Slack’s Hedge Against Its Own Failure
Stewart Butterfield, Slackโs co-founder and CEO, is the type of guy who convinces the quick traders to stick around. Rallying cries on the tannoy and long hours in the thick of it gets employees running through walls for him, revenue doubling every year, and millions of new offices turning to online workspaces.
Itโs been a meteoric rise. Heโs even a good sport with competitors. When Microsoft Teams launched into the e-workspace biz in 2016, he shouted, โcongrats! Itโs exciting to have competition!โ Heโs now cooperating with his competition (co-opetition!).
Slack will integrate with Teams to allow users to make video calls directly from the web app. Hello convenient online meetings. Goodbye wiring your webcam up to a shoddy third-party service. We donโt know when video calls will debut exactly, but it’s probably soon. A wise idea, just in time.
Microsoft Teams is the harder puncher, with over 44 million offices signed up. Slack only has 12 million, but smartly, it’s integrating with Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint as a hedge in case that client disparity widens. It’s riding Microsoft’s coattail. Plus, now is the perfect time to reveal remote calling.
A quarter of the worldโs population is quarantined, with millions working from home. Slack has seen an enormous surge in demand as a result, two million offices joining in nine days.
Butterfield believes growth will revert to the mean, and he knows Microsoft Teams and Zoom are growing too. However, Slack shares have still rocketed 60% in ten days. Invstr sentiment is through the roof, 94% buying, so you can’t argue with that, and some think video calling will set a lower bound for the stock price right around current levels!