Dear Microsoft
slackhq.com
slackhq.com
This whole idea, from writing the letter to publishing it as a full page ad in the paper, seems bizarre and misguided.
That's why it is so great. Of course, only time will tell if their display of strength is of fear or confidence.
They could have sent a cake. Or took an ad like the ones Spielberg and Lucas did when the other broke box office records.
Link to Times ad: https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/793811616760496128
I understand that Slack's valuation is based in part on the idea that they can convert large portions of the enterprise market, and that Microsoft has a pretty great track record of burning that market down. It makes sense that they'd want to write something to maintain their claim on the enterprise market.
But this piece can't decide who it's talking to, and so it's probably pretty cringe-y to everyone.
Once they are on Office 365 for email and Office, they basically get Skype, Yammer, and all the other things thrown in for free. I'm sure that this will fold into that same pattern, assuming it's, say, 75% as good as Slack.
The founder put his name on it https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/793811616760496128
Agreed this is a move by Slack that is very disappointing to me. I thought better of them.
Wow, and folks give Apple a hard time about acting like they invented stuff. The hubris of Slack thinking there's some moral high ground for them to take is astounding.
But their post does have me searching the web for Microsoft's offering. Because I don't know what the hell Slack is on about, and I'm thinking what Microsoft has might be better than the disjointed web-app-in-a-native-wrapper thing Slack has going.
EDIT: found it, thanks to whalesalad's post in this thread. Okay, given that the MSFT client looks a hell of a lot like Slack, I can see where they're coming from. Still, it strikes me as someone who wrote the ubiquitous to-do app and then buys an ad in the NYT when Apple includes the Reminders app in iOS, welcoming Apple as they "define this new product category".
You know, I really should think about my recent experience with a company's product before making comparisons. Because I forgot about the Skype app (don't use Skype much, but their recent releases for Mac were bad), and a few other recent examples that were less than stellar. So I guess a good experience with the Microsoft product isn't a given lately (I'm looking at you, Lync for Mac).
It has its pros & cons... one nice thing is that if you use the desktop app most of the time, using the web UI on the go doesn't feel like much of an adjustment. It has basically the full power of the desktop app because it's the same UI code.
As others have mentioned, it will probably be an Electron app. But VS Code is also an Electron app and most people have positive things to say about it, many Atom users say it is a lot faster than Atom. So I feel like there's a decent chance that Microsoft actually makes a good Electron app here.
We have over a thousand people on our forums helping each other out, people are building installers for Mattermost in Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Docker, etc. (just web search to find them).
We're also getting help writing and updating our deployment docs (https://docs.mattermost.com/).
Slack is seriously user-centric, all the way down to how they run their Twitter.
It is the single most annoying thing about some projects - I get it, IRC doesn't show your emojis, but it just works.
That being said I do believe that Slack is a poor choice of medium for a free project, mainly because of the limited history and no publicly searchable transcripts.
Can't seem to find the link, but you can see they will give discounts for non profits, up to 250 users. - https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833
Its a poor medium, as it locks projects into a walled garden ecosystem.
I guess I'm also apart of the problem. :P
Come back to IRC, FOSS!
(You might consider other aspects of openness more important, of course.)
Ugh, really hate work going this way. Slack is an all-day all-hands meeting with no agenda. I miss async email.
I'm no big IRC user, but when I joined some of the open source IRC channels, there was activity all the time; how is that less distracting?
Also, do not disturb and 'quit' are always an option.
MSN/Skype/etc. are all IM-style clients, so you have to actually select a person to talk to rather than just dropping an @everyone. They vaguely support group chat but it's not the default. I would like Slack a lot more if they emphasized individual and ad-hoc group/topic chats. They support them, of course, but large channels are the main focus and the UI steers you there.
I'm not sure anybody really did, but you could...
Actually, the terrible UI may well be a benefit. I've worked in a company with heavy investment in Slack, too, and its ease of use I think contributed heavily to the low S:N ratio of channels with high population. Lync's group chat is so painful to use that, unless it's important, we don't.
I treat slack as an async alternative to voice and video... maybe I'm doing it wrong?
Through network effects and corporate norms.
Gee I wonder why...
This piece would've been better released after Microsoft announced something IMO. Timing seems wrong.
We only use a mix of Microsoft Lync and Lotus Sametime.
You're hanging onto that still? We used to build a number of products for Sametime, but IBM appears to have written it off and is hemorrhaging customers jumping ship, to Lync/Skype mostly, or Jabber, to a lesser extent.
