Slack and Atlassian Team Up on Chat Software
Dina Bass and Ellen Huet (via Hacker News):
Atlassian Corp. is selling its corporate chat software to rival Slack Technologies Inc. and taking a small stake in the startup, as they face greater competition from Microsoft Corp.
[…]
The deal gives Slack 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.
Stewart Butterfield’s team didn’t set out to make a chat app. Fresh off of Yahoo’s acquisition of his team’s photo-sharing app Flickr, he started a new company to build a game. His team hadn’t set out to make Flickr, after all—that, too, started as a game before noticing the game’s photo sharing tool was more popular than the game itself.
The game didn’t work out this time either. But on the side, they built a team chat app and pivoted to it instead.
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It's almost as if making software that is useful is more profitable than making games…
