Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft
theverge.com
theverge.com
If they don't add something that is innovative I'm not so sure. I see companies and people who raved about it 10 months dropping it just as fast all around me.
We've delayed the inevitable by coming up with a file sharing and secrets policy for what can and cannot go over Slack.
> Slack could have done what most companies do when a competitor rips them off, and said nothing.
Someone competing in your space is NOT ripping you off.
(My firm is largely made up of old school unix hackers. I can see the appeal of something with a better UI and better integration than IRC for some, but when half the company are the type to run CLI IRC clients, it seems unnecessary.)
The problem is, Slack has a user base consisting mainly of people willing to switch to the "next big thing" pretty quickly. That's how they got to Slack, but there's nothing preventing those people from leaving to move onto something new. Most slower to react companies are still using Lync, and probably won't ever switch to Slack.
The reason I use Slack is because it is better than any of the alternatives, but I wouldn't hesitate to switch to something better if it comes around.
Perhaps an open source utility will be written that can package all of the content and metadata required for your chat service up as a JSON bundle for import elsewhere.
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248-Guide-to-...
I'm happy they have a reason to bother now.
I'm not so sure. I got us using Slack at work, and that was after about 12 months of hearing ads for it. It is IRC plus a slick UI and integrated bots, but putting all that together with a web UI and a dedicated client and phone apps makes it multiple times better than regular IRC for the common person.
I don't use twitter. I only started actually using my Facebook account I've had for many years last week, after finally deciding it's curring me off from people to not use it. I've never used Instagram or Snapchat or any of those other newer things. I'm not what you would call "people willing to switch to the next big thing". Quite the opposite in fact. At this point, the new users of slack are hearing about it from other people that are themselves 3-4 people removed from those early adopters.
That said, Slack isn't a perfect snowflake. It's a simple idea executed well. The reason I was so for it once I finally bothered to check it out is because my prior experience with IRC let me immediately see the value they had created by combining IRC and all the extras for IRC together in a nice package, and made it accessible to less technical people.
> The reason I use Slack is because it is better than any of the alternatives, but I wouldn't hesitate to switch to something better if it comes around.
Same here on why I use it, but I would hesitate switching (given most my usage is work related). If Google had a good competitor, we would probably switch, since it was our solution to crappy support for what we need in Hangouts, as all our other stuff is in Google Apps. I imagine a lot of people/companies might feel the same way with MS if their stack is dominated by MS products. For those that already have a fairly heterogeneous environment, there's probably less reason to switch to the major names, but I imagine those groups are already fairly on board with trying new tools to find what works best, so have little allegiance.
Edit: s/seeing ads/hearing ads/. I think a really good case could be made that Slack was genius to market on podcasts as much as they did, and on the ones they did, and that might have been instrumental to their growth.
They still need some polishing, but once they fix some bugs and add good support for history and searching, I think it'll be fantastic.
They promise the core features will remain free, but I don't trust that when investors come knocking for a return, and I expect unless they find a very suitable model, it will slowly start to get worse at some point. I seriously doubt their core audience (people playing games) is going to throw money at them for things, like, skins, or something. Maybe they plan on more "B2B" style profitability where they do deep integration with partners like Youtube, Twitch etc behind the scenes?
FWIW: I say this as someone who's extremely happy with Discord since I switched me and my friends over to it for playing games, and as someone who thinks they really do have a solid product. And as someone who'd hate to see it go into the shitter just because of the above. It's wonderfully stable for its youth, and it's light years ahead of Skype, Vent, Mumble in terms of "Just Works", and has every feature we've needed, and more (the moderation/ACL, and external service features keep getting better, for example).
Maybe my only complaint with Discord is that, because it's so feature rich, it's actually a bit confusing to initially wrap your head around, in terms of UI/UX. I had to guide a few of my more non-technical friends through the UI when they first used it. Things like, non-obvious buttons and stuff like that.
I personally like the UI/UX, except some of the channel management features. It took me some time to figure out how to set ranks and give permissions.
