Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company.
That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueless about the situation they are now in.
UPDATE: Some saying it's not super easy to copy Slack. I see what you are saying but the truth is that it's easily to copy Slack to a "good enough" state. If you think the "best" and "most brilliant" software wins the enterprise market then you don't understand the enterprise market. Wish it wasn't like that, but it is and that's Slack's challenge (and what the article is saying).
I feel obliged to post this tweet https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218
Do it in a weekend? A codemonkey could do it in a day.
This argument would be different if it were for something like Dropbox, where the internals are really "something else."
But, I agree, with what I believe you're implying, that HN users throw around "I could code it in a weekend," even if it doesn't apply here.
I used to have same attitude but what I have learned over the years is that sometimes the big Co just does not get it. Just look at Google with its 100 chat applications, it's like watching Titanic hitting an iceberg in slow motion.
For example, I had to roll out MS Teams (a slack clone) for a company event. Big company, big budget, terrible software.
With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.
Well, if the only advantage is being first that's a big problem. The same goes for other startups: they can observe what works and deliver a better solution faster.
I see Slack innovating a little (custom menus etc.) but maybe it's just the market shifting - the chat alone is not interesting anymore as a standalone product but rather as part of a bigger solution.
All of the services used by the majority of people have been consolidated by just a few companies. This is terrible for both quality and personal provacy, not to mention pricing.
The world is in a weird place these days.
> If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants.
These two ideas are diametrically opposed. If it's impossible to build a business then you'd expect that their you'd get no offers to buy your company (indicating that it is valued highly) or that entry into new markets would be near-impossible in the first place (like starting a new bank). What you're actually complaining about here is that big companies won't give startups space to build their own little monopolies. That shouldn't be surprising, in fact part of the reason startups are meant to be lean in the first place is to out-manoeuvre and out-compete large bureaucratic organisations.
> Even bigger, more established companies like slack or NYT find themselves between a rock and hard place. Look at whats happening with journalism, it's geting wrecked by social, how can they possibly compete?
NYT are in a pickle because advertising is a terrible business model in the 21st century and no-one buys newspaper subscriptions any more. They need to find a new way to reap a profit from journalism, preferably one that doesn't result in them turning into Buzzfeed for cheap clicks.
(to add a personal opinion here, I think that journalism is likely to be entirely be replaced by citizen journalism and sousveillance, and that this is a leap forward in freedom of information and openness of the truth).
> All of the services used by the majority of people have been consolidated by just a few companies. This is terrible for both quality and personal privacy, not to mention pricing.
The whole point of market competition is that if one company offering a fungible (and I'd argue software is mostly fungible when it can be easily replicated) product over-prices relative to the market, a competitor will undercut them. Also, the fact that companies like Slack exist is testament to the fact that Microsoft and friends _haven't_ managed to get a stranglehold on the software market.
I don't know what world you're living in but the reality is not as grim as you're making out.
Automation and concentration of power are, however, problems for the modern entrepreneur. If they build a cool app or something and become part of the tech ecosystem that way, then they have decreasing power over their own piece of the pie. They can be banned from the app store, out-SEO'd in a week, locked out from previously accessible user data, banned from an API, etc... Some of this is due to today's fast pace, but another factor is the centralized architecture of modern internet ecosystems.
Even the fact that journalism is getting dominated by citizen journalism speaks to this, imo. We just need to free citizen journalism from the shackles of twitter.
I don't think that Slack's issue is so much that other companies are just copying it, it's that they were a nuisance in an already existing space (collaborative chat) and they hit on a few key features that devs liked. While the Slack features are great, and the slack-team is great [1], [edited content: it's yet another item to keep track of], and that's a hard sell when you're an org of 100+ employees and you already have stuff like Lync or Hangouts or Skype around as part of the standard employee loadout.
I hope the best for Slack and sincerely think they'll be able to dazzle people with their support and with good responses to user feedback.
[1] http://imgur.com/a/6vPcn It's small, but this sense of humor and fast response time from the support team is just hard to hate.
