Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before something shinier comes along.
They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
They were simply the first company to do hosted chat well enough that it didn't constantly piss people off. I wouldn't call that a sticky moat.
If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.
- deal with the target platform's API
- deal with APIs of the many platforms that are being integrated
- maintenance and SLAs
I honestly doubt you can create half a dozen good integrations that require more than just notifications in a channel (for example, PagerDuty notifications and the like).
There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.
well put - and - even more so: hosted business chat. all they have to do is keep on keeping on.
I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will always come out cheaper than Office + $other_thing.
We route alerts through IM primarily, and are remote-first. I get that some folks here complain about their inability to ignore chat notifications, but there's a decent chunk of us that need to find our uninterrupted time where we can, not when we want.
A few weeks ago the startup I work for started using NextCloud as a stop-gap till we get O365 and OneDrive. It is ridiculously simple for us at-least to just copy over our entire Dropbox folder to the NextCloud one.
We have shared channels with Integration Partners, Suppliers, Enterprise Customers... These are extremely valuable ways of communication once setup, especially with simple file-transfer thrown in, etc. Leaving Slack would mean slamming the door in the face of these entities, something we're simply not ready to do for the cost-savings that ditching Slack would mean.
Enterprise users usually just use it for internal messaging.
If you’re big enough for Microsoft to care about you, you already have embedded SEs compensated based on OneDrive and Teams adoption. Your IT middle management pushes teams.
Your CIO is getting the cyber pitch based in the insecurity of your O365 implementation. The fix is to buy Azure AD or the next bundle (EMS), or maybe the E5 O365/Windows subscription.
MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.
I think it is hard for cost conscious organizations with o365 to justify slack.
As a remote worker Slack is my office, essentially, and I think it's done an amazing job at being an office for remote first companies. I can't speak for Teams.
It's actually pretty good for managing discreet work streams, and even for organising personal work (kind of against the "Team" ethos, but having a channel for myself keeps my work visible and tabs keep important things to hand easily).
I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.
I think your company should start working on that problem ASAP.
Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.
- Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobody uses teams but chats, which are only recently pinnable (!?!?) - the pages, plugins and sharepoint files is great, but too restrictive.
Compared to Slack or Zulip, it is still very behind. However, once our 70k organisation moved to office 365 and started using teams, we sheepled and didn't want the team to use a fragmented tool and bit the bullet. So yeah. Watch out for teams.
I haven't moved to it yet because I require a chat application that works and allows people to contact me.
Teams has it's own issues, but messages getting delivered isn't one of them.
If Lync (Skype for Business) is any indication, building well-working enterprise messaging is hard. Unless cost-cutting is your central concern, you want your internal communication to use the best, least-friction tools. Here Slack has quite an advantage.
99% of value of Slack for our team is in the text-related features.
Seriously, Flow is good stuff.
Also, Google Chat. AFAIK it's free if your company is already using the work version of Gmail, though don't quote me on that. It's out now, and does the job well enough.
My current employer went with Google Chat, I think mainly due to the cost difference with 10k+ employees.
Or Salesforce Chatter. Enough companies handing Salesforce good money that adding this on makes sense.
I see Slack as more akin to something like Excel, where people who really depend on it (in a way much more than person-to-person chat) go beserk if it's taken away.
The product is compelling enough that Microsoft is trying to position their clone as the lynchpin of everything in O365 that isn’t mail.
It’s a platform that is attractive to all sorts of players. Apple has a huge enterprise business that they completely ignore. Google, Cisco, other enterprise plays are easily imaginable.