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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

I really like Slack but I think it will be troubled in the short/long term in the same way Dropbox is now. It is innovative but many others will catch up it soon.

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It has a great getting started experience and some fun gimmicks but most of the innovation was cloned from Flowdock anyways. What you are seeing is the power of a famous CEO and an awesome marketing engine powered by an experience VC.

And sometimes that's the difference between making a buck, and making a business.

In my experience, HipChat / Jira / Confluence is a nice stack to work with. What advantages does Slack offer over these?

Jira is definitely a pleasure to use. We only just started it a while ago and I'm often pleasantly surprised by the things I can do with it and just how convenient it is to work with. It's quite a change given that we previously used Mantis.

I am not saying that Slack is better/worse than HipChat, I am just referring to its commercial success that I think is related to its UX. I think its success will be in trouble when new or improved offerings appear.

Slack and Dropbox have pretty different business models from my vantage point. Slack entered the market as an enterprise product vs. consumer. Slack was built for collaboration from day 1, so there is some amount of lock in (change management in an organization is tough).

I look at Slack as being more like a hybrid of the best parts of Box + Dropbox... They have the good parts of Box's business model and the UX quality of Dropbox. And fortunately for them, they aren't in a market where the price is driven largely by the cost of the commodity hardware underneath them.

I have been saying for a long time the real target of Slack is Dropbox, since it adds a ton of valuable context around files shared.

Yeah, I imagine they will drive right towards each other. Dropbox is trying to get better at the whole collaboration / enterprise use case. And I have no clue about Slack's plans around document handling, but feels like a natural progression for their product. I don't think they do a great job there right now, but even something as simple as being able to add tags to uploaded documents (as opposed to free-text subject lines) could go a long way.

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