Lex, the conversation interface that powers the Echo, already has a Slack integration. The consensus is that voice-the commonly used shorthand for voice-activated devices and other conversational machines-promises to be the most transformative technology since the smartphone. Silicon Valley is, at the moment, obsessed with this technology. (You may know the Echo as “Alexa,” which is the word users must say to get the device’s attention.) As of January, Amazon had sold more than 11 million of its Echo home device, according to a report by the investment banker Morgan Stanley. And it seems to be doing pretty well so far. Amazon is one of the major players in the fight for dominance in the realm of voice-activated artificial intelligence. The Bounty Hunters Protecting Your Slack Account Adrienne LaFranceīut the more intriguing explanation of Amazon’s interest has to do with one of the company’s even bolder visions of the future. It reported an eye-popping $12.2 billion in sales last year, and more than $3 billion in profit. AWS, with its global server farms, is the backbone of the commercial web.
(Neither Amazon nor Slack returned requests for comment early Thursday morning).įor one thing, it’s easy to see why Amazon would want to add a popular corporate communications tool to its suite of offerings to Amazon Web Services customers, Amazon’s widely used cloud-computing platform. But Amazon’s possible interest also signals some clear ways of thinking about how the company wants to position itself in the future. Remember, Amazon is not just an online retailer Amazon Web Services is already a major force in the corporate world. So in the broader sense, the idea that Amazon is flirting with a Slack takeover is just another chapter in the Office Wars of Silicon Valley.
Even for Silicon Valley’s most formidable companies, a multibillion-dollar acquisition isn’t taken lightly. Instead, it launched a competing collaborative group-chat service called Teams in November. ( The Atlantic has used the platform since 2014.) Last year, Microsoft was considering scooping up Slack for itself. It’s quite popular in American newsrooms-including at The Washington Post, which the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns. As of last year, Slack claimed 77 Fortune 100 companies among its clients. It now has about 5 million daily users, including more than 1 million paying users. The startup has enjoyed extraordinary growth since its 2013 debut. It’s no surprise that tech giants have taken interest in Slack, with its elegant, user-friendly interface that keeps employees ever-connected to work via their smartphones.
A deal could give Slack a valuation of $9 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Amazon is rumored to be mulling a purchase of Slack, the fast-growing corporate chat platform.
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