Also, if you want to talk about "open solutions" then make your own solution open.
their only hope is what they hope for in this writing, MS f's up somewhere in the process and create another yammer. I hope they won't, competition is healthy. ;)
Use it every day. And it's always unpleasant.
Why does it say "New mentions" when I wasn't actually mentioned, just someone said something in some other chat.
Also, I find it pretty tedious to switch back and forth between discussions.
In terms of UI design, I suspect they don't have a good team.
Maybe it just tries to please too many people?
"In computing, an open platform describes a software system which is based on open standards, such as published and fully documented external application programming interfaces (API) that allow using the software to function in other ways than the original programmer intended, without requiring modification of the source code. Using these interfaces, a third party could integrate with the platform to add functionality.[1] The opposite is a closed platform."
An open platform can be closed source. A good example is Microsoft Windows.
[1] https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat...
Some people like me see the discrete accounts as a definite positive though!
We are a 100% remote company and we use Slack and Teamspeak as our primary communication tools. Our biggest problem with Slack is when multiple conversations are happening in the same channel. There should be a way to segregate those convos into separate "theads", without having to make new channels.
That would be a huge win for whatever chat product can solve this pain point. Unfortunately, innovation is probably not a huge payoff since the competition would simply copy the feature =(
Looks like Microsoft's Teams product also has threads. Because not having threads is insane.
Honestly though, that's hilarious.
Okay so, definitely not applying to work for Slack anytime soon. This is not the kind of attitude I would want to support.
Slack
I also have irssi open. it has 7 IRC networks, and ~ 120 channels - its taking 144MB of RAM.
Completely pointless. To think someone got paid to write that shite...
Try sending them an email - it's a better medium (pun-intended) for this, than an open opinion piece pushed to the general public.
Unless of course, you're marketing, in which case honesty can be a much better policy.
Lync has a stupid mutex that prevents this.
Skype for business works. IBM stuff doesn't
I guess if your only product is a chat platform, how much can you innovate in this space in 2016? I'd be desperate too.
Now that Slack has posted this, I intend to give this a look and a trial (hopefully it does not require an O365 subscription) as it just tells me that Slack is either annoyed or scared of Skype teams (either one being a good enough reason for consumers to check it out)
I'd personally probably rather look at something open source and self hosted, if I was going to move away from Slack.
The only real thing that I image Microsoft Teams would be able to do that Slack can't, is integrate with MS tools better and easier.
If you want to do something like this right, the way to do it is the way Data General wanted to do it when IBM, then the 800-pound gorilla of the computer world, entered into DG's minicomputer market. (Which is described in Tracy Kidder's classic book The Soul of a New Machine (https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316...)
The ad they proposed was much simpler -- a full page that said only the following:
They say IBM's entry into minicomputers will legitimize the market.
The bastards say, welcome.
I find it ironic that Slack calls Microsoft out for making something like Slack for the enterprise.
I sincerely hope one day we'll have something like https://matrix.org/ and https://riot.im/ as the standard.
I ask because I've been an employee at multiple start ups before and seen this kind of situation happen multiple times. I have not yet seen a response that gets received well. And silence gets perceived by existing customers as weakness or fear.
Honestly slack doesn't feel much different than IRC and wasn't it built on this originally. What revolution is this anyway? Lame.
And MS has had yammer for a while now (2012).
Four years later, Yammer looks exactly the same, and the data access API that I was using, which was supposed to be facing imminent deprecation, is still there.
Somewhat comically yammer was just rolled out to my company this year. Perhaps we got free licensing for it. I'm not sure.
For offices with mostly remote users slack or even yammer might be a great option for dialog. I'm in the email camp for a running dialog of well thought out replies or a group IM for rollouts or some other conversation that can't be done face to face.
They speak about an open platform (forget open-source), just being open to communities that might benefit from their expertise.
Here is a piece from ages ago, what slack means for huge communities: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-w...
I'm assuming it's going to fail much like Yammer did - the screenshot looks like a rip-off of Slackanyways...
Now, before Slack has the time to become "old, known and reliable" Microsoft jumps in and steals these potential customers :D
I like it.
The "we are better" thing they claim is just marketing. They are as cutthroat as anybody else.
I have plenty of other stories.
Beware.
McCartly responds- "Now go and do better than The Beatles did"
Ugh
Edit: more stupid than I thought! They bought a full page ad. Edit 2: I hate M$, but Slack doesn't help either.
Never mention the competition, always focus on your shit.
But yeah, we get it - first Facebook Workplace, now MS Team. Slack might get pushed into the feature/addon category faster than it can move into full product. Hard to reach the crazy valuation that way.