I really don't like the heavy dependence on Slack that my (and a lot of other) company has. The outage is frustrating.
And since so many companies have settled on the same solution, when I'm working with a client I can join their Slack workspace too. That cuts down on the numerous quick phone calls and long email threads that we used to have.
Slack vs Teams vs IRC vs anything else, I don't care. It's not about the product. But my company (and most of our clients) didn't have this capability before Slack even though IRC existed for decades, so I'm going to give Slack some credit.
Hackers like to pretend that presentation doesn't matter, but in the end presentation is the only thing that matters.
Blackberry was absolutely massive before the iPhone, email has always been the largest use of the internet (until media became possible), and Google search became successful because it actually worked, unlike everything available at the time.
I do agree with your sentiment, though. To the user, the UI is the product.
Same thing with email. Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL pre-dated Gmail by quite a long time, but Gmail now owns something like 80% of all webmail traffic.
I think your confusion might be where I said "these things existed but no one really liked them" maybe you read "these things didn't exist before"?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/global-revenue-of...
Take slack as an example: ircd with logging enabled + elastic search/sphinx/lucene + web frontend (use any existing web irc client and integrate that with elastic search results). MVP really seems as a one guy one weekend project. And that was lying underutilized for decades. While my original comment was just a snarky remark, I really think that there are other areas where such a (relatively) simple MVP could allow huge productivity boost to many businesses and allow them to use an existing tool that right now is just too hard/too complicated to use by a wide audience.
And of course the market will reward those that will find the right solution and come up with a great UX improvement to that tech. The hard part is creating the GUI that is both efficient and easy-enough , and the hardest part is of course finding the right tool and the right problem to solve. (edit: formatting)
Slack is way more than that, though.
My recollection is that even the initial version of Slack was more than that.
At this point, it's enough that "let's extend ircd" isn't exactly a practical answer. Either they maintain their own incompatible fork of ircd or they try to force their business desires into the irc protocol.
There's plenty of things that are "just X plus some paint" if you don't look at them deeply. That usually does an extreme disservice to the difficulty of the "plus some paint" part, and often represents a failure to understand the features involved.
- Phone apps from the jump - Easy ability to upload files - Search includes the content of those files - Editing
Pretty tangential, but I observed that exact phenomenon recently after looking at the recent VR headsets: Oculus Rift and HTC Vive existed for at least a few years. Tried them, was pretty fun, but tangling with wires, having to have a powerful PC on hand, that 1-2min set up every time before you want to use it, it was all killing the usability for me.
Then Oculus Quest comes out earlier this year. Pretty much similar tech (a few differences, no need for PC, but can be used with one through easy sideloading), but no wires and no need for a PC connection. Every time I want to use it, I don't need to fiddle with my PC. I put the headset on, it wakes up in a few seconds at the exact spot I left it last time. I put it down, it goes to sleep in 15 seconds.
I ended up spending an hour or two almost every day for the past two months playing with it, as opposed to the previous headsets (most of which were left on the shelf a few weeks after the initial purchase). The only major advantage that Quest has over previous gen is easy and frictionless UX.
It got to the point where every single friend of mine who tried it at my place ended up purchasing their own headset the day after. And those people were some of the biggest VR skeptics, after their experiences with original Vive and Rift.
When a company switches from their own e-mail server to hosted Google Mail, their uptime improves.
You won't be able to receive new e-mails, but if you use a local client like thunderbird, you can still access your old e-mails.
With slack down, I can only access the messages that I (luckily) have cached locally.
Yes it has and it is a great thing - hopefully no messages would be lost assuming that downtime is relatively short. This still does pose a (possibly minor) problem when some mails are urgent.
Likewise for Internet service... if my local AT&T connection went down, it doesn't matter how open and resilient the Internet is, I'm not getting online until it's fixed.
Except that you could work from home, check your e-mail using mobile.
Yep. It's pleasant at first and a genuinely useful tool when used correctly, but if you're not judicious with your usage, you could get burned.