Slack Is Raising $250M from SoftBank, Others
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I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur.
It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
I finally realized that the web version works pretty well so now I just use that when I need to use Slack.
I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.
I'd say you'd be far from the only one. The thing that Slack really brought was an improved onboarding experience, but I have a (probably somewhat vain) hope that protocols will win over corporate controlled walled gardens.
Matrix[1] / Riot[2] are really promising and I really hope we settle on something like that sometime down the road.
[1]: http://matrix.org/
This is a note to others who may be considering the same. Specific needs will vary greatly across teams/companies.
We found Mattermost web client to be ok, however phone apps and integration coverage are both poor by comparison to Slack. We also found running, securing, and maintaining our own server to be roughly as or more expensive than using Slack.
I'm hopeful the Mattermost project keeps momentum to improve. Currently though it doesn't quite seem in the same league.
As others point out, Mattermost vs. Slack is more a discussion of self-hosted vs. 3rd party cloud-hosted.
Developing clients is hard. Especially good UIx and complex feature sets across a zillion platforms like Slack does. A lot of their day I bet these days is simply tracking down obscure bugs on certain platform combinations and trying to keep feature parity between everything working properly. I think most of us can stipulate Slack does a decent job there - or at minimum is far better than the competing (open) solutions.
I really wish there was a Slack alternative where I could purchase a really nice unified frontend and simply connect to an open protocol backend such as IRC or Jabber or whatever. This was the original intent behind IRC as well - back in the 90's there were a number of shareware style IRC clients developed for Windows - and you saw some interesting protocol hackery to make some more graphical features work.
I have yet to see open source really truly compete in the "client" arena, save for an exceedingly few notable exceptions. However, it excels at the backend where you will have developer interest and competence - and the long tail of possible bugs (and user competence) is a much more sane problem to tackle.
No, I do not expect this to ever exist for obvious reasons :)
There's connectors to Mattermost from IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord and many other services: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
There's a wonderful Pidgin plug-in (https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-mattermost) that even has its own installer to bundle Pidgin itself (https://github.com/Brightscout/mattermost-pidgin-client)
Here's a Terminal client for Mattermost written in Haskell (https://about.mattermost.com/galois-releases-matterhorn/).
Also, we've upgrade the polish on Mattermost UI for our 4.0 release this month: https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-4-0/
Agree good UI/UX in open source is hard, I think there are two challenges: a) Attracting top UI/UX talent, b) Having a project that prioritizes UI/UX.
That said, I would also propose that what has already happened is not impossible.
Yes, we needed better mobile apps, and new ones are here (React Native in iOS and Android with full source code): http://bit.ly/2w33V3D
Huge thanks to over 2000 beta testers that helped vet the apps along with all the community contributors.
We've also recently added a directory for making it easier to find integrations: https://about.mattermost.com/community-applications/
Our focus is helping increase productivity for companies who need total control of their infrastructure. Thousands of companies use Mattermost for that purpose and we're excited about bring them more and more value in each of our monthly releases.
They do have an IRC gateway, although it has to be enabled by your team: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...
Slack has an IRC gateway. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...
No offense, but the IRC user interface is REALLY lousy. I've been around the block, and I hate going into IRC.
In addition, I wish people would bring back mailing lists. No, Google Groups is not a good substitute.
IRC is Not Good.
I used to use IRC a lot when I was working on the Openstack project and do not agree with this part.
I agree that Slack is pretty painful - the Linux client may as well be unsupported.
But it's still a hell of a lot better than when everyone in my office had to run their own ZNC bouncer.
That's strange, cause we have been heavily using it for 2 years at a team of 100+ and have yet to find any bug to write home about, and basically nothing affecting day to day use (mostly OS X clients).
>It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
While no doubt there are bugs, those all seem like corner cases.
"un-join" a team works fine when the admins un-join you, for example, which is more likely in a business use case.
I also don't think "updates frequently force a logout" even qualifies as a bug. Heck, OS X and Windows updates force a full reboot.
And how often does one "partially creates" a team they have to remove? Even if that's a bona fide bug, it's still quite a corner case. I've seen worse bugs in XCode or Photoshop, and those are on their nth decade of existence...
As for alternatives, I don't really know if many do exist. Slack offers their free version, which allows teams to use it pretty much without any strings to see if they like it. It provides great functionality in a simple UI (you may disagree, that's totally fine), and solves a problem - Office Communication.
It has been a productivity increase for the teams I've been on as it is much, much better than email chains, easier to add code snippets, images, and the fairly rich ecosystem of plugins/bots is icing on the cake for me.
The other day it took me an hour to wire up a couple endpoints in Node, add them as slack slash commands and boom, I was able to add three commands for QA department that resolved some heartburn for them.
I think Slack did a good job with a base product, and they simply solved a pain point in a better way.