My personal biggest gripe is the lack of easy searching. I rely on it a lot, and Skype usually does an okay job at it (even though it can often be slow and tends to lag the UI).
It's a nice option for small communities and people who need voice chat, though.
Disclaimer: I am one of the creator of Errbot that was designed for this specific purpose (be chat system independent)
People who are totally active directory and exchange are going to use Teams. Nobody else is.
Execution is a lot, but so is timing. Execution can be controlled, timing is mostly luck.
Also, if all it took was a pretty UI, companies like Hipchat would have been the winner years ago. I mean, Slack has a better UI in my opinion than Hipchat, but it's an example of taking the basics of IRC and slapping an interface of it.
Besides that though, I agree this letter was pretty stupid.
Beyond that, a well made UI for web, desktop and phone that is consistent is valuable. 'Adding a pretty UI' isn't a zero-effort or skill thing.
No, Slack isn't a world away from IRC or email - but it's enough better that people want to use it, that's good. I'm not sure where all the hate comes from.
Furthermore, in the IRC world that's not uncommon either; Quasseldroid does this. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembile...
People always point at everything and go 'this stuff existed!' - even if all Slack did was pull everything together into a single cohesive environment, that's useful to people, it provides value. I'm shocked people are shocked by that idea.
Some of the most important work in the tech industry is highly valuable and not one bit innovative. CRUD apps that bridge data from two different parts of an organization are amazingly valuable and amazingly important, but have no innovation. There's nothing wrong with that CRUD app—but there's nothing making that app better from another CRUD app that also bridges those two departments.
None of this thread is saying that Slack is bad. It's not criticizing Slack. It's not saying people are wrong to use it. It's just saying that people can jump ship very easily because there's nothing innovative.
Slack is great. I use it daily and love it. But the things I like about it aren't tied to Slack the company in any way, and it would be easy for me to love Microsoft Teams (or some hypothetical open-source, competent-at-UX, mobile-enabled version of IRC) every bit as much. Slack doesn't seem to realize that.
More precisely, I hope that if Microsoft builds a vastly better product, that they kill Slack, and if Slack builds a vastly better product, that they kill Teams, and if someone else builds a vastly better product (maybe Ryver stops arguing on Twitter and focuses on product? maybe everyone realizes that Zulip has been awesome all along? maybe Mattermost builds great mobile apps?), they kill both Slack and Teams. And I hope Slack does not get complacent about the product they have built and how hard it is to build a vastly better one, because I am currently using Slack and invested in it. I hope this because competition is a good thing. Is that wrong?
Bots to sit in channels to passively log; bots which act to send messages to people who are presently offline, at the time at which they come online again; and so on.
Adding a log to IRC isn't particularly innovative. Slack's value is almost entirely in its user engagement, not its technology.
Who gives a damn about innovative? It may have been obvious and simple, but if no one else is doing it well, and they do, sneering at it seems dumb. They made a good call, and are profiting from it.
Pings show up - if you desperately need phone notifications there are many apps/solutions to deal with that too. (but lets be real...nobody ~really~ wants notifications outside of work)
Nor was it obvious that if someone put it together properly it would achieve commercial success. I was theoretically in the right place at the right time to have put together something like Slack at my job, but there was no desire to invest enough to do that and eventually the entire product was EOL'ed a couple of years before Slack was released, not just because the product itself was not doing well but the entire market segment was not doing well. Commercial IM products have not done well historically, because it was difficult to do enough better than the free stuff to get people to pay.
What Slack may demonstrate is that, indeed, there was a market there all along, it's just the activation energy was higher than almost anyone was prepared to pay.
The only "innovation" Slack provided was the UI, and that's textbook "bad startup idea", because of how easy it is for someone else to step into the space.
Slack didn't innovate, it simplified. I called it a "UI" simplification, but you can call it whatever you like. They didn't innovate on technology, and that's a dangerous place to build your startup, because someone like Microsoft can eat your lunch and there's nothing you can do about it.
