Slack Partners With Amazon To Take On Microsoft Teams (theverge.com) 29
Slack is partnering with Amazon in a multi-year agreement that means all Amazon employees will start to use Slack. The Verge reports: The deal comes just as Slack faces increased competition from Microsoft Teams, and it will also see Slack migrate its voice and video calling features over to Amazon's Chime platform alongside a broader adoption of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon's roll out of Slack to all of its employees is a big part of the deal, thanks to an enterprise-wide agreement. It's not immediately clear how many of Amazon's 840,000 employees will be using Slack, though. Up until today, Slack's biggest customer has been IBM, which is rolling out Slack to its 350,000 employees.
While Slack has long used AWS to power parts of its chat app, it's now committing to using Amazon's cloud services as its preferred partner for storage, compute, database, security, analytics, machine learning, and future collaboration features. The deal means it's unlikely we'll see Slack turn to Microsoft's Azure cloud services or Google Cloud to power parts of its service in the foreseeable future. [...] Slack and Amazon are also promising better product integration and interoperability for features like AWS Chatbot, a service that pushes out Slack channel alerts for AWS instances. In the coming months, Slack and AWS will improve its Amazon AppFlow integration to support bi-directional transfer of data between AWS services and Slack channels.
While Slack has long used AWS to power parts of its chat app, it's now committing to using Amazon's cloud services as its preferred partner for storage, compute, database, security, analytics, machine learning, and future collaboration features. The deal means it's unlikely we'll see Slack turn to Microsoft's Azure cloud services or Google Cloud to power parts of its service in the foreseeable future. [...] Slack and Amazon are also promising better product integration and interoperability for features like AWS Chatbot, a service that pushes out Slack channel alerts for AWS instances. In the coming months, Slack and AWS will improve its Amazon AppFlow integration to support bi-directional transfer of data between AWS services and Slack channels.
Re: (Score:3)
Amazon has 840,000 employees worldwide, only about 120,000 of them work in the Fulfillment Centers. Programmers, marketers, logistics specialists, security specialists (like me), accountants, network engineers, DBAs, they'll all be using it.
MS basically free (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of this stems from the MS effective monopoly. MS at one time had the ability to go into any office that used machines that could run MS and sue the company if they did not have a license for software that was found on the machine, even if the software was used. Remember that MS once got a cut of every computer that could run windows, even if it did not.
But it also derives from the fact that no one really seems to want to be in this space. Google had a very good set of office products, but Google never invested in end user customer service, and never really took the suite seriously. More critically, they regularly release products, then cancel or depreciate them if they are not service the core data mining business.
Obviously many tech companies do not run on MS products the way that other companies do, and they already use slack. But the reason they do so is because they are looking for a free product and as a tech company can support the product themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously many tech companies do not run on MS products the way that other companies do
Most do actually, since it's bundled with their office/outlook suite... which almost everyone uses except those poor souls who are forced to use lotus notes at IBM. We moved to teams because frankly slack is VERY expensive and teams was "free" since we were already using their other stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, Notes + Domino server was pretty good; you could develop some great applications, that actually worked. Not like the nightmare that is Sharepoint / Outlook
Not free (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
That program even sucks more.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. But only because M$ "improved" it. The original versions worked fine. Just like the original versions of Skype 'normal'. Now everyone uses WhatsApp (personal) and Zoom (pro - if they have a choice). But of course as M$ tightens its stranglehold over corp users with Office 360 (which sucks donkey balls, BTW), they're pushing "Teams" (which is pretty unremarkable). Of course, zoom shooting themselves in the foot with security issues did not help.
Re: (Score:1)
The difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Slack is a replacement for email, and it also does voice and video.
Teams is a replacement for Skype and Microsoft Messenger, and it integrates tightly with Office.
Re:The difference (Score:4, Interesting)
Slack is a replacement for email
But it isn't.
If the only people you email are those in your company, then maybe you can make that argument. If you work with people outside your company, you have to connect to different Slack servers. The point of email is that it's distributed by nature. Slack, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they all want you to centralize on their services and be beholden to them forever. That is unequivocally, absolutely, 100% against what the Internet means.
I do understand the convenience of Slack, but let's not kid ourselves. It's a cleaned up and branded IRC, which is itself a distributed system in the Internet mold. If Slack and Amazon are working together, that just makes me want to use Slack less.
Re: (Score:2)
If you work with people outside your company, you have to connect to different Slack servers.
Have you even used Slack? Connect to different servers? No idea what you're talking about. Half of the traffic on my company's Slack workspace is third-party suppliers and providers at different companies.
Re: (Score:3)
What, do you mean being able to create a "Teams" meeting in Outlook so the calendar entry auto launches Teams when you click on the link. Big fucking deal.
Or do you mean the green dot that indicates someone is online. Again big fucking deal.
And if you mean using SharePoint or OneDrive as storage. Why the fuck would I want a front end to SharePoint or OneDrive. Tal
Re: (Score:2)
^^^^This.
PM me when we have truly "universal inbox" (remember that over-hyped crap from the 1990s?), the ability to automagically schedule meetings with team members that have been defined for that topic / document, work collaboratively and seamlessly on a document simultaneously, not have to worry about where the hell a document is stored, grant access to people to SharePoint (internal or external), automatically create an approval workflow for a document based on a table of approvers in the document itsel
Re: (Score:2)
Don't tell that to Beelzebos, lets just feed him to the Borg and be done with it.
I think I see how Bezos does it (Score:2)
You look at him and say "It's Elmer Fudd! He's funny, and no danger to anyone! Ha ha let's watch his crazy antics!".
But then, before you know it, he somehow is holding the title to your small intestine and spleen.
Careful there Slack... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Slack is already going to adopt Amazon's Chime as its communications platform and the rest of their services will provide a nice income without the overhead of managing the customers, there's no need for them to try to reproduce something that they're not specialists in.
Re: (Score:2)
Might be a devilâ(TM)s bargain.
It is OK to say His name, He isn't going to appear in a puff of smoke.
Slack? (Score:2)
Who they?
Evil (Score:2)
The Devil against Beelzebub. Hard to know who to cheer for.
Re: (Score:2)
Begun the Clone Wars have.
Compete with Teams? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It is one of these, "until you've tried the alternatives" situations. It is harder than it looks.
Really (Score:2)
Good Morning (Score:1)
So? (Score:2)
Large companies (and small I guess? I can't speak for those) that use Microsoft Teams also pretty much have an entire suite of Microsoft products as well for their users.
Who cares if you make a better MS Teams? Everyone already knows it's garbage, but it's what we have because Microsoft is just what the large corporations are going with.
Good luck getting them to replace what's already there.
I don't see this going anywhere.