Well deserved.
Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed.
It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.
Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed.
It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.
They didn't even run ads for the first three years of their existence.
I agree. There is no law against half-assed, bloated Electron based desktop software that can bring even recent hardware to its knees.
There are plenty of lightweight clients that use the Slack API. I don't see why people complain so hard that the official client is heavy.
Weechat with Slack is a dream feels like the good-ole IRC days.
I'm not a fan of how much RAM or CPU it uses. I tried the desktop app hoping it would be better, but it seems like it's perhaps worse (I use Firefox, so
Because on Android at least the website detects that you're on a mobile device and switches to read-only mode. Correct, you can't even post a reply without fudging user-agent or installing the app.
Ended deleting the desktop client.
Office/company slack, project A slack, project B slack, ... and in no time slack starts to use more RAM than docker/VMs I am developing on.
As I do every day.
Every single day.
For the one single channel I join. with no PMs and no threads, no file transfers, no voice or video anything.
Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if it was astonishingly good. But it isn't. It isn't even basically competent, it's terrible. Terrible at scrolling back, terrible at editing previous lines, appalling at completing names properly, bad at search, and completely lacking at customizing when it displays 2MB animated gifs inline.
I would expect a 4Gb machine would mean I never have to check on a text chat client. Apparently not.
What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.
This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.
Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.
...while creating others: fragmentation and lock-in
I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable.
Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top.
If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.
Found the bug.
> there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards
It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols.
While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that governments can sometimes wake up and restore competition.
Perhaps in 50 years using open standards will be encouraged e.g. by providing a tax discount
I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.
I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.
My Dad _just_ upgraded from an iPhone 5. Do you think his Xs won’t last as long?
I agree the laptop situation is a bit shitty. I hate the USB-C everything on my work laptop. Everything works fine on my personal computer but as soon as I plug my usb hub into a usb c adaptor everything stutters.
Love their privacy stance though. Best in the business for sure.
Also, what’s abusive? And what’s fraudulent?
Apparently their new monitors are very well priced. And building the same machine you’d get in a MacBookPro or different model ends up being more expensive or similarly priced.
I could be wrong, and I am, certainly, an Apple fan, but I will criticize when I think it’s appropriate and don’t hold views concretely.
I'm mostly talking about their laptops and their iMacs. The USB C connectors are of course inconvenient, but I actually like them. Again, the problem is that in their pursuit of thinness they ended up designing keys that are very sensitive to dust (and not very nice to use). In subsequent models they kept at it, so the quality of keyboards doesn't seem to be a priority. Some laptops have a tendency to develop display problems due to bad design. For instance blowing hot air on parts that can't take hot air or laying out connectors so that they will fail more easily.
Now these are design flaws, which brings us to the "abusive and fraudulent" part. If you want to get these things fixed under warranty you _may_ be okay. Except the process appears to be entirely decided by chance. For instance they have put moisture indicators inside the macbooks that not only react to liquid damage, but which turn from white to red (indicating moisture) over time depending on the humidity in the air where you use it. (Most people don't know how these things work, so they'll accept it). So they'll accuse you of having spilled liquid in your laptop and refuse to fix it even when this is not the case. Accusing their customers of lying isn't a very good way to behave.
In many cases they will also claim that your laptop is in need to expensive component replacements. Either because they claim that the component cannot be repaired or when their service technicians fail to correctly diagnose the equipment. The repair costs quoted are supposed to make you buy a new computer rather than fix the one you have.
On top of that they have the gall to claim that independent repair shops are somehow less qualified than Apple. Which naturally rings true in the ears of most people; they designed it so they should be the best to fix it, right? However, this doesn't seem to be generally true. Especially since Apple and their authorized resellers appear to have very limited diagnostic and repair capability and the qualifications vary.
When you do send in an Apple device, you have to be aware of the fact that it isn't Apple that repairs your equipment - it is a subcontractor. And they are not always the best.
