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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why Slack is not a defensible product.

1) The UI/interaction/UX can (and obviously will) be replicated, which has been slack's biggest value proposition.

2) There's no "stickiness" for companies. None of the data in chat is really a "system of record" and the switching costs are minimal. 3rd party bots/integrations are the only thing that really make it sticky for companies.

3) The IP isn't really all that interesting. Chat based systems have been around since day 1 of the TCP/IP protocol and it's design patterns are pretty well known. In other words, the tech can be replicated.

4) It's not solving a core technology problem for most business without introducing additional problematic externalities. http://www.businessinsider.com/i-used-to-be-obsessed-with-sl...

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> None of the data in chat is really a "system of record" and the switching costs are minimal.

That's not true where I work. Slack's history is full of valuable information that we use all the time.

Honest question, is it possible to export all of the chat history from slack?

One of the (only) things I like about Skype is that message history is held in an sqlite database on the local machine. So I have a record of every single message for the last 5 years.

Yes.

What do you mean, not defensible? As in, it shouldn't exist, or there's no way it can be profitable long-term?

I think it's a great product experience, but as you say, without adding more value, it can be replicated by Zulip/Rocket.Chat/Mattermost/Cisco Spark/Microsoft Team/ you name it.

They meant not profitable long term implicitly as it is easily replicatable

As in it doesn't have a moat.

Microsoft Office doesn't have a moat but they had better product and engineers than the competition and turned that into phenomenally successful business.

I think you are overly discounting the advantage for Slack having done this for 4 years already.

>>Microsoft Office doesn't have a moat

You are joking, right? Or do you actually believe that pretty much anyone can trivially develop similar tools that have feature-parity?

Load up Office '97 on a computer today and compare it to Google docs - even 20 years ago Office was more fully featured than their most viable competitor is today (real time collaboration excluded).

Then think about all the good work that was done over the last 20 years, and how that really solid base turned into the best mobile office solution.

Office has an extremely deep moat and their continued O365 efforts are deepening it.

But it isn't based on anything besides creating a very, very featured product. Microsoft created their own moat. Same is possible with Slack. 4 years into its lifetime, one could have made same argument against MS that their word processor had no moat.

You forget the massive amount of plugins and conversational bots that you can plug into slack that are ready to use right now.

Slackbots are easy to write. I suspect they're not deployed in a business valuable way from off-the-shelf offerings. Microsoft only have to make their own bots easy to write.

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