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Comment by Latty | Hacker News Reader

It sounds a lot like all the people that bash StackOverflow - "It's just posts and a voting system, I could write that in a week!", ignoring all the complexity and design behind it, operating at scale and cultivating the environment.

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?

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Microsoft has a well regarded developer network and Q&A system regarding Microsoft technologies, at least in my (limited to primarily Azure) experience.

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.

For enterprise companies that already use a lot of MS services, and which have tight security policies on what software can be used/licensed/installed, an MS Slack clone could be a wonderful thing for employees.

Having worked for a company with security concerns and tightly coupled to Microsoft, Lynx fucking sucks and a MS Slack alternative would have made my short time there much more bearable.

Does Slack even allow on-premise installs yet? That instantly disqualified them from the last 3 jobs I've had. (All of which had data protection issues that prevented them from using off-premises IM systems, mostly HIPAA regulations.) Microsoft's got that market already sewn-up, right out of the gate.

As far as I'm aware Slack does not offer on-premise installs. (On-premise in this case could mean running in my own account at a cloud service provider) It's unfortunate because I'd love to adopt them as well at my current company, but it will be very difficult to achieve if the only option is to become yet another tenant of some large multi-tenant infrastructure.

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.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft Team doesn't currently have a self-hosted option. I hope it's in the pipeline because my company can't use an offsite IM service. It would be nice if Microsoft added support and then Slack followed. Competition is good!

Mattermost is an open source, self-hosted Slack-alternative: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...

There is also Matrix (matrix.org), an open standard for decentralized communications. Our goal is to let all apps talk to each other - including Slack, Mattermost, and Microsoft Teams!

Check it out using any Matrix-enabled app: https://matrix.to/#/#matrix:matrix.org

Skype can be self hosted.

I think this is one reason teams use hipchat, because it does provide this.

I think you are interpreting the rhetoric as "Slack is not innovative, therefore it is not praiseworthy."

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.)

Stack overflow benefits from tremendous network effects while Slack does not.

Slack has some limited network effects with guest access, but they should really make inter-company collaboration easier.

The lock-in due to loss of history is a bigger reason to stick with slack though once you have it.

Sorry, but you're wrong about this. This is my opinion on the matter and I understand that not everyone will agree with me.

People bash StackOverflow for their draconian moderation, not because it would be technically trivial to implement (it wouldn't, nothing at scale is).

I've seen both. The "draconian moderation" is also the reason for their success.

That's highly debatable. I use it despite the moderation. Half the questions I get answers for are "closed, off topic".

If it wasn't for the moderation, it'd be a swamp of terrible just like the forums of old.

Many people feel otherwise. Anyway it's way off topic to the op.

Stack overflow was hugely popular before their draconian moderation. And I use it less because of it. The most valuable questions I have as a developer are things like "what are they trade offs between using system.js or webpack". "How should I use flux Or redux to get the most benefit?" Or "how does the js build ecosystem work". These are much more valuable in my opinion then "I got error 4602 how do I solve it?".

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