Wich brings us to the bullying. Apple do their best to kill the independent repair market any way they can. Often by filing lawsuits against repair shops and then putting them out of business. When confronted with this they us their go-to excuses. Like protecting the consumer from unqualified repair shops.
They do this by denying independent repair shops access to the supply line - meaning they work hard to make it difficult to obtain spare parts and components. Compare this to, for instance, Samsung, which sell parts online to make it easy for repair shops to get the needed parts. In order to get parts for Apple products there is an entire market for broken laptops that are bought and sold to repair shops in order to provide donor boards for components.
Of course, then there is the fact that they seem to deliberately make things harder to repair or upgrade. For instance batteries that are glued in unnecessarily, increasing the chance of destruction if you try to replace them. Or soldering in components that the user may want to upgrade later (like RAM and SSDs). For instance on my mac mini the SSD is soldered in, but fortunately the RAM is socketed.
I became aware of the systematic nature of this about a year ago when starting to watch videos to learn how to solder surface mount components (I do a bit of electronics). I stumbled over people who repaired Macs for a living. I didn't come there for the rants, but when starting to research the issue a bit and speaking to a couple of people who also do this for a living, it became obvious to me how terribly Apple are behaving.
Two things struck me 1) diagnosing and fixing macs isn't rocket science. People are able to even as Apple tries to starve them for information. 2) most people don't know how electronics are fixed so of course Apple will get away with claiming they are protecting their users by not allowing independent repair shops to repair their stuff. Diagnosing and replacing broken components and cleaning up fouled circuit boards is not all that hard. Sure, you need the equipment, ability to read schematics and some ability to diagnose electronics, but there are people who do that for a living.
And you really do want to be able to pick your computer repair people just like you pick repair shops for your car. I use a mechanic I know and trust for my car - a guy who walks me through everything he does with my car and even shows me what he has done, and what he thinks should be done. I never use the brand workshop simply because those guys only follow procedures (which aren't always correct), I have no idea who works on my car and I have no insight into what is actually done or if the car is actually fixed or serviced correctly. If anything, my computer is even more important to me so of course I don't want some semi-qualified, random clown subcontractor of Apple, far away, to work on my computers.
The upshot of all this is that I feel very uncomfortable as a Mac user. Whenever I buy a Mac I am taking a huge risk. If something breaks I may not be able to fix it and the only option available to me might be to buy an entirely new machine. Even when the fault is due to a cheap component that takes 10-15 minutes to replace. Simply because Apple actively work to withhold spare parts from the market.
This is even more true if you buy one of their expensive models. The new Mac Pro may look nice, both in terms of specs, price and looks, but if it breaks, you have no way of knowing if you are going to lose your investment. Your machine may become completely worthless as a result of a trivial, cheap component breaking.
If I trusted Apple as a hardware vendor I would probably have upgraded my laptop to a newer model and I would probably have bought an iMac Pro rather than a Mac mini. But since I can't trust them I'm looking at starting to move away from Apple. My next laptop probably isn't going to be an Apple and my next desktop computer is probably not going to be an Apple since I need more power with less risk.
I'm really not fond of the idea of running Linux and having to depend on vmware to run Windows for a lot of the desktop stuff, but this may be the only viable route if Apple doesn't get their act together.
Enough text. Here are some videos.
Some reporting on Apple's fraudulent practices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_SZ4tfLns
Example of repair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDjwYf_GzK0
Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service?
Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers.
"Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it with Qt (old Qt). Cool huh?
* Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly.
* DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's inserting itself in the conversation.
Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.
since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that)
Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack
I'm more a Unix person that a network person so it's possible I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what it is. Thanks for replying.
(and I think from the above description of my typical computer use at the time, it's quite obvious what I was doing, and how that would have given me plenty of opportunities to run into all sorts of (compatibility) issues)
In theory there must be some scheme for forwarding the port through a firewall on the sender side, which might be setting the sending device as "DMZ". Or you can put the burden on the receiver by using active mode.
mIRC should really support UPnP by now but I don't think it does?