I agree with this, but haven't found it to be preferable to hipchat. I definitely think it's a well designed product in many ways, I'm just surprised the valuation for such a thing is that high.
I look forward to seeing what new innovations and improvements are in the future.
I'd agree that they're both good, but if it's the main communication tool for your company the #1 priority is that it stays online.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-to-client_protocol
And
Yep. Some people at work are super resistant to using slack and prefer IRC, even though slack will make their lives easier. And I get that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude, but I can't help but shake my head at the people managing these IRC bouncers at work. Like they'd rather die managing these cloud VMs running ZNC than ever use slack. Those bouncers are likely to be poorly-secured. They can see nothing when ZNC dies and the external servers don't play well with the corporate firewall (literally, people send IRC traffic through ports 80 or 443 because they can't get through the firewall otherwise).
And don't get me started on teams running bots in order to get github/jira/ci/etc integration with IRC. It's just insanity. Just use slack and its dead simple, no-bots-required webhooks/apps. Quit wasting the company's time standing up all this additional infrastructure because you're too stubborn to switch to a better chat client.
IRC doesn't do all that, especially multiline messages.
Also, Slack has an IRC gateway.
IRC –the protocol– isn't made for that. IRC clients can, but don't.
IRC isn't a credible alternative for most users in 2017. It stagnated ages ago, which is obvious from problems like the fact that you can't even write a multi-line message.
My personal opinion is that Slack has been so successful primarily because nothing older than it (IRC, Campfire, HipChat) was a decently modern product by the time Slack launched and Slack was really good at marketing.
Personally, I'm trying to solve the problem of open source projects increasingly moving to Slack by working on Zulip, the leading open source alternative to Slack by contributor activity. Here's our story for why one should prefer Zulip to Slack for fellow open source projects (written a few days ago; feedback welcome!): https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/
I disagree about the decent competitors -- there is e.g. Flowdock which in many ways (such as proper threading) is still better than Slack, and was doubly so back then. I think it's more about access to VC money and network effects, and indeed the successful marketing you mentioned.
Slack took the simplicity of IRC and gave it a modern interface with things like showing a preview when you link. easily share files etc.
What makes you think that? I don't see any connection between Flowdock and social media. As far as I can see, it's purely an internal communication tool with easy file sharing, hooks for external services as GitHub, and so on.
A neat thing is that you can start a discussion thread from any of these items, so the context of the discussion is clear.
Flowdock went a little further ahead when it came to how they constructed the base communication.
Mattermost is OSish, but Rocket.Chat seems to be a much more modern/UX friendly version compared to Zulip and fits the bill with FOSS.
I wish popular Slack alternatives would support each others protocols, even if the support was not perfect.
It feels that alternatives like Rocket.chat and Mattermost are still way too closed. I'm not sure if the dev teams are interested in supporting multiple protocols though, as it might be too much work for something that will keep breaking.
Despite all the problems you mentioned, it is still extremely usable. There are tens of thousands of users using it for decades.
Yep, and IRC and its plethora of clients are totally bug-free /s
IRC netsplits alone are far more annoying than any slack bug I've encountered.
> It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created.
You definitely can log out of a team in the OS X app (e.g. right click the team icon, click "remove" or go to the team dropdown and sign out). Or if you want to actually deactivate your account, there's a link (somewhere) in the app that opens your browser where you deactivate your account.
> the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
Not in my experience. You don't even have to reset your password. You can have slack email you a magic link as a method of logging in. Open your email, click the magic link, and you're logged in.
> Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC
How? Slack has an IRC gateway, but IRC doesn't have standardized ways of even sharing files (everything I'm aware of is client based). So how do you implement Slack's feature-set (even ignoring video/voice calls) over IRC without requiring everyone to use a special client?
For example, IMHO one of Slack's best features from the beginning was on the iOS app when you clicked the button to upload a photo you were presented with "Last Photo Taken", "Camera Roll", or "Take a photo". That "Last Photo Taken" button was genius. Simple and I found 90% of the time was what I wanted to do, and it just worked. In one of the last revisions of the iOS app, they removed that feature and replaced it with a newer redesigned photo picker. The new photo picker is riddled with bugs and a good percentage of the time fails to upload the photo at all for most of our paid team members. Some have resorted to using the desktop app to send a photo after transferring it over from their phone. When Slack was a small scrappy startup I'd open tickets and spend the time w/them to get them the information they needed to debug various issues, but now that they are at this scale and size I can't be bothered.
You know that there are enterprises with 5000+ members on a paid slack, right?
Not really.
E.g. The firms investing $250 million basically would like to see ~3x return or more on their money. The want their $250 million to turn into ~$750 million. That's the whole point of investing.
