The Slack Social Network
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
You sure about that, Ben?
Teams has been a disappointment for my group. We need it. At least, we need what it is on paper. But it's been so bad that my (Microsoft-loving) boss asked me to write a groupware web app specifically for our workflow, so that we wouldn't have to try to make that shoe fit any more.
The fundamental, universal problem that Microsoft is trying to fix with Teams is a problem of their own making: Office. Everyone LOVES to make Office documents. Can't write a memo without Word! Can't add a series of numbers without Excel! Can't have a meeting without a slide deck! So every non-single-office-sized organization has mountains and mountains of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it with SharePoint. They tried and failed to fix it with OneNote. And now they're failing to fix it with Teams.
Ray Ozzie fixed it with Groove, 15 years ago, then Microsoft acqui-hired him, and threw the product away. Good work, there, Ballmer.
I guess it's hard to gauge the exact behavior of hundreds of millions of customers, from all over the world. Both you and I might be heavily biased by our point of view.
I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users?
Anyway, interesting thought.
You at least know they have tens of thousands of Office documents that no one but their creators can find when they need to reference them. ;-)
Devs, devops and other tech teams gravitate towards Slack.
And product/project management teams end up using both.
> This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”...
This is another part of the problem. Again, living in the litigious, policy-addled state of corporate IT that Microsoft has created, our company has turned off message history on Skype for dubious legal reasons, so this compelling integration is MIA for us. I suspect we are not alone in this decision.
When SOX came along, I saw the same thing happen to IT. The concept was the same: 1) document your separation of duties and authority, and 2) document how well you were working in regards to that. What we got was a complete, secondary industry of consultancy which demanded ridiculous things, which did nothing to improve security or compliance, and onerous documentation of all the things that were missing the point.
I blame Microsoft for being complicit in giving corporations the ability to, for instance, prevent a user from changing his desktop background, as though this had anything whatsoever to do with computer security or financial regulation compliance. There are HUNDREDS of options like this in AD policies. The ability to, for example, turn off Skype conversation histories, is a perfect example of something that Microsoft enables in the name of "security" or "compliance," but which actually does NOTHING but inconvenience users. (There are open-source libraries to re-enable the functionality on GitHub. I know someone who wrote an application to do it. Or you can, you know, just copy-and-paste.) And it was the Microsoft-funded trade press which told all the CIO's of all the Fortune 500 companies that this was the sort of thing that had to be done in order to comply with SOX.
That's why a blame Microsoft, but that got long-winded. Sorry.
That is very useful in schools where students will happily set obscene wallpapers on shared lab accounts.
Source: seen it happen.
Teams entirely replaces Skype for Business when you actually turn functionality on. The real WTF is why you'd use Zoom instead of Teams itself for a Webinar to explain how Teams works or Streams (the "Business YouTube-like" in O365/MS365), unless they aren't confident they actually turned on all the Skype for Business replacement features correctly.
I agree that the fact that Microsoft leaves so many "core" parts of the application able to be turned off by over-zealous IT micromanagers (often at the behest of over-conservative corporate lawyers, yes) really does not help at all, and leaves too many companies just shooting themselves in the foot and wondering why their foot hurts so much when they use the software they way they've configured it.
About a week later I was on 4 unofficial Slack workspaces.
They also mandated Teams for meetings, which was both terrible and particularly hostile to external invitees, so everyone just used free versions of Zoom instead.
[1] Less than 0.07% of my base salary
Unless you work for a large corporation or really any business that takes security seriously. Many of these businesses will quickly fire employees for conducting company business on non-approved applications or sites. Major security issues there.
I used to work for a company with 200k employees that banned any use of google apps. In 2009. Even working on a different company’s doc was banned. They threatened firing. It was ridiculous.
One day a partner was presenting from google drive. One of the IT execs said “you can’t use google drive” during the presentation. The partner asked what he should use and the IT guy said something about opening a ticket with AV and emailing the presentation.
