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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

We currently use Teams and everyone on the team absolutely hates it. I am actively looking at alternatives such as mattermost or slack to get us onto something that doesn't run like complete garbage.

Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? If Teams were a native application, or even written using something on the .NET-side, we would probably have about 20% the complaints we do today. Watching an application that is more-or-less responsible for managing basic text and image data on a continuously-paginated basis occupy nearly a gigabyte of memory is simply intolerable.

Teams makes me want to write a clone just to prove how much better it could be. That is how bad Teams is. It makes me want to spend an entire month's worth of weekends writing a native clone that no one will ever use.

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There are already a bunch of native Teams/Slack/etc.-like applications. Matrix has a good number of native clients[1]. There's Ripcord[2] which supports both Slack and Discord. There's Matterhorn[3] for Mattermost.

[1] https://matrix.org/clients/

[2] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

[3] https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn

What I want, is something that ISN'T a poor copy of Slack. We've lost the rich landscape of differing chat/collaboration clients, and now just have a mono-culture of Slack-Clones.

That isn't true at all - Matrix has a rich and growing ecosystem of chat clients. For Slack clones, you're well stocked, but the links given to you by the parent shows there is much more out there.

> Matrix has a rich and growing ecosystem of chat clients.

Including ones that work on iOS and Android WITH Notifications? Not having that feature has been a blocker for me so far.

RIP HipChat, last top tier native work chat program. We were paying customers for HipChat and were forced off when Atlassian killed it. Replaced by stride/slack/discord/teams all built on electron and all with awful non-native UI and web app like performance.

I know why they do it: electron is cheap and easy to spam on every platform. I don't know why: people pay for this crap.

Perhaps the issue is that people don't pay for it? Teams is free, bundled with other MS stuff that people are buying anyways. Discord is free. Slack is mostly free (until you are already stuck with it).

I’m curious what was so great about it: when we did the comparison even the Atlassian maintainers picked Slack.

Apparently it was great simply because it was a native app. Who knew that was the top criteria for a work chat app.

It was a focused product. Native apps, high performance, no funny business. Yes, it lacked some features that the newer stuff had, but it did the team chat part really well and got out of your way.

Deploying web apps lets you iterate faster, stuff features in faster without ending up with different capabilities across the group of apps. Sometimes the ability to add features too easily is abused to add too many features without thinking through them.

When it was up. The frequent outages on HipChat circa 2014 or so got to be unbearable, and we switched to Slack at that point, and were much happier.

I've found every instance of Mattermost that I've encountered to be poorly executed, notifications to be hit-or-miss, loading slow, access unstable and recent conversations to fall off my list unpredictably.

What do your coworkers hate about Teams? I've honestly found it to be an acceptable chat platform and I've gotta say I appreciate the cross-coordination with Outlook.

It makes me want to spend an entire month's worth of weekends writing a native clone that no one will ever use.

If you ever do, I'd suggest doing the same with Slack might get far more attention, given that it has a publicly documented API as well as a few thirdparty clients already.

Also, why did this have to be developed using electron?

Probably because Web/JS developers are far more common and cheaper than native ones? Otherwise, even MS itself is saying "Win32 is the future":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883351

ripcord is exactly that

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

Not QuiTe --- that's a step up from a web app in a browser, but not "true" native (i.e. pure Win32 on Windows.)

I'm convinced the community with never reach majority consensus on a solution.

Maybe people just suck at communicating?

Check out Twist. It's great.

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