[thogenhaven]

Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft.

And based on the numbers in the article, it seems like Atlassian had less than 4% marketshare (Slack expects single digit growth - and assuming they have around 50% of the market)

This deals seems like the last step before a full - and in competitive terms logical - merger between Slack and Atlassian.

[sithadmin]

>Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft.

That's pretty dependent on which way Slack decides to go in terms of facilitating large Enterprises' needs for absolute control of and visibility into communications platforms. Monitoring and governance of Slack is, at present, a goddamned nightmare. The third party tools that currently exist are, in my experience, somewhat unreliable, and all of them are crippled by the fact that Slack's API drastically limits visibility into the platform. I've worked with more than one very large Enterprise customer with special compliance needs whose Slack instance(s) are one foul-up away from having a regulator rain down fines/sanctions, and in every case Slack is pretending like the issues don't exist while my customers shove their head in the sand. And compliance aside: the Slack API doesn't even have methods in place to deal with things like emoji-react trolling on read-only announcement channels, and a plethora of other little features required to control toxic and obnoxious behaviors.

I love Slack to death, but it's not an Enterprise product yet.