Edit: Removed comment on extra account as below comments pointed out Slack has SAML SSO, which I was not aware of as it was not in use at my last place of employment. Changed it to current text, as I still feel that the idea that it's Yet Another Chat that users have to decide on, but definitely a plus that it's not another account.
Slack appears to support SAML SSO, with a list of supported providers and ability to roll a custom one (https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/205168057). Haven't tried/needed it, but wouldn't that care of this particular problem?
I have edited my original post to correct this with an updated content piece. Thank you both for letting me know.
Seamless mobile clients, integrations, animated gifs, etc. Slack has a lot of small but very sticky features.
"How will we get people to use Slack if it does not have $feature [1]?" - "But hundreds of people are already using it, so your point is moot."
[1] e.g. SSO integration
They are not too big to fail. The bubble we are in makes it seem that way. Cheap money makes valuations soar. Won't last much longer though. A good thing because thats when you can really make some money.
Media is now controlled by a handful of global corporations rather than independent outlets
Tech is the same, Amazon will soon control everything from ocean freight to last mile delivery. Google and Facebook have similar reach as well as the ability to influence billions.
If something isn't done I think we're going to see Weylan-Yutani level super-corporations that are effectively more powerful than governments.
It's very hard for large companies to do large scale decentralized R&D, so they copy and buy companies that are doing it. This isn't an awful thing. In many cases the original technologists get acquired. If the market is big enough, big players will want in too.
This is not a new thing..
When tools are straightforward in their utility they can empower, but when they have so much baggage, they can also influence culture. Of course being able to communicate more fluidly can change the culture of a workplace to be more open. But it sometimes feels like an extension of flippant social media, except you can't escape because there's critical stuff on it.
I used to work in a place that used XMPP, and before that Microsoft Communicator. They didn't bring as much benefit as Slack does, but sometimes I wish for something a bit more unobtrusive. I don't want a tool to try and make friends with me.
The other sundry things would be video transcoding, and reference-type attachments (for stupid nonsense like attaching a giphy to your message, or possibly-useful things like embedding google docs info).
And with Slack, I don't have to be somebody's product. I don't have to already use Lookout xxx Outlook. I don't have to cope with messages from recruiters sending spam. Any fake nuz that shows up was faked by somebody I know.
Go Slack. Please figure out how to make your business sustainable: you're helping make our business sustainable.
It's not hard or expensive to run yourself, and it's not difficult to securely expose on the web. That's why Lync has such a head start and why Atlassian's on premises option is gaining traction. Ultimately I suspect Mattermost is going to end up the main winner here. Slack, Teams and Hipchat will all have their userbases, but they'll have been in a three-way bar fight to get them, which is expensive.
Meanwhile, all those 12 person offices that farm their IT out to third party support companies? They're gonna start getting given Mattermost servers, because that's easy for the IT shops to license and install, yet also still under their direct control, which is important because IT support companies don't have a tonne of bandwidth to educate all 100 client companies if slack suddenly changes something.
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/is-slack-really-wo...
> This is the best time to raise money ever. It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history,
He basically knows he didn't need to raise 200M, but if you can take that, put it in the bank and don't have burn rates the likes of Uber - you've got a while to figure out the exact route to profitability.
Slack claims to not have a sales team.
my own question is "why." slack is by no means a trivial business to run but 800 does seem awfully high.
In my opinion, per-employee metrics (ie. revenue/profit per employee) are a great way to make sure that you don't overhire [1].
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple...
800 employees is especially insane for a serial entrepreneur like Stuart Butterfield who should know better. Then again, the Twitter guys including Ev Williams were serial entrepreneurs and yet the overhired too. It seems an interesting coincidence in the technology sector that viral user growth often can lead to viral hiring.
> “There are people who will die, get divorced, have children with cancer,” Mr. Butterfield said. “You really have to put yourself in their frames of mind. If we preoccupy these people for a minute longer than we have to, we’ll lose them.”
"People are in a rush these days, let's not get in their way."