It takes a lot of heat because it is very customisable and get locked down in large corporation.
I worked in company that ran an old shitty very version on underpowered server and disabled feature like rich text editing but force you through a 5 page wizard with in total tens of mandatory field to fill for any jira ticket. People at that company used an excel file on a shared drive to escape the jira hell.
Also there is the crowd of Agile purist that complain that Jira is too bloated for agile and ignoring the extra feature is not good enough because mostly "trust issues".
More recently there are stuff like plandek that create metric on your jira usage. In the wrong hands, this is modern day LOC metric.
Herding exists, but at some point I suspect the fact that more working business use the one rather than the other would have some meaning.
That being said, the good thing about mIRC / Bugzilla is that no-one prevents you from using them for your business, so go for it !
People who complain about these products probably aren't in the position to use something else, or they probably would have switched already.
I use IRC all the time, and IRCCloud makes it comparable to Slack.
I'd go with Github simplistic issues all the time instead of wresting with Jira. YouTrack from JetBrains is a reasonable compromise. Redmine is also ok.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Confluence is OKish. But Jira is absurdly bad. I'm talking about the UI for creating Issues and Epics etc. The front-end devs that wrote it simply didn't have the ability. The parser for entering markup such as preformatted code blocks just doesn't work a lot of the time. The newer "Visual mode" just doesn't work a lot of the time. It simply needs to switch over to markdown and use a 3rd-party parser and renderer. The Visual Mode preview doesn't render using a fixed-width font. have you ever clicked on the little "Link" symbol in the top right of the text entry box? Obviously that should copy the current URL to the system clipboard. But they didn't know how to look that up on StackOverflow and instead made it a normal link to the current page (so you reload the page accidentally), with the link title saying
> title="Right click and copy link for a permanent link to this comment."
! You enter `bq.` to quote a line of text. This is all just some crap that someone with no design sense or standards came up with after 10 seconds thought.
I'm talking specifically about the quality of the UI. It is far, far, below the quality of UIs put out by respected modern products.
As and end user, you may not (and probably should not) care about the historical context of its design decisions. But it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers. They've simply placed a large premium on backward compatibility and are still around today in large part because of that. Having said that, they really should find a way to support both Textile and Markdown if for no other reason than Bitbucket uses Markdown and it's confusing as hell having to switch between the two syntaxes if your company uses both products.
[0] -- https://textile-lang.com/
bq. commitment to not breaking backward compatibility
Backward compatibility with what? People's brains? We're talking about markup language and rendering right, which is not an API consumed by machines.
bq. it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers.
So why is the new "Visual Mode" WYSIWYG text entry mode so terrible? And why that absurd "link" icon in the top right of the text entry widget?
As for the link issue, I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. I have an icon that looks like the Android "share" icon and that drops down a dialog with a link to the current page and a target user field. The link icon in the text entry field just adds a textile formatted link. I'm probably just overlooking something, but I'm not seeing what you described. And I never use the visual editor, so I can't speak to its quality.
I should note that I don't work for Atlassian and never have, so I don't have a horse in this race. But I have been using Jira since maybe 2004 due to its early adoption by the Apache Software Foundation. Jira is hardly perfect, but it's the least bad issue tracker I've used. At some level, I'm sure it's just a matter of preference. E.g., I know plenty of people that laud the GitHub issue tracker and I don't get it. It works well enough for small projects, but is too limiting for any project of non-trivial size, IMHO. I also find more than 2 or 3 labels in the issue list to just be a distracting sea of colors.
I hope you're able to find something that works well for you. I'll add that if you're using an on-premise version of Jira in your company, there's a high likelihood that you're running a dated release. I've found that some of the more aggravating issues people run into have actually been fixed, but not deployed in their environment. If you can find access to a running instance of the latest version, you might find it to be a more less frustrating experience.