It did indeed... implement them as pieces. The out-of-the-box experience for an IRC network does not look like Slack.
And the UI was a non-trivial component. Personally I'm in the segment who doesn't much care and for whom IRC is a fine amount of bandwidth... but a looooot of other people, including lots of people with money, want something more.
Slack is not "just IRC". The proof is that if it was, we wouldn't be talking about Slack, we'd be talking about IRC. We aren't.
Those people with money can easily be stolen out from under Slack, precisely because they didn't innovate, they simplified.
Slack is "just IRC", and the proof is that if it were more, there wouldn't be nearly as much competition in the space, with more people joining every month, it seems.
Not marketing, or features or UX - price was key for us.
I still hope Slack wins, but MS is a very serious threat. In the end its best for us, users - prices will drop, new features will be added, support will be awesome all thanks to competition.
I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form.
What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack.
There's no hate coming from me - i'm just a realist. Slack didn't do anything amazing. It just did things right. Which is unfortunate for all of us users, as it took so many years to do things right. Unfortunately for slack though, they showed what is a good UX.. how hard do you think it is to copy that UX? Not easy, sure, but the template is there. Spend some time copying Slack, and i think you can manage to make Slack.Clone.
This reminds me a lot of HN dismissing Dropbox on the original show HN or something:
"We have git, rsync, FTP. We can hack something like this together in an afternoon."
Except that was before Dropbox went ahead to become a huge success.
This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]
Sure, i'm not calling Slack amazing - but i very clearly said i use slack, love it, pay for it and recommend it. I used Dropbox too.
I don't think anyone here is claiming Slack isn't a massive success. Nor that the product is any less great because it's not innovative. A comment like:
> This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]
seems to suggest "we" are somehow wrong.. but i'm not sure where. Is my above statement somehow wrong? Or are you simply linking success and innovation where as i am not?
MS is going to bundle LinkedIn with a Slack-clone tied to their CMS and AI chat systems, and provide an easy-to-scale-in-private-cloud platform to enterprise. Part of their Azure smart services.
That's all people mean: Slack did a pretty good job, but it's very similar to stuff MS has done before, and there's not really a secret sauce trench. So MS will probably be able to win a lot of the enterprise market.
Only tied to Office365, not Azure and LinkedIn.
https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat...
> seems to suggest "we" are somehow wrong.. but i'm not sure where.
Thanks, it was just an attempt to not talk down to anyone even if I disagree.
Rethinking it I think they might have been really innovative, but more in sales, marketing etc than in pure technical terms.
I've used xmpp chats with a couple of clients since well before slack and I'd struggle to think of a feature in slack that I hadn't used before.
But if you don't like Slack, I'm guessing Mattermost is out of the question as well. I'm still using IRC in a lot of places which "just works", but obviously that is missing a lot of features and fluff of newer technologies, even if some can be retrofitted in.
Please et me know what you decide and your success since it's still relevant for me in a couple of places.
Both companies can probably make well enough money to survive and achieve growth, but maybe not such an exponential growth the investors where expecting.
If people need something to be 'amazing' not to put it down, and 'amazing' doesn't include doing the right things to be highly successful...
If no one else did it, was it really so obvious?
Similarly, Microsoft has already operated a widely used integrated chat, profile, and community system at scale. Given their recent pushes, it wouldn't be entirely surprising for them to bring back similar platforms for business users integrated with LinkedIn.
That would eat a lot of Slack's potential big clients, because MS has a history of enterprise grade support on products like that, and Slack has scale issues for large orgs.
Microsoft will quickly take over this market if they offer an easy-to-manage on-prem solution that's integrated with the company directory, as it seems they've done. Plenty of firms already have Exchange and ActiveDirectory and Skype for Business.
Check it out using any Matrix-enabled app: https://matrix.to/#/#matrix:matrix.org
The claim is something else entirely: "Slack is not innovative, therefore it is not immune to competition."
