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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

Our entire company switched to Slack within basically a day. While that's a big selling point for Slack's ease of use, it also means it'd be easy to switch away to a competitor within a day too.

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Team communication tools don't suffer the same network-effect downsides to switching that other social apps do. The decision to switch can be made by one person. Everybody else is responding to a mandate.

While the decision can be made by one person, I'm not sure this is true. There is a big switching cost for most team tools.

* 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.

My team has built numerous chatops bots and automation around Slack, mostly because of their great API. In a way, we're building our own lock-in, as any replacement would have to provide the same level of API access, from in-channel announcements to channel scraping for parsing by other systems. And it would require retooling the bots too.

Respectfully, that sounds like an engineering failure on your part. There are enough similarities in the APIs among different chat systems that the business logic can be easily decoupled from the event loop; had you abstracted the interface, your system would be more easily portable to other providers.

Except... other than Slack, nobody has a sane API just yet (I work at sameroom.io).

What about using something like the Microsoft Bot Framework(1)?

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.

(1) https://dev.botframework.com/

Unless you use their API. Or you invited external users. Or you use one of the other features that lock you in. In fact, I think Slack wrote the letter because they feel so confident that they've locked in their current customers. Switching to Slack is easy. Switching from Slack is not.

It's not necessarily true--Mattermost has a Slack-compatible API, and Sameroom can be used to mirror channels in both systems during the transition.

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