Now that it has established itself beyond almost any doubt, its INVESTORS have established an $80M bet around those who make the company a core component of their strategy. Slack, which has very low burn, seems to have contributed to this fund but we can safely assume it was a small amount (if at all).
This is a sign of strength. We're still creating transformational companies with real revenue models, and these companies often facilitate other great companies. Tech is strong - valuations may be wrong one way or another, but tech is a great place to deploy capital.
The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
Why would you ever want to entrust a log of everything in your company to a third party service? Honestly curious.
Sure, you wouldn't have wanted to host the Apollo Program's lab notes on Soviet servers, but your cat selfie startup isn't quite as high-stakes as that.
Unless your cats are taking selfies on Mars. In which case, yeah, maybe developing an in-house chat service is worth the investment.
And then what if Slack gets hacked?
http://slackhq.com/post/114696167740/march-2015-security-inc...
Q: Were my messages taken/read/accessed?
If you have not been explicitly informed by us in a separate
communication that we detected suspicious activity involving
your Slack account, we are very confident that there was no
unauthorized access to any of your team data (such as messages
or files).
Yikes.
My perspective is framed by working with an EMS provider (PCB design & assembly) who does business in some highly regulated fields. We've started using Slack in the last couple months for some of our teams, and love it, but the idea of using it as a catch all strikes me as questionable.
If we used Slack for actually talking about the design/assembly portion of the business, and not just coordinating sales and marketing efforts, our customers would flip shit. And rightfully so.
At the end of the day, Slack is really useful, but I just don't see its use getting expanded much. At least for us. There's lots of stuff that just shouldn't get communicated across there. Coordination across the sides of the business that don't use Slack wasn't an issue in the first place, it was never really even considered afaik.
hn-username @zulip.org , or https://groups.google.com/group/zulip-devel
I find this to be a pretty interesting comparison. To the best of my knowledge, the entire stakes of the space race were "we might lose face".
Slack has said before that they're going to release a self hosted version at some point, so they have to know this is true. I think it makes sense for them to focus on the larger market (personal use and the SMB sector) for now though, even though the enterprise market will really make them money, because it's a much lower pressure space where they can afford to experiment.
Second (this is the point I think hn-like forums grossly underestimate) is because the alternatives are not really alternatives. In practice the likelihood of using Irc or some open source chat within a company with the same wide buy in as slack (or Skype etc) is 0.
The way to judge this is adoption.
It may not be quite as "slick" looking, but it works very well.
There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangouts was used by everyone else).
really? $7 per active user per month? How little do you pay your staff? At the median wage, save an average of 90 seconds a day per person through better communication and it pays for itself. And it's pretty likely any team members using slack are at a 2-10x salary multiplier on that, a $100K engineer only needs to save 24 seconds a day...
As a company we are not short of options: Slack (the dev team liked it, but no one else used it and even a large part of the dev team didn’t use it), Google Hangouts (what everyone else used), Skype (no one here uses it), and now HipChat—which everyone in the company uses. This means that we weren’t choosing between $0 and $7, but:
• $0 (Slack) which provided something most people in the company didn’t use, and whose limitations we in the dev team hit fairly quickly (both 10k message chat history and the limited number of integrations).
• $0 (HipChat) which provides something most people in the company do use, and whose limitations we have only recently hit (the last six weeks) and are not currently bothering us (the limitation is just the 25k message chat history).
• $0 (Google Hangouts). Not really $0, but we already pay for it as part of GApps so it’s an incremental $0. The group chat functions suck, and there’s no integrations to speak of, but it is available.
• $2/mau (HipChat). Adds video/voice calls and screen sharing and unlimited chat history. We only need the chat history, and that isn’t bothering us.
• $7/mau (Slack). Just removes the 10 service integration limitation (which IIRC was 5 a few months ago) and the chat history and a few other features we don’t really care about but nothing to write home about. There’s also the $12/mau level and they are working on an Enterprise level.
There is absolutely nothing that Slack provides—except a bigger bill—that HipChat doesn’t provide as well for less. (And, even if Slack were better than HipChat, it isn’t 3x better. Sorry.)
This isn’t to say that Slack is a bad thing, just that it’s stupidly expensive and/or limited compared to other hosted options.
This integration will allow you to receive updates in a Slack channel when an alert is triggered in New Relic. If you would like web, transaction, server, and mobile alerts to be posted in separate channels, you will need to set up separate integrations.
You can quickly hit the limit of ten integrations on the free service by having to set up a separate integration for each channel you want things to appear in. So…between GitHub, Bitbucket, Semaphore, a custom API integration, and a couple of others we ended up hitting the limit of 5 integrations (which is what the limit was as of May or June when we made the switch to HipChat; it’s double that now, but we’re starting to use even more tools, so it’s the same problem).
The lawyers and Congressional subcommittees are going to love this.
there are many, many offerings, like Google Apps Vault, to facilitate this.
Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always works how I want. I don't know if I'd call it a "revelation", but it's way better than any comparable product I've used.
[0] - I think HipChat recently added support for more granular notification settings, but I don't use it anymore. Also, it took over 3 years of this being their 1st or 2nd most requested feature before they addressed it, so I don't give them any credit for having it now.
[1] - They might get an email depending on their settings, but the HipChat app would never give a notification.
I dunno what notification settings hipchat is missing, but I'm not sure I need whatever it is missing. If I get tagged in a message, I get notified. Not sure that I want more than that. We have our deploys and a few other things hooked up to hipchat - at first when we started using it we went crazy with the third party integrations, than realized we didn't actually need all the noise the integration notifications gave us and turned a lot of it off.
We don't even pay for it and we get all of this.
Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?
A portion of the difficulty is owing to them using a web app in a SSB (single site browser) instead of a properly native desktop app.
I would love to be able to tile different channel/message windows, like we all did with IRC clients. Unfortunately this is fundamentally intractable in an SSB-architected app (including Electron, node-webkit, et al.).
Right now I'm not seeing a difference between this and HipChat but everyone seems to love it so I'll use it I'm just kinda indifferent and unimpressed with it thus far.
There, you now have sound and no banner-style alerts. You can customise a lot more and all apps that are able to do notifications go through there.
I first used HipChat more than 2 years ago, and the notifications worked perfectly and were as configurable as I wanted them to be. Offline notifications worked well.
We tried Slack when it came out and couldn't figure out why anyone would use it over HipChat, since it had no native client at the time.
A pattern I have seen in Slack that never happened in Hipchat is "Let's put notifications into the channel" > "ugh, this channel is impossible to talk in because of the notifications! let's create a new channel with no notifications". Kind've kills the point of notifications.
Aside: does 'notifications' need to become 'n10ns'?
UX/integrations/apps/speed/etc might all be the answer but it was visceral for me.
EDIT: This is a fairly recent problem. A month or two ago, I had never experienced this.
Folks on Macs had no idea what I was complaining about though. Go fig.
If I have to cycle through 4 rooms to get to the conversation I want, it can take seconds just to Option+UpArrow there.
Plus I can't manually reorder rooms as I like. I don't get why everyone talks about the Slack UX. Slack has snippets. Which I find mostly useless. Especially since they kill performance. But HipChat lets you reorder rooms as you see fit. Which is something I actually used and miss desperately.
At least Slack has finally gotten rid of the useless Channel vs Group distinction?
Often it's an innovation along some other dimension - process, business model, etc. In this case it's Slack's business model and "platform" strategy. Other tools like HipChat were just that, a tool. Slack is a platform in the sense that it enables businesses and developers to leverage and extend the platform, thereby adding additional value to the platform. This leads to so-called "Network Effects" where as more apps are built on the platform, the more valuable the platform and the more likely others will want to build on that platform, etc. in a virtuous cycle.
How many man-hours am I going to spend fracking around Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Sandstorm?
I think I'd much prefer just paying Slack to worry about that for my hypothetical new business with 10 employees. 6.67 * 10 * 12 = $800/annum.
Peanuts. Especially compared to the value of my time or my employees time.
1) Install Sandstorm (curl https://install.sandstorm.io | bash)
2) Install Rocket Chat (one click)
3) Set up a domain. Done
Regarding maintenance: I set it up 2 months ago and it's still running smoothly.
People underestimate the costs of "rolling your own" or even going FOSS. It's absolutely never "set it and forget it."
Most of these services that charge nominal fees ($5 - $100/mo) are interesting because you don't have to control your own support procedure and ostensibly they're build to scale.
Have you tried Sandstorm? It is in fact designed to be "set it and forget it" -- that's a major goal of the project. Everything auto-updates, you never have to edit config files, it can configure DNS and fetch/renew SSL certificates automatically, installing new apps takes one click, etc.
(Disclosure: I'm the lead developer.)
For individual users and small companies, single-machine Sandstorm is pretty reliable, but it's true we don't automate kernel updates yet (which will require scheduling reboots for off-hours). We'll add that eventually.
(Sorry for all the vaporware.)
That being said, to roll your own you'll need to run a box somewhere, select secure defaults, and keep on top of patching the box itself. It's not worth it unless you're really willing to spend the time to do it correctly.
That said, we plan to build a "Sandstorm OS" that auto-updates everything including the kernel, and doesn't even have an SSH interface (wouldn't be useful anyway).
Rather than putting more money into the mothership, you bet on external tools that will help the mothership grow.
It is also a way to reduce the costs of acquisition of the best integrations. If the majority of slack shareholders hold the majority of the shares in the best integration, it effectively lowers the price of acquisition to turn the tools built on slack into internal products/features.
$80M is the price they have to pay to go in monopoly position as soon as possible and become a platform.
Slack was founded in 2009 and has raised over $300M (yes, three hundred million dollars) [1]