There isn't any value judgment with the second claim. "didn't do anything amazing" is a statement of fact, not a put down. It's not somehow morally bad to do nothing amazing! If anything, it's morally good. There's no sense wasting time building amazing technological breakthroughs when the problem space doesn't need it, and just needs someone to execute well on boring problems. (Slack is particularly good at recognizing this and just getting the job done; see also their tech stack running on PHP.)
The lock-in due to loss of history is a bigger reason to stick with slack though once you have it.
I don't think they even do that well, it's a complete nightmare finding anything on slack beyond the last 24 hours.
What Slack did well was branding and marketing.
Do you have any other issues, just curious or is their search algorithm enough to make the Slack platform a net bad UX?
It never works the way I expect it to work, and very simple things that you can do within IRC takes multiple steps in Slack.
I feel like they get in the way more than anything - and other platforms can still implement those just as easily.
I am also a remote software engineer who have been working on distributed teams for the past 8 years. I've tried a bunch of different things to collaborate remotely, including IRC. Your mileage may vary.
Either way each choice is just a tool and if it works for you - thanks great!
I've been working on applying the theory of Kanban starting from first principle: "Make work visible." Visibility helps develop trust. Slacks helps with signaling a lot, and there are obviously a lot of thought put into the design.
Some examples:
1. URL for every message. I can paste that URL into Github PRs or Jira to reference a conversation where people talk through something.
2. Cross-device notifications and fallbacks, and other controls such as Do Not Disturb, etc. This allows me to control heads-down coding vs. when people needs help.
3. Notification integration helps. I know there are IRC bots that can do that, but how well you can just click through things depends upon the IRC client you choose. Being able to see a log of say, Github and Jira (usually in a separate channel) helps stay in the loop. The same with when adding CI/CD notifications.
4. Starring messages helps me manage time. I don't read everything people send over the chat. I certainly do NOT try replacing person-to-person contact with Slack (or IRC or HipChat). Sometimes I'll star something I want to read later (which may or may not happen).
5. URLs posted often have previews, which also helps with managing whether I go read it or not.
I'm sure these things can be done with IRC, and Hipchat probably copied over some of these ideas. Mattermost has certainly cloned the important stuff. By no means am I saying any of this seem earth-shattering innovative, but it is clear to me that Slack was designed around remote working, and it works well.
To keep things in perspective too: before Gmail, I used to run my own web server and used terminal-based apps for that. I don't do that anymore because it was easier to just dump things in Gmail and then search for things I need. I'm still keeping my tmux+emacs setup though -- maybe I'm missing out with web-based development.
So yeah, Slack is a great tool, and it works well with what I do. If you don't use it with discipline, or you have not developed much of a philosophy on how this all works together, it's not going to work well. You won't have a philosophical framework in which to curate or vet what you want in your life or attention-space.
I wouldn't even credit them with that. 20 minutes ago I yet again pressed up-arrow to scroll up one line to see a message off the top of the page and yet again it dropped me into an editing prompt for my last message. What?
And then there's the click-click-click of jumping between channels to see the latest messages, instead of having some form of summary.
In my experience people tolerate the UI of Slack, they don't praise it.
That may be dependent on team dynamics.
Slack's innovation was getting a huge funding round, blowing it on advertising to mainstream non-tech markets and trying to build a competitive moat with 3rd party integrations that other developers are incentivized to make on their own due to Slack's large user base.
I think the first was the bot that told you off for using gendered pronouns.
The evangelism it has fostered has been a great promoter, however now I think if our company (non-tech) adopted it - it would be a massive distraction.
Providing value is not the whole story. That's why I begin looking for alternative factors -- like luck and circumstance.
The thing keeping HipChat going in the face of Slack is that Slack can't be used on-premises, which is HUGE for an extremely large percentage of business.
HipChat hasn't improved as fast as Slack because they haven't needed to-- since no HIPAA-compliant business (to give just one example) can use Slack at all, the two products don't really compete with each other currently.
