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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

And yet sometimes a small team really could do it. I spent years complaining about MSN/AOL/Skype etc. and talking about how a small team could build a better messenger in a week, but we didn't really believe it. Then Slack actually took that possibility seriously, and look at the results.

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Sure, they were a small team in the beginning. Google too... Now they probably have more than 500 employees. (They had 385 in february 2016: http://uk.businessinsider.com/slack-ceo-worried-about-growin...)

Slack also jsut recently hit 3 million users. 100 million people were using AOL Messenger at it's peak, and 12 million were using ICQ when AOL bought Mirabillas.

Whatsapp is a good example too.

They didn't build it in a week.

Yes, but that's something a lot of people are arguing here and I agree. The "I could build in a week" is ridiculous, but "I could what this 1000 engineers company do that with a small team of 10, in a lean way in 18 months" is very frequent in the market.

MSN and AOL come from the 90s, and Skype is from 2003. Slack is from 2013 - the web has more than doubled in age for Slack compared to the others. Computers are ridiculously faster, browsers are more mature, language libraries are more complete.

Slack also took much longer than a week, and to be honest, the actual chat part of slack is pretty meh. Where Slack unbelievably shines is in the buttery-smooth onboarding process and the management around the chat accounts.

git is a great example of this.

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