If Slack simply parked $250 million in the bank for 1% interest rates, that's something Softbank could simply do themselves. If Softbank can buy $250 million treasury bills for 1% return, there's no need to give Slack $250 million to do it for them. Besides, VCs like Softbank can't survive on 1% returns; they're hoping for ~20%+ returns.
Instead, Slack is supposed to put that $250m to productive use and make the company more valuable. This makes more money for everyone including investors. (This doesn't mean Slack spends the $250m all at once though. Softbank and CEO Stewart Butterfield probably had long discussions on the strategic uses of the potential capital. Presumably, Softbank agreed with Butterfield's vision which is why they invested.)
That sounds more like a loan with very high interest then.
For investors, the 3x & 20% figures I gave are not formalized terms of payback. Instead, they are desirable financial targets for the investor so they can be considered a prestigious firm that attracts capital from more limited partners. Slack won't be in "default" if they provide 0% return to Softbank. However, future limited partners like university endowments or police/firemen pensions will avoid underperforming VCs that deliver low or negative returns. (If VCs don't perform to expecations, the market will punish them and they will shut down.[1])
To trace the causal chain, VCs want 20%+ because your grandmother and her pension plan investing in the VCs want 20%.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/death-of-venture-capital-2011...
I expect Slack has a plan for these funds, which was probably pitched to the investors. The plan was good enough to get the investment.
Until I see otherwise, I'm going to give Slack the benefit of the doubt and assume these funds will go to expand their business in a positive way which may have little to do with existing features.
Even at its previous level of funding, Slack had so much extra money they were giving it away as a private VC fund. I'm baffled as to why they need to raise more instead of just reining that one.
There are use cases where a group chat is important and crucial but almost every chat product out there has a proper group chat. Even with weaker APIs than Slack they are still ok to use. Moreover:
- Slack is the huge distraction and greatly improves ADD
- The admin UI is like a forest full of trees, slow, crowded, littered with settings and options, has more pages than Wikipedia, finding the right setting is a ten minutes task if you are not used to Slack; this is my major gripe with Slack which drives me nuts every time
- Why do I have to create new accounts with email verification with every new Slack channel?
- While people post a lot of crap on Slack (memes, gifs, jokes) important stuff is still handled over email or respective ticketing systems; so now I have many topics in Slack, email and Trello
- Slack is def. good for socializing but again--every other group chat is good enough for socializing
- Ok there is second use case: echo chambers for token ICOs and obviously there are many at the moment
- As a side note: 95% of startups and SMBs use G Suite/G Mail as their mail server which includes Google Chat which has group chat and all the features 95% of us need, which is integrated in everything (such as the address book or search works seamlessly with chat and email messages); why aren't folks just using this? Why the hassle of setting up another tool, setting up roles, team members in the horrible admin pages of Slack? Just to have an ADD powerhouse called Slack in the company? I really don't get it and if I miss something please enlighten me, I want to understand why I need Slack
With their market share and their API they have reached a nice network effect without a doubt. But the question is, is it a winner-takes-it-all market and will they ever find somebody who will buy them at that valuation.
(Discord has replaced Slack for me and my friends now, but it only came along afterwards).
There were many before Slack, e.g. HipChat but as said the in G-Mail integrated chat has an excellent group chat (assuming your organization uses the GSuite).
Nowadays, a group chat is just a commodity which many other products include.
What in earth is some glorified chat room software going to do with enough money to have an impact on a small country's economy? It's insane.
Someone argued elsewhere in the comments that IRC and such is inaccessible for normal users. Sure, but who are the people that are using slack? Definitely not normal users. I don't think slack will last only catering to developers and such, because for example discord has a massive user base of average janes and joes and I honestly can't see what slack offers that's better.
Not when you consider who they are going to be competing with. Microsoft and Google will make their products essentially free as part of their Office Suites.
I wouldn't be too worried about Google. Hangouts and Chat are by far the worst products I've ever used. I can't think of a single piece of software I loathe more than Hangouts.
No you don't. It's per "team". Assuming that's what you meant: how many teams do you honestly use? Sure, it's not ideal for a bunch of little communities. As you said, Discord is good for that.
For a business, I haven't seen anything that even compares with Slack. I'm not sure what you consider a "normal user" (I'd argue that there is no such thing). If you mean non-technical users, then there are plenty of non-technical users in a business that need to communicate. For most businesses, they outnumber the technical people and rely on good communication tools more.
For work, Discord would be terrible for me since I can't have more than one username (to my knowledge). I want to keep my personal chats/username/status separate from my work ones.
Different people need different solutions.
BTW I'm focusing in on the business use case as that seems to be who Slack targets. They are trying to sell to people that have used Skype and Lync (or whatever they are calling it this week) and hated it.
EDIT: also, building a decent chat app is a very difficult problem. I imagine they will use that money to maintain the various clients they have and try to keep adding communication features (as they have been doing).
> - Why do I have to create new accounts with email verification with every new Slack channel?