That doesn't apply to this new Microsoft solution, which will probably kill-off HipChat long before it kills off Slack. Unless Atlassian really gets their butt moving and starts improving their product.
Even when the worked, Hipchat notifications weren't configurable a the granularity I wanted.
Slack also is prettier and feels more cohesive to me, but that's a secondary concern.
It's not a huge barrier to entry though.
I think the hate comes from the ridiculous letter.
I don't think people are hating on slack here, it's just that what they do isn't nearly as hard to u.plement as they seem to think it is, so a letter like this just comes off as pompous.
Sure. Nice feature. hardly game-changing or innovative.
Our company is just getting on the Slack train. I'm honestly underwhelmed with the experience. I suppose I expected a lot given the hype and valuation. My main gripe is the lack of UI customization.
I don't hate Slack; heck, I've never even used it. But like _many_ people I'm disappointed that we still don't have a non-proprietary, federated IM system. That leaves most of us ambivalent, and some of us bitter.
IRC is still around, but IRC isn't a substitute for IM. IRC can't be truly federated because there's no global directory or routing the way there is for SMS or XMPP.
XMPP is still around. I can even chat with a few GTalk stragglers, and quite a few tech-savvy people still run their own XMPP servers. But it seems to be on the decline. For a brief period it was gaining corporate momentum, but that stopped years ago.
My company still uses XMPP for corporate IM. Fortunately, nobody can agree whether to move to IRC, HipChat, or Slack. So for now I can actually instant message with co-workers from my personal XMPP server/account. That was actually useful when I was on contract and didn't have (or want to deal with) juggling and logging onto corporate accounts.
Somebody else suggested Slack was like the iPhone, in that it offered features and usability previously unimagined. I don't think so. The iPhone wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a _phone_. It would have just been a fancy minicomputer if it didn't have the built-in capability to interoperate with any other phone, and participate in the global federated telephone and SMS network.
For all of Slacks features, they pale in comparison to what _could_ be. They could still create a better IM client, with better searching, indexing, etc, etc. But if it supported global federation a la XMPP, the sky would be the limit. Instead of the Internet people are simply excited about an upgraded AOL experience.
I found it really cool that I could spend ~half an hour setting it up on my own server then just pop in on chats on another server.
(Sure, not as poslished but that would only take one more designer to fix.)
What I'm saying here is that GP is correct, and you are significantly overestimating the value of what Slack provides. They have the mindshare right now, but that's really all. They don't even the benefits a company like Facebook has, since a Slack competitor is still useful if a small number of people use it, as opposed to social media companies who are not useful at all unless they have a large userbase.
Perhaps you should also try using email. Or SMS. They can do that.
Move Slack into IRC's position, and Microsoft Teams into Slack's position, and you can see what Microsoft is trying to do. The problem with Slack is that right now, they're caught in the middle. They're not a consumer-facing company (at least, their profit model isn't consumer-facing), but, at the same time, they haven't invested in the boring schlep work (auditing, compliance, etc.) to make their product truly competitive to large enterprises. So they're stuck in this small-to-medium business space, while Microsoft is trying to vault ahead of them to capture the large enterprises.
From what I've seen, this is pretty much Microsoft's cloud strategy in a nutshell: take other companies' products, do the boring schlep work to add auditing, compliance, Active Directory Integration, etc. and then sell it to enterprises as a cloud service. This appears to be Azure's strategy against AWS, Office 365's strategy against Google Docs, Visual Studio Team Services' strategy against Github, and now, Microsoft Teams' strategy against Slack. It's a brilliant strategy that plays to Microsoft's strengths - knowing the needs of enterprise customers - while relying on the broader market to fill in for its weaknesses in discovering new products and doing UI design.
In short, they are entrenched and have done a great job of ensuring that the cost of switching is high enough that it's going to take a lot of justification to get somebody to take the time to make the move.
All they really have to do is avoid a colossal screw up.
