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Comment by henning | Hacker News Reader

I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can really do anything about it. So, I congratulate them on their success but I, too, am utterly mystified.

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Back when Slack came out, my company was using HipChat. It was okay, but clearly outdated and not great -- barely a step up from AOL Messenger. I was invited into a Slack by some former colleagues, and it was a breath of fresh air. Someone finally upgraded the chat UI to something modern and un-clunky. It didn't hurt that it had a web UI, that it was free, and that it had configurable integrations that could work right inside the channel. Another thing that I think helped it take off was the simplicity with which it handled embedded media. Post a YouTube video or a tweet or a GIF, and the thing came alive on your screen, embedded right in the channel. You shouldn't underestimate the power of GIF sharing.

There was nothing groundbreaking about Slack, and there still isn't. There are a lot of naysayers on HN scoffing at Slack for basically being a worse form of IRC, which is silly and wrong, but also right in that there is nothing groundbreaking about the tech. But products don't need to be groundbreaking to win. They just need to be better than the rest, and perhaps generate the necessary "reality distortion field" that convinces people that it's the next natural evolutionary step. Once you convince people of that, they don't go back to HipChat.

One thing that can’t hurt is that Stewart Butterfield is well connected, and got all his friends to push Slack at their startups.

I was at a startup, we used a mix of Hipchat (business types) and IRC (developers). A marketing/social media guy who was buddies with Stewart joined and insisted we should all switch to this, and there we were, dogfooding Slack (this was closed beta days).

Hard to beat free user acquisition.

Slack and IRC are incomparable. Slack has authentication, message retention and search, multimedia attachments, mobile application with notifications, conversation threads, etc.

You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.

Except for message retention and search, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible with bouncers.

Mobile applications with notifications, conversation threads with +draft/reply (IRCv3 draft), multimedia attachments (IRCv3 idea), authentication with SASL and standardized account management (IRCv3 draft), etc.

Look at what IRCCloud provides, and what IRCv3 is doing.

> Except for ##2 killer features##, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible ##if you implement it yourself##.

That's what normal people see when they read your message.

Going to irccloud.com, creating an account, and connecting is "implementing it yourself" how again? And IRCCloud has all that in a single solution.

Even if you want to self-host, there are solutions — get any server, run

    docker run \
  -v /path/to/folder/where/you/want/to/store/the/config:/config \
  k8r.eu/justjanne/quassel-docker:v0.13.1

and connect with quassel or quasseldroid to that server (the setup wizard guides you through everything else). It's about as simple as it can get for selfhosted. (Quassel gets you message retention and search immediately, and the other features are already being worked on).

Well, irccloud.com must be doing something wrong if they're using a pre-existing protocol, have solved its problems and yet Slack is the company worth billions.

That’s the part where VC money comes in. 99% of the VC funded companies worth billions weren’t the first, or the best — they just managed to get VC money and out-spent everyone else on advertising, or used the money to give away their product until they were the largest.

Uber is still making losses in almost all markets it’s active in. Slack is making a 380'000 $ loss per day. Amazon hasn’t made a profit a single time in their entire history.

The Silicon Valley model of "let’s gain a monopoly by giving away a product and outspending everyone on advertising, then monetizing it" doesn’t reward the best product. Never has, never will.

And companies grown the traditional, honest way, making actual profits of course can’t compete with that. If I opened up a supermarket giving away everything for free, of course I’d have more customers than the supermarkets who have to make money.

Amazon has made a tiny profit for several years before AWS, when it started having larger ones.

But it was never too much in the red. It shouldn't be placed together with Uber.

"Except for message retention and search"

> I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat

Stay up? I was at a company that was on Hipchat, and we really liked it, but the amount of downtime got to be semi-unbearable. We switched to Slack and it had much better uptime.

Hipchat had service issues at the same time Slack was getting momentum. It was terrible timing for HipChat.

I believe hipchat was a paid product, which stunted it's growth compared to Slack. Slack is 'free by default' but converts users to paid.

Hipchat was horrible. Barely worked. Flaky. Was happy when my company switched to Slack

Hipchat has terrible scalability problems and poor uptime.

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