Jira can work well or it can work very poorly. It really depends on what you're trying to do with it and what resources you're willing to pour into it. That's why some people love it while others hate it.
In all that time, the only thing I've really heard people complain about, was when it was slow or down.
You need to explain a claim like that.
On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?
It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully".
But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user.
The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances.
On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste.
On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.
Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive.
OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a different window.
You use ⌘-k to switch channels. Partially drafted messages are retained. I think I prefer that to a mess of windows that I'd have to manage though of course I don't mean to impose my preference on you.
I have the desktop client open and it's using about 800MB memory between the main process and 3 helper processes. I agree it's a lot, but it seems 100% standard for modern applications. Everything seems to be built around the assumption that people have a $2000 laptop like rich westerners might. So I don't agree with it but I wouldn't single out Slack for criticism beyond any other modern consumer tech company.
I had people at my last job who had to quit Slack because of how hot it was making their laptops, and how much memory it was using.
At my current job, Slack is definitely one of my most rate limiting applications for how quickly I can get things done. Scrolling in chat, searching, switching channels- these are all actions that are extremely slow, and sometimes seem like they don’t work at all.
It's the same thing with the Swarm review CI tool. If you diff a big enought file, but still quite small for a conputer, it get slow or crashes.
Also the same thing with MS Teams. The prior conversion are not loaded at startup and if you scroll it shows place holders instead of the text for some seconds.
Price/sales = 42, bubble stock ...
And this is before we get into the fact that it devours RAM and uses more CPU than is reasonable, making it somewhat pathetic if you think of programming as a craft.
Other electron based apps like Discord perform better so I'm not sure why Slack is so crappy.
Choose your customers.
I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments).
But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.
If you're using it personally, the limits on message counts are made quite clear. Exceeding them makes export difficult or impossible without paying. So don't exceed them.
A huge chunk of Slack's value prop (after decent UX) is exactly the fact that they have all of your communications. No chat admins, servers to manage and back up, or networking hell to orchestrate non-text content sharing in a multiparty way. Also makes corporate folks who pay for it happy as they have pretty good auditability/retention controls--not perfect, of course, but better than a truly p2p/federated solution, and again: no infrastructure management needed.
You don't have to be happy with it, but those are features, not bugs, and are valuable to many.
You also just, y'know, don't have to use Slack. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. If the hill you want to die on is "I won't work for any company/team that uses this chat platform", well, that's your choice (hell, there's not even an argument to be made about ubiquity making it a false choice; Slack has plenty of competitors, both paid/hosted and FOSS/federated, in active use by big companies). But don't pretend that a lack of local history or easy export is some sort of highway robbery or hostage situation.
Are you just trying to be infuriating?
What are you talking about then? All of my communications are either personal or employment related, almost by definition.
I mean they are already giving you the oppportunity to use a limited version for free, you can't expect them to give you one of the most useful features imho when you are just using their resources and infrastructure in exchange for nothing; it doesn't make any business sense.
If I'm a non-paying user of Slack (or whatever other SaaS with a free tier) I am not entitled to anything whatsoever, I'd be grateful for the fact that they allow me partial functionality at all.
Personally, I would just call that normal / decent behaviour. Alone, it doesn't mean you deserve a ridiculous billion dollar evaluation
"Well deserved" describes the outcome.
So you might say the outcome is well deserved only if decent behavior comprised the process.
As others have said, this 'Standard Export' doesn't include direct messages and private channels, so there's still some amount of 'hostage taking'
If governments weren't so concerned with party politics, infighting and staving off populist surges, we'd probably have a proper definition for a "gig economy" worker by now. A definition that would allow them to keep the flexibility that they appreciate so much, whilst still having proper worker protections for sick pay, holidays and all the rest.
They didn't start as a company for the sole purpose of exploiting legal grey areas, but they certainly have consistently done so since their inception.