And they didn't even add it, Metalab did. http://metalab.co/projects/slack/
If only luck made slack, then doesn't that mean Microsoft will need to be equally lucky to succeed?
It is extremely hard to create a compelling and delightful user experience that is also maintainable so that new features can be added quickly. So to say "they just slapped a nice UI on IRC" is a little short sighted.
Let's take this somewhere. So what if it's just luck? What useful information can we glean from your dismissal?
I thought it was pretty well known that luck plays a significant factor in success. Are you disputing that?
I'd like to see them succeed with skype first. I still can't message someone using a mac from a pc...
Yes, Slack's core tech has been around for decades now, and that it is pretty much a gussied up IRC with some bots. But they found that IRC is awesome for what it does and they found that businesses needed something like IRC with bots. Luck is for sure what they have, but they also followed it up. A favorite site of mine recently had a post on follow-through [0]. I'll quote the part that is relevant to Slack:
"There’s a dearth of people who know, or have the will, to do the stupidly easy stuff to be charming and successful. Let me give you just one example. Both off the air and on, guests of my podcast will tell me, “I can tell you actually read my book before this interview and I really appreciate that. It’s so rare.” I don’t bring this up to toot my own horn, but rather to point out how ridiculous it is that this might even be something worthy of mention! An interviewer reading someone’s work before asking them questions about it would seem like the barest of bare minimum job requirements — a prerequisite rather than something above and beyond. And yet the majority of podcasters aren’t even taking care of this most basic of basics. There are tons of people doing what you want to do, but how are they executing? In 90% of cases, not as well as they could be. That’s your opening. And such openings are absolutely everywhere." (emphasis from the source)
Slack is this to a T. It's simple stuff, but they followed through with it. They spent time on the code, on iterating, on making sure it was not just ok, but good. And as a result they are not eating Ramen anymore. Is MS going to squish them? Who knows?! What we do know is that Slack is capable of following through with this product and the MS has a history of not being able to do so. I'd put the money into Slack over MS in the long run. But we will have to wait and see if MS will dump enough cash into their competitor to squish them out before MS runs out of follow-through and bureaucratic stamina.
[0]http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/10/10/myth-scarcity-12-st...
Yes, it's IRC with a pretty interface. But that interface is comfy and useful. Juggling multiple devices is seamless. It keeps your history and you can search it.
Not rocket science, sure, but not bad either. It's a step up from IRC.
Think about apple products. You could throw your hands up and say "but there's nothing innovative here! they just built a pretty UI on top of BSD and people have been using Unix operating systems for 50 years!". True, but it's the pretty UI that connects it to the masses.
Slack took a concept that has been done to death (a chat server) and made it useable and accessible. I remember years ago installing pidgin, psi and adium at work because they all ran on different operating system and som guru had to configure an XMPP server somewhere in the company. Then at home i'd fire up mirc to work on some open source. My daughter would come home and hop onto yahoo chat so she could send terrible looking ascii/emoji bling to all her friends.
Yesterday i came into work and some guy came over and saw i had slack up and said, "whoa i love slack, do we have a company server for this?" I said, "yep". He said "send me an invite! i'm gonna go get my boss on this". That sort of emotional reaction to a product I think is what makes something a success.
I a chat room innovative? no. But i think success can't really be wholly described in terms of innovation either. Somehow software has to connect with real people (iXXX - because i own it?) and get people to buy into it like a brand of blue jeans.
Fear of missing out or FoMO is "a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent".[2] This social angst[3] is characterized by "a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
Slack has this to it, a team gets using Slack for their own purposes, the initiative started by someone that wonders why the company/team use Skype still.
Then other teams in the company want to be in on it, there is a party on Slack and they want to know all the gossip that goes down. Plus the Giphy memes.
The next thing is that you then find that it is no longer a private chat room, the guys in HR are reading this too so no longer can some things be said in the banter. So then you move your important chats off Slack and onto WhatsApp or somewhere where whomever the bad guys are, e.g. HR, will not be reading. Obviously Slack then becomes something that your manager uses to tell you what to do and no longer becomes a channel for convo for things peripheral to the tasks in hand. This is how I see Slack shaping up in the long term, it might as well be a MS product and you might as well get the MS product since it is better integrated to Office things.
