Comment by kragen
8 months ago
Slack's business model has always been that you give them all your most critical data and they sell you access to it. This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware, before people got better at making backups.
You probably should expect large bill increases over time from ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably the nature of the category is such that you should expect it of most of them.
When switching providers is impossible, the pricing of maximum profit for the provider is the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero. Slack presumably doesn't have quite enough information about their clients' businesses to calibrate this exactly, but if they can approach it approximately, they'll make a lot of money; even though they drive some of their customers out of business, those losses are compensated for by the higher revenues from their surviving customers.
I was cancelling my annual slack premium last month and had to click to acknowledge that some of my members are using the AI features and they will lose access to them.
They then offered me a discount and if I refused there was another checkbox where I accepted that I was about to cause disruption for other staff.
I was tempted to take the deal until that point, but I'm the only member of the organisation and I absolutely do not use their AI
That sounds quite a bit like fraud.
Pretty sure it's perfectly legal marketing at least in the US.
13 replies →
It's just incredible that billion dollar companies are copying the dark patterns from last decade's shadiest developers.
On the contrary it is extremely natural that they do this - when the only thing that matters is revenue and morals are just a roadblock this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do
What's the difference? Ransomware gangs aren't evil, they just want to make easy money and don't care about morals. That is also the definition of a for-profit company.
Fixed! Disabled those messages wherever org size = 1. Thank you, Slack*
(*not actually Slack just annoyed by this scheme, boo)
Oh so there’s a history of dark patterns too? Colour me surprised.
> You probably should expect large bill increases over time [...] Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably [...]
Sooner or later, expect any decent ones to be bought out, by orgs determined to "unlock value" (or whatever the current PE-speak for fully exploiting ransomware is).
I'm not following what "the pricing where the buyer is exactly zero" means. Typo?
Thank you for the correction! I meant to type "the pricing where the buyer's remaining profit is exactly zero", and I'm not sure whether I accidentally deleted some text or what. I was pretty tired.
Not the OP but I'm fairly certain that if you change "buyer" to "difference between the charge and the switching cost" you'll understand their intended meaning.
"This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware"
This is basically it. Nobody frames it this way. But once you see it lol.. your eyes open up to what really goes on behind the scenes at Slack et al.
This can be generalised to a lot of SaaS