from the big-fish-small-fish dept.
Atlassian is selling its corporate chat software to rival Slack Technologies and taking a small stake in the startup, as they face greater competition from Microsoft. From a report: Slack will pay an undisclosed amount over the next three years to acquire Atlassian's HipChat and Stride products, chief executives from both companies said. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield described both the payment and the investment by Atlassian in his company as "nominal" in financial terms but important strategically. He declined to elaborate on the former. The deal gives Slack, valued at north of $5 billion, more customers, most of whom pay a monthly service fee, and allows Atlassian to exit a business that failed to generate as much demand as expected. Combining the two businesses bolsters Slack at a time when Microsoft is pushing a rival product called Teams to some 135 million Office cloud customers. Microsoft introduced a free version of Teams this month in a bid to lure people who don't subscribe to Office 365.
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Slack is Buying HipChat and Stride From Atlassian More

Slack is Buying HipChat and Stride From Atlassian

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  • Very Surprising Move (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Slack is Buying HipChat

    I really didn't expect Patrick Volkerding to make such a purchase.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Oh you old geezer. Slack != Slackware. I'll get you your metamucil now.

    • Considering Patrick is broke [linuxquestions.org] (Why isn't this news?) he couldn't afford it:

      I've been mulling over exactly how to tell you all this, and I guess this is as good a place as any. The store has been ripping me off horribly, and I'm very nearly broke. I have no evidence that they've ever done anything with donations besides line their own pockets. I've not been paid any money by them in two years. That was upon the 14.2 release (and followed another long period of time with no income). The 14.2 release generated

  • Atlassian is a Scourge (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If there's one company who can go lower than Microsoft in terms of support and product functionality, it's Atlassian.

    • All their services are based on Java+Tomcat and the installation process is clunky and annoying. Not to mention the Tomcat containers occasionally die and need to be restarted.

      I find it mindblowing that large businesses depend on this stuff during day to day operations.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luthair ( 847766 )
        I suspect you may be doing something wrong, we have very large installs of Jira & Confluence without issue /shrug
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • I have to agree. I complain about their tools, but truth be told they actually are some of the best out there.

          With that said, some of their stuff like SourceTree really is awful. Luckily it's just a GUI wrapper for Mercurial/Git so there's plenty of alternatives.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Atlassian Jira for Agile Development. Install their software package on your Java server today and watch it get overloaded when you have more than 40 people on your team.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I support a Jira instance with over 10,000 users. It handles 1000 concurrent users with no major performance problems.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by _merlin ( 160982 )

          But they just keep removing useful functionality and making the JavaScript slower. It used to be useful, but they seem to be intent on ensuring it isn't any more.

      • Then you're doing it wrong, our instance has ten years worth of issues and is in constant use by 1,000+ users. Badly written bots or extensions can cause problems, but the core platform works well when deployed correctly.

  • A great step in right direction! (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @04:57PM (#57015304)

    At this rate, Shitty IRC will be as good as IRC in the next decade! ;)

  • I'm an old fart who once wrote JCL from scratch, but am I the only one who went "Who, what, what, who?"

    • Re:Anyone else (Score:5, Informative)

      by Peter P Peters ( 5350981 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @09:19PM (#57016688)

      I'm an old fart who once wrote JCL from scratch, but am I the only one who went "Who, what, what, who?"

      Allow me to try fill you (and anyone else) in.
      Team Chat is a thing that when used properly within the right scope pretty much replaces the olde worlde email as the primary communication platform
      Slack is the cool player in the team chat space. In Digital-land everything is Agile and Devops and modular and distributed, so open team chat is the best method to collaborate rather than email. These new team chat platforms are not just apps like IRC, Skype, Messenger etc, they have all sorts of useful new features such and integrations, APIs, Bots, wiki, document storage, search etc.
      Atlassian is company that got popular in developer world for creating newer Agile type tools such as Confluence (wiki), Jira (issue tracking), Bamboo (CI/CD), and Bamboo (repo). Hipchat is their version of team chat.
      Microsoft as usual realised late the Slack and Atlassian had a potential game changer that threatend Skype and Outlook/Exchange so created their product 'Teams' to try and do the same thing. Teams is a lot more shit, but MS have market power which a lot of the times means more than good products.
      I assume that Slack and Atlassian saw this threat so have joined forces to try fight Microsoft.

      • As someone who thinks 75% of cases where email is used would be better using something like usenet[1], do these things leave a trace?

        Because if they don't, they're useless.

        Monday. Marketing: Make it all purple!
        Tuesday: Your boss: Why did you make it purple? Marketing are throwing a fit.

        [1] Yeah, first rule...

        • As someone who thinks 75% of cases where email is used would be better using something like usenet[1], do these things leave a trace?

          Because if they don't, they're useless.