It is kind of amazing that Slack are the only chat system out of dozens our hundreds who can make a UI that doesn't suck (I wouldn't even call Slack good), but evidence would suggest it's true.
> Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need luck to get users.
Well they've tried four or five times and always managed to screw it up.
And the iPhone was just a phone with a pretty UI.
Slack is winning exactly for the same reason that the iPhone did, and you're misjudging it for the same reason that a lot of people misjudged Apple: It's all about execution. The first iPhone had the same features as previous phones, but those features were executed so much better than the competition. Slack is the same way. It's an evolutionary product with a revolutionary execution, and should be rightly praised for being innovative in an industry that often moves in surprisingly slow ways — which the state of IRC, HipChat, Skype etc. shows needed serious disruption.
And as with the iPhone, Slack is facing the same problem: Once you've shown how things _can_ be done, everyone else will jump on the same wandwagon.
(I realize you didn't say anything that contradicts the above; this is more about the dismissive attitude towards leaders like Slack.)
The browser was the killer feature. Remember Jobs going to the NYT website?
I remember the awful browser on the Nokia N73 (my last phone before the iPhone), which had a largeish screen and a little joystick to control a mouse pointer, but no touchscreen.
Exactly. The point of the demo was "this browser is just as good as one on a computer".
The fun thing is that Microsoft bought the product back in 2007 and sold it again pretty quickly but not before taking a bunch of the code and using it in their own group chat product (never as effectively as the original app, perhaps until now Slack have come along and shown them how valuable a product like that can be...)
Not only that, on those days doing an IRC like server and chat client was a common programming exercise at the network programming classes on the university I attending.
Or it is "time", or marketing, or just because it is mobile first.
You could say the same about what's app, Instagram and others. Maybe it is not just about the big picture. Maybe they are successful because of small things like knowing they will always work when you need.
Sure someone can replicate it, but I think you're underestimating the value of it. Like IRC could have the best features in the world but for the users who do not find it approachable it may as well not exist.
1) They decided to mess with a company having $500B in-cash
2) Which decided to attack their low barrier-to-entry market
3) And took the unusual revealing step of building its own instead of buying
4) And is playing in its comfort zone (productivity tools, Office, API, cloud-scale integration points : azure, azure marketplace etc...)
5) While having a pool of 90M trustful paying customers and the ability to provide them the same offering for free in less than 1 second.
The worst they could do was to help Microsoft define this offering as a direct competition. But this is just what they did with this arrogant and high-schoolish "Welcome" letter.
What really has me roll my eyes here is the way they think that they can be frontal with a corporation like Microsoft playing in its comfort zone and having the dollars we know they have.
This will cost them a lot. You can't easily backtrack from that and even if they somehow manage to do it, by the time they get there, Teams will have already seized a good chunk of their user base.
Dear Slack,
We built the cloud service, web framework, programming language and operating system our Team app runs on as well as the IDE it was built with, the source control its stored in and the office apps it integrates with, oh and 2 of the browsers we tested it on. The chat part really wasn't that hard.
We'll probably be OK.
- Microsoft
I felt a sort of haughtiness in the letter, like "you don't understand what chat is, but we do, and if you look at our success, you will never understand what chat is, but we will." This was not a letter of advice, but instead a letter of intimidation.
But if I give them the benefit of doubt, maybe it was just an ad. Nothing more. Nothing less. One that touted the underlying coolness of Slack and the platonic posture of Microsoft.
In all of this, Slack misses the point of Office 365 chat, e.g. tie users together when working on Office products, and build collaboration features for Office users. Maybe Slack slacked off on what the market was requiring now and was not able to keep itself up to date with what companies like Microsoft needed.
For reference, here is the ad: http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/jobs-apple-welco...
