Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Super, super user-friendly and Skype’s very similar. You know, I think it was more a consumer product and the business model was more for consumers than enterprises but it was the first… I don’t know if it was the first but it was a great example of a crossover product that businesses… I mean, I do many calls with startups I do as Skype video chats. Yeah. I wouldn’t say that it was the wrong product. I think that video, audio served a different purpose than what Slack is, a glorified IRC chat. You know, slack is expanding to become communication in the fiber that exists between employees that’s more than just chat. But that’s really their core competency. And the question is who will own communication in enterprises going forward and what form will it be and we’ll these things be combined. Like, are we going to see a Skype-like product and a Slack-like product merge, and are we going to see that happen. You know, are we going to see Slack get Skype-ified and Skype get Slack-ified at the same time. Well, I think that these things are both happening. But it’s interesting, you know, the path that Microsoft has kind of taken since the acquisition with Skype – we were talking about this before the show – is not a unified path. I mean there’s Skype for X, Skype for Y, Skype product derivative Z. It’s very confusing whereas like unclear what product that Microsoft and Skype are offering today that I would use for what use case. Whereas you look at Slack on the other hand, it's just Slack, like there is one product.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.