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Comment by fortytw2 | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty incredible to think that for all the billions of dollars around Slack it's still fundamentally the same product with the same value add that it was when it first launched.

Sure, maybe it's faster or more efficient or whatever now, but what it is at heart is the _exact_ same thing it was on Day 1.

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Does it need to change?

I don't want Slack to be a different or more comprehensive tool.

I agree! That's why I think it's so interesting.

Aside from bugfixes, I'm sure they could have done absolutely nothing since launching and be profitable and useful.

Yes, in order to provide a competitive advantage over the numerous clones that are already coming along, Slack must continue to innovate.

And become what, Microsoft Teams? Everything for everyone ... executed badly?

Staying focused is orthogonal to continued innovation.

I’d prefer that slack just release more products rather than add a ton of features to slack.

I’d like to see a slack version ticket tracking for example — not a slack feature, just a separate product.

Probably not, but why do they need the billions of dollars of funding and steep subscription cost then?

The per-user cost is only Silicon Valley reasonable - it's nearly as high as GSuite which provides a lot more value, and if so many other major business suite companies (Google, MSFT) weren't absolutely terrible at building chat applications I'm pretty sure Slack would be forced out of the market (or to actually compete).

People and companies have a really hard time with something being "done".

One could start reducing the engineering and sales force, focus on polish and maintenance, gradually reduce price and collect on a successful useful product. That kind of declaring victory doesn't happen though so products get engineered into uselessness and get bought out by companies who collect on them by neglecting them until only people who happened to get stuck are still using them and everybody moved on to the next hot thing.

It's hard to justify CEO and management salaries when you decide your product is finished so instead they just keep doing things and end up ruining something great.

And still just a web browser underneath!

If they used a native toolkit this bug wouldn't exist, no?

Probably not, but then you would have 100 different bugs browses handle flawlessly nowadays.

Minus IRC/XMPP.

A Tesla Model S is fundamentally the same product with the same value add as a Ford Model T. Sure, the Tesla may be faster or more efficient or whatever now, but what it is at heart is the exact same thing as the Ford was 111 years ago.

Not quite the same.

How so?

The Tesla Model S has dog mode.

The point of the Model T was to be mass produced and to be affordable for the average working class American household. No Tesla model meets those criteria.

For people who aren't interested in cars, this statement is quite true.

Not if you want a car for reliability, long distance high speed travel, and protection from the elements.

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