There is an interesting welcome ad that Data General made when IBM announced their entry into the minicomputer market in 1976, although Data General never actually ran their add. It said:
They Say IBM’s Entry Into Minicomputers Will
Legitimize The Market.
The Bastards Say, Welcome.To give a parallel, so were Teamspeak, Ventrillo, Mumble, Raidcall, Xfire or whatever have you (for gaming at least).
Chat rooms and VOIP solutions are commodities and have been for a decade or more. Sure, some companies do some more value-add than others in terms of service and support, but at the end of the day it's still a commodity and no amount of rationalization and wishful thinking will change that.
Which is why their mimicking of Apple ad seems condescending and arrogant. Personal PCs were at the top of the technological know-how in the early 80s. Glorified chat rooms haven't been new or high tech for 20 years (IRC is how old?). In fact the only innovation in recent years seems to be end-to-end encryption, which Microsoft seems to be on board with.
* There's going to be a lot of discussion and consensus building. Most of the team is going to have an opinion on the subject.
* Setting up new accounts for team members, teaching team members how to use the new tool, and change management all take time.
* Most teams have integrations within their chat apps, these will have to be switched or re-implemented to use new APIs.
I think it's fair to say that most team tools have good moats. The longer the team has used a tool the stronger the moat becomes.
I am not too familiar with it but its open source and it looks like it works with Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Office 365, etc.
Hubris is rarely a good quality.
So if they aren't buying now because it's not Microsoft, I don't see how Slack hubris changes anything in that equation.
Either way, this is a HUGE market Slack hasn't even begun to touch. (Although I see they now have a "coming soon!" banner on their homepage.)
Just one data-point, but: my employer went with HipChat because we needed an on-premise solution. (We were moving away from IRC because we needed persistent chat history for remote employees. Using IRC bouncers was considered too high of a barrier-to-entry, given we wanted non-technical employees to join the conversation too).
It's hard to imagine that anyone who read this came away with a positive perception of Slack.
Slack is great. I'm part of many slack communities and until they move I'll stay (although they are all in the free-tier). While the many millions who are already part of the O365 subscription base (and who probably don't even know slack or why they need them) won't have reason to start a community on Slack I think Slack is safe in the short-run with those who don't pay the "MS-tax" or those who are already part of existing slack communities.
And while Slack is a great product (as the IRC on steroids that it is) it is easy to replicate and so MS now did.
Ah, Silicon Valley. Where growing slowly is the same as being already dead
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dear%20microsoft&sort=byPopula...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
A native ui for IRC with some extra features.
Their valuation is laughable and is a prime example of the bubble forming in vc tech.
That's what got them where they are right now.
Also, people tend to use their personal emails on Skype in my organization. Slack's sign up process makes more sense for an organization.
Doesn't really give an edge to Slack since their search is awful as well.
"Shall we buy more-or-less the same chat application
from Microsoft or Slack?""Nobody was ever fired for choosing IBM."
MS actually has done rather neatly out of that one
"But, your honor, Slack told the world they welcome competition from us in this infamous letter from November 2016!"
That's not to say that Slack doesn't have a lot to worry about. But competition from Lync, or whatever the hell they call it this week, is not one of those things.
Ref: Paul graham : Microsoft is Dead http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
And i think it would be easier/safe for companies to adopt self hosted solution or use already trusted company like Microsoft.
Slack had great UX - but one cannot compete only with that because it could be copied. Maybe Slack have some comparative advantage that could not be copied.
How does an instant messaging app not have threaded conversations?
When practically every office employee on the planet is your customer, it is kind of different.
In addition, the communication market is bigger than the market for soda. Genuine or otherwise Slack and the market will benefit from competition. There's still plenty of upside for Slack, Microsoft and perhaps one or two more.
Communication is extremely important to me. That said, if all the employees in my company were only using 'Teams', 'Skype for business', 'Lync' or any other POS out of Microsoft then I'd be looking for a new job.
That was a very nice turn of phrase.