I think you are misunderstanding the difference between a Slack instance and a channel, but it does seem silly that it treats your login as a distinct thing on every instance. I get the impression they never thought the free version would be used so widely or that people would join and use 12 different "teams".
Then you are using it wrong and you have your notifications set incorrectly.
This isn't a Slack problem it's a culture problem in your company.
At least for Silicon valley, really we want to go back to AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Lynx, IRC (the latter is possible I guess).
For engineering sure we can do IRC...but really sales/marketing/HR? No.
Slack is not perfect...but they have done a pretty damn good job hitting 90% of most tech company needs.
(Omg there is even an API)...c'mon give em some "slack"
I don't like how some open source and general interest communities use it for communication, as you have to go through this awkward sign up process that describes language like "welcome to the team!" and you have to set individual passwords for each team you join.
Slack seems to me like it's designed for businesses and teams to communicate, not as a public forum.
https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-...
Like others have mentioned, I tried several chat clients (open source and non-open source) and realized none of them fit the bill/don't have the customizability that I wanted.
So, as stupid/crazy as this sounds, I sat down over a weekend, wrote a simple chat app on Phoenix/Elixir, hosted it on Google Cloud AppEngine, and Bingo! We were done. I know many people will advise against this, but:
1) I'm not into devops, so this setup works really well for me since AppEngine is precisely meant for this.
2) AppEngine allows you to setup firewall rules within their interface, so I restricted access to the outside world and whitelisted only my company's IP. So, I don't really need to worry about security much.
3) Because, this is a custom solution, I was able to integrate stuff such as time tracking, verifying that confidential docs aren't shared between teams, etc. Also, our own custom branding, client support integration within the chat (you can answer to support tickets right from within the interface).
4) I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and it integrates with my entire Saas I've developed[2] very, very nicely.
Ironically the Phoenix open source project (and similar others) themselves use Slack (why god, why?) and it's really terrible because Slack doesn't allow you to search for more than 10,000 messages. That's the last thing you want in an open source project - the inability to search for solutions / snippets of code.
Hope they move it else where or did what I did.
[1]http://sircmpwn.github.io/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack...
Any chance you mind sharing that code on GitHub? I've been curious about Elixir/Phoenix lately :)
Translation: partial liquidity for founders and early employees.
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/atlassian_closes_60_...
If you suck in $250 million and have only 500 employees, you can cruise for a very long time.
It's pure win for Slack right now.
I integrated Dropbox and kayak and ton of others app. My parents are not tech savvy and they can still use it.
As annoying as Slack's UI can be, it's not as annoying as Jira's, and Atlassian has a market cap over $8B. Salesforce has a market cap over $64B and also has a lot to do with people in big businesses communicating about stuff.
My hunch has long been that Butterfield, having sold Flickr too early back in the day, badly wants to join the Three Comma Club. That annoying knock-knock-knock sound is just the beginning.
Between the "Slack" and "Slack Helper" processes, the OS X slack client is using about 766MB of ram.
Slack recently ran a Slack Developer Workshop (conference with 100+ attendees) to a small group of developers in SF. I was lucky enough to be a part of it. They made it abundantly clear that Slack has a strong interest in being an application distribution platform and they are focused on creating a superior developer experience for their ecosystem. It was amazing to hear.
As somebody who grew up on IRC, the power, to me, was in how robust and easy IRC was to build for and around. Bots and commands were very easy to script and get the hang of. In my mind, Slack has actually built something more valuable than IRC. They have built a new model and ecosystem for application distribution, and they've added the right product features to do the job. The next step is to make it insanely easy to develop for and truly surpass the "ease" of the IRC experience for devs. It's inspiring to hear stories about how companies are building entire workflows with Slack being the center of their business; Mike Brevoort of Missions for Slack [1] spoke of a use case they're dealing with where Slack is powering the entire operations of a Canadian craft brewery using Slack + Google Sheets.
What Slack really has the potential to do here, in my mind, is be the application layer for business. Think about companies like Envoy (check-in, etc.) with Slack integration; somebody shows up at your office, you get pinged on Slack. You open Slack on your phone to check the notification, there's Slack Actions available for you to unlock the door (or what-have-you). The time-to-delivery on similar applications without Slack... well, it oftentimes just straight up wouldn't happen. We'll see more of these.
This is what Slack is getting insanely right. They didn't stop at massive growth + having a "good chat app." They're innovating and enabling new and veteran businesses to grow in novel ways.
Disclosure: Slack is an investor of ours [2] and we're also pretty passionate about developer experience. Through that, I've had a chance to interface with a number of their team members and I truly believe it's a fantastic organization. I can't help but root for good people.
TIL people actually say stuff like that.
... this post, too.
Providing a fremium service allowing the first email from a domain to be the admin encouraged adoption without official blessing.