Hacker News Reader

I guess my question is, why use Slack at all when you have Quip?

Quip has chatrooms that work like Slack (or IRC, or any other group chat in the history of the Internet).

I guess because most conversations are not about documents?

But Quip's chat rooms are just that. They don't have any forced relation to the documents, and can be set up just like Slack (as far as I can see).

So what's the different use case?

Oh ok, I didn't know that. I tried Quip when it first came out. Anyway, even if functionally they are similar, the Slack ecosystem is too strong now.

Maybe... Sometimes the initially strong ecosystem doesn't end up being the winning one. Apple had a huge headstart in GUI desktops but Microsoft nearly trounced them.

(I don't see Quip having such an advantage -- although Quip seems like a perfect fit for Microsoft's product portfolio... Hmm...)

Oh ok, I didn't know that.

Positioning can definitely hurt a product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com