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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

You don't see the magic behind Slack, because it got lost.

At one point in the past Slack was new and shiny. It had much less features, but every one of them were crafted with UX in mind. People were raving about it, because for many it was the first time they could use something that had the nice properties of IRC chatrooms, in a nicely polished package, and it was usable in a work setting. It brought some fun back into the workplace where you previously had boring email inboxes.

I don't know exactly what changed. Maybe with feature bloat, the same care for UX was lost. Maybe the competition caught up and it doesn't stick out as that special anymore.

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> Maybe the competition caught up and it doesn't stick out as that special anymore.

Exactly. Slack's biggest benefit was "chat with persistent history, the ability to message offline people, and notifications". That's table stakes now.

It’s crazy to think that MSN has this back in 2007, but Microsoft instead gave Skype to companies. Such a step back

Slack brought old technologies to light at the right time.

And they had emojis.

IMO the main reason Slack became successful is the massive number of pre-built integrations that were (and still are) available even on the free tier. It meant that you could use it as a message/log/notification aggregator for the various pieces of software you were already using. Furthermore, those messages/logs/notifications immediately became searchable so you could for example do a search for <customer name> and have ALL the stuff related to that customer show up in the results (with links to the source applications).

That's not how I remember it. I remember Slack being more or less functionally identical to HipChat, but HipChat had some PR disaster about their privacy policy that spooked the valley and "switch to Slack" became the wisdom of the day.

HipChat also had some pretty substantial outages.

Hipchat was also not nearly as stable as Slack in my experience. It was a big reason we switched at my company.

That's not what happened.

HipChat was god awful. It was half assed in almost every way (especially the mobile app). Atlassian simply didn't see the opportunity.

Slack was leagues better. It was as simple as that.

Perhaps. At the time I certainly heard through the grapevine of several companies switching because of this TOS change:

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/hipchats-terms-servi...

> Atlassian simply didn't see the opportunity

Na, they did. They put everything in to Hip Chat, even attempted a re-write which led to Stride, it's replacement.

Check the logos on the bottom https://www.pubnub.com/what-we-do/. The core part of any chat client is? messaging. Outsourcing your core layer, hmm...

Something must of gone drastically wrong somewhere from having it as the #1 business priority and beating Slack to instead selling their customers to Slack.

That's not true. They absolutely did not. Not soon enough.

Slack launched in August 2013.

Stride was release in September 2017.

But then it was way, way too late. 4 years is an eternity. Even Microsoft Teams had come out before Stride (in early 2017).

Slack would go public less than 2 years after Hipchat/Teams launched with $400mm in revenue (FY2019). To give you a sense of Slack's scale and some perspective, the same year Slack went public - Atlassian did $1.2B in revenue.

It is still significantly easier to use the hipchat, et al. Which was the main driver in the "enterprise" space.

Also the free model is _very_ generous.

Don't know about you, but I'm glad to see the back of hipchat; the product was unloved for years

I especially loved it going down ALL THE TIME

That makes perfect sense. I was just a little late to the party :)

I would say what changed is the fact that Slack stopped being developed completely :)

The only features they work on are the next-gen features while the more comprehensible login flow wouldn’t get you a promotion.

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