          Monday. Marketing: Make it all purple! Tuesday: Your boss: Why did you make it purple? Marketing are throwing a fit.

          [1] Yeah, first rule...

          Yeah it's persistent, but the point of it is for high productivity, dynamic let's-make-stuff-work type teams, not cover your ass type culture where everyone's primary function seems to be to find someone else to blame. If your boss is a cunt then it's probably best to stick with email.

          • for high productivity, dynamic let's-make-stuff-work type teams

            1% of teams who think they're all that actually are.

            If your boss is a cunt

            I don't see the relevance of that.

            • for high productivity, dynamic let's-make-stuff-work type teams

              1% of teams who think they're all that actually are.

              And those 1% need better tools, hence why Slack was created

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Slack is the cool player in the team chat space. In Digital-land everything is Agile and Devops and modular and distributed, so open team chat is the best method to collaborate rather than email. These new team chat platforms are not just apps like IRC, Skype, Messenger etc, they have all sorts of useful new features such and integrations, APIs, Bots, wiki, document storage, search etc.

        And ensuring you have the latest and greatest hardware. I've never seen a chat client consume 30% CPU resources before, for

    • I'm an old fart who once wrote JCL from scratch, but am I the only one who went "Who, what, what, who?"

      Ironically, I'm a mechanical engineer with very little software development experience (aside from some data processing), and I knew exactly what this article was talking about.

      I'm usually the one out of the loop here.

      Now I have to go put a Jira ticket in.

  • After reading the post, I laughed out loud because I have been working as an engineer for 20+ years and never really heard of any of those companies or "products".

    Guess I will get back to work just writing code that actually makes people money.

    • Atlassian is pretty big in the cloud development space for bitbucket (as a Github competitor) and their Jira web based tracking system.

    • After reading the post, I laughed out loud because I have been working as an engineer for 20+ years and never really heard of any of those companies or "products".

      Probably says more about you than them.

      Guess I will get back to work just writing code that actually makes people money.

      Atlassian went from Startup to $10B by selling developer tools and Slack went to $5B just because of their Team Chat platform. I get that not everyone chooses to use these products, but having some smug anonymous internet user guy not knowing who they doesn't make their products any less useful.

  • why not use mattermost or any of the others (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    why use a proprietary persistent chat thing like slack or hipchat?
    why not use any of the open source equivalents.

    Because it is "Hip"? or for some specific features.

    Personally, I I have distaste for Atlasian. Especially how every trivial feature is brought by some expensive plugin from some questionably source. Compare to the breath of plugins available in Jenkins...

         

    • Re:why not use mattermost or any of the others (Score:5, Insightful)

      by piojo ( 995934 ) on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:09AM (#57017238)

      The main reason to use one of those proprietary programs is if it gives all the features you need and other programs don't. Some of the ones that are important to me:

      - can send code without it being parsed to smileys
      - can attach files to a message (and can paste an image from the clipboard) and have an attachment preview visible in the chat client
      - being able to edit sent messages for a few minutes
      - notifications must be compatible not only with everyone's OS, but with everyone's personal attention/focus traits
      - system should receive and hold messages while a user is offline
      - tagging a user by name should get their attention somehow
      - program should be able to search through message history
      - markdown formatting is a plus

      For work, even a single missing feature is a problem.

  • And here I was hoping that Microsoft taking over the market for 'Slack' would mean that those guys would go back to working for Tiny Speck and they would bring Glitch back online.

    Do it, Stoot!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nadass ( 3963991 )
      Ahh, Glitch, what a game!

      Microsoft's Teams is really a repackaged Yammer with better Skype and SharePoint/OneNote integrations. It's solid, and when the bundle can be obtained for FREE, the cost-benefit is a no-brainer compared to all of the limitations of the free Slack offerings.

  • Jitsi Status? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PineHall ( 206441 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @06:04PM (#57015694)

    Jitsi [jitsi.org], an open source audio and video platform for conferencing, was bought and further developed by Atlassian. Some code from Jitsi is in Stride. Was is part of the purchase? Are the Atlassian developers still working for Atlassian? Are they working for Slack now? Or have they been let go?

    Check out Jitsi Meet [jitsi.org], the open sourced video conference product.

  • I've never used Slack, but it CANNOT be anywhere near as bad as HipChat. 50% of messages people try to send will turn gray and show the progress indicator, meaning there's another 50% chance it will end up saying "Failed" with option to Retry or Cancel. Sometimes I end up seeing the same message 4 times in a row from a coworker, because it showed "Failed" on their end when it really didn't fail.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Are you using their cloud version? We have a couple hundred on HC and sending messages only really fails when the user's internet is having issues.

    • A co-worker once DOSd our hipchat channel by posting a huge image file. We had to delete the channel and rebuild it from scratch. Atlassian need to face the fact that they are terrible at software.

  • For a horrible moment I thought Atlassian was buying slack.

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