The partner kept going and the It guy said “no seriously, you’ll be fired.” The partner laughed, kept going and said “I’ll risk it.”
If they just capriciously fire someone for deciding to use Slack in their functional team away from everyone else, sure.
But if one's org has a security mandated policy to use specific communication programs and services that one presumably agrees to and signs a document asserting their compliance to as a contingency of continued employment, and that person violates it anyway...I'm hard pressed to call the company "bad" when they take disciplinary or corrective action against that individual.
Such cavalierness (generally speaking) is how you get ants..I mean data breaches et al.
An enterprise can adapt to use tools and apply security to the tools used and needed.
Also there is really basic “don’t post sensitive data to the wrong places” training. I think there’s a difference between banning posting sensitive data and stopping teams from planning a meeting agenda.
A company that can’t stop an enployee posting sensitive data to Slack also won’t be able to stop them posting it all sorts of bad places.
I expect that sensitive data is protected in an org. With something more effective than firing people from posting it to Slack.
If any substantial fraction of your workforce sees your security policies as an obstacle and IT as an adversary, your policies have already failed and it's just a matter of time before there's a problem.
If your policies make sense to everyone, you educate people on why they make sense, and they're so sensible people's first reaction to a breach of those policies is to genuinely understand how doing so might cause a security incident and advocate better solutions person-to-person, you're far less likely to have a security incident.
(That doesn't mean every person needs to be happy with every policy all the time; it means that people need to not systematically feel that IT is primarily an obstacle to their job.)
Companies where most people think IT is actively awesome (not just "not in the way" but actively good) are 1) rare, and 2) likely to be substantially more secure.
In another reply I talked about my experience working as an infosec analyst at a company where we had to implement a policy against streaming media because our security monitoring tools could not handle the constant stream of data. That policy wasn't written because streaming media is inherently dangerous, it was written because the technology the IT security team had was not capable of monitoring the network when a bunch of people were streaming music on the corporate network.
Ultimately IT security is a racket of overpriced and outdated tools which forces CISOs to make decisions like that. If anyone is looking for an industry to disrupt, look at infosec. A startup could easily double the value of the software and still be able to cut the cost in half and they would just absolutely destroy the big vendors. And/or get a billion dollar exit when Cisco or Amazon buys you out.
I only ask because your comment sounds like you don't think security is a concern for businesses. It is, so much so that worldwide, companies who have been breached spend close to $4 million cleaning up after the incident [1]. In the US it's actually more like $8 million to clean up after a breach. And if you read the report, data leaks (like customer info sitting in an unsecured Google account) account for half of all breaches.
[1] https://www.upguard.com/blog/cost-of-data-breach
I'd like you to understand how Google Docs poses a risk to businesses. Imagine you want to share a customer list with someone else in your company, but you don't want to use Word and OneDrive like IT has approved. So you put it in Google Docs. Now sitting in your personal and unsecured Google account is a list of your company's customers. Maybe some pricing info, maybe the email address of a contact at the company, that kind of stuff. Now your personal Google account is compromised. It happens all the time, but this time the hacker finds your company's info. Maybe they sell it to one of your competitors and your company loses business. Maybe they use it to spear-phish your customers. Maybe your company's customers get breached because you put their information in an unsecured location.
Now lets say this goes on long enough that other people are using Google Docs too. If prepend can get away with it, so can Anne from accounting. And Ben from HR. And now the SSNs and birthdates and home addresses of all of your company's employees are in the hands of some lucky hacker who guessed that Ben's Gmail password was "Benjamin123".
Does that warrant firing? Doxxing everyone at your company, putting your customers out of business, and putting your own company out of business, just because you didn't like the IT approved solutions? I'm sure there are easier ways to destroy your company and put 200k people out of a job, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
If I can screw up and post company financials, ssns, whatever sensitive stuff to Slack, then that is a big security risk. And Slack isn’t my company’s problem. The problem is training, and digital loss prevention, and access controls.
If company IT approved solutions don’t meet business needs, then I think that’s a bit security risk. To prevent people from posting inappropriate material, we need effective tools.
Should the partner not have given his presentation?
The solution, I think, is to identify docs with SSNs wherever they may be on network and major cloud vendors and redact them, or remove the files when they are uploaded.
In the partner’s case there was no sensitive data in the presentation. IT should know that and help users. If the solution is to ban cloud docs in 2009 with no solution then I think that creates more risk because rather than trying to adapt to using google drive and training users how to use it, there’s a lot of shadow functions.
There is risk in these tools, my point isn’t that we must allow everything. I think we have to support common use cases and banning functionality needed by users, and used by competitors, is actually riskier than supporting enough so that users can do their jobs.
This alone tells me that your first sentence is not true.
Do you work in IT security? Have you used DLP tools? Have you seen the process to certify technologies for use and secure them when they are being used? Have you seen the cost of those tools, and how much time/manpower it takes to run them?
If Google Docs is not approved for company use, how does the security team identify SSNs in Google Docs? They don't. So the security team approves Google Docs and buys a product to monitor Google Docs. But now people want Dropbox, which means more cost. And Box, which means more cost. And OneDrive which means more cost. And Bobby only uploads his stuff to S3 buckets, which means more cost. All of these services cost money and all of the tools required to monitor them cost money too.
And while the security team is spending tens of millions of dollars per year (probably a low number actually) to monitor all these approved cloud storage services, Maria uploads a thousand W2 tax forms to her personal Gmail account and brings down the company anyway. Or if Gmail is blocked, she puts it on a USB drive and loses it when her car is broken into. Or if the security team locks down USB storage, she prints the documents and accidentally leaves the folder on the bus. Or if there's a DLP tool watching the printers... she shares it in a personal Slack channel so she can work on it at home.
Security is hard, and the mindset of users who say "you can't stop me" makes it almost impossible. The security team needs to be right 100% of the time, but an attacker only needs to be right once. The risky part isn't banning functionality, it's employees who refuse to follow the rules. And in any job, if you refuse to follow the rules, you get fired.
Part of my argument is that Google Docs is popular and widely used by users, so IT should support it.
Then there’s training on how to use unsupported stuff (ie don’t email ssns, don’t upload ssns, etc).
Then there’s DLP as the source file was a PowerPoint on the partner’s laptop. Back then, I don’t know what products existed but today I have implemented DLP that if a file has a social it is flagged for review immediately and will present visual cues to the user for sensitivity and it is blocked from lots of different transfer methods. This helps prevent users who don’t know the file is sensitive (most of the potential breaches I’ve encountered) but users can get around it (screenshot, phone, etc) if they are really determined.
My point is mostly about rules being better rather than rigid. The best rules fit into a mental model and should be easy to follow. The “Just say no” style rules work just as well for security as for drugs and smoking.
Usability is really important, I think, in security.
And here we are. An idiotically simple use case that is not covered by IT.
If instead of locking the shit out of infrastructure people in IT in your story focused on providing a comfortable solution to work on a document from home, none of that would happen.
It repeat of the story with passwords. Muh security guys establish rules that your password should be a crazy something and you must rotate it every month and then are surprised that those passwords end up to be written on sticky notes beneath the keyboard.
Try to be human-first and address use cases and nobody will need to use third party tool to get on with their work.
We were just completely and utterly blind as soon as two or three people started streaming.
They can't do that remotely?
If I send a sensitive document in the approved chat app that uses SSO, once I quit. I don’t have access to it anymore.
It makes perfect sense why something I could do at small no name companies would be banned at BigCorp.
Most large corporations are very concerned about which communication platforms you use for official business.
I see this more as a corporate organizational problem and work flow issue with different departments' responsibilities, than microsoft not providing an adequate tool to create a "cloud" based fileserver (sharepoint, onenote, onedrive, etc).
GIGO. I've seen people do useful things with sharepoint with a proper organizational structure thought of ahead of