I'm surprised investors aren't more scared of the competition, particularly Microsoft and its Teams product that is part of Office 365.
Maybe it's not a huge deal because the overlap of Slack customers and Office 365 customers isn't that big?
Maybe it's not a huge deal because the overlap of Slack customers and Office 365 customers isn't that big?
Those sound more like great features than "workplace bureaucracy".
To everybody who isn't a software developer and will likely never need Jira integrations and Slackbots, Slack is just another chat app.
For a paid software, Slack needs to win those people over too.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-canceled-8-billion...
(I do most of the sales calls for Latacora, which feels like a decent representative sample of startups, and I think all but one, maybe two, of the companies we have ever spoken with used Slack. Order of magnitude a percent.)
In my company Teams was actually a big improvement because we had nothing before.
* Formatting is done with Markdown syntax instead of "word processor" style formatting.
In a word processor if you type Hello, Ctrl+b World Ctrl+b!
it would produce Hello, <b>World</b>!
In Slack it produces Hello <b>World </b>!* * .
* /commands are not discoverable or intuitive to anyone who never used IRC or CLI programs. Non-programmers have no idea what arguments are or that [brackets] means optional.
* Bots and their syntax have the same problem except that their DSLs are far more varied and arcane.
* Very few people know or understand the difference between a channel and a group.
* Threads are super weird compared to email. It's like an inbox but not really. Threads interleaved into actual message timelines are not very discoverable and difficult to follow.
* Attachments and files don't really work like most people expect.
* There are at least 5 different settings panels all with different things and scopes.
* Reminders and a bunch of stuff being implemented as a magic "account" in Slack is super confusing to people.
* Very few people really "get" apps as well in this respect. They're in your message timeline, they look like accounts, and are in some ways but aren't in others.
* The difference between a "bot" and "app" isn't super well defined. Some respond to messages in a channel, some need commands.
...Which serves as a demonstration that nobody needs chat.
Isn't it great how that works?
As many times as I’ve hated on Slack on HN, my anger is at their bloat and sluggishness and low density UI to do basic text chat. At least I can do basic text chat in an IRC style channel in it.
Desktop Teams is a nightmare of mystery magic UI, I never have any clue where I am in it, where anything else is, how to get to or from stuff or what the chat is doing, it’s super unpleasant.
It’s basically a web browser to SharePoint but with no browser chrome or address bar or navigation hints or breadcrumbs, then the same into a Skype replacement, then a pile of chat channels which aren’t channels and have rolled up chat threads in a list in them, but all of this in one window so you can only do one thing in the UI at any time (I.e. NOT chat to someone and look up some documentation in another window because it only has one window) and Teams honking at you wherever you are with red blobs of attention grabbers and “people are trying to contact you in Teams” dark pattern Facebook bullshit where the mobile teams and desktop teams notify and then emails you.
It’s both completely overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.
The explanation is here
For Slack has no moat
It's one of the few products that's forced Google to create a desktop app (even if it still is CEF based).
I have seen first-hand how much of the business can run on Slack. Yet, if it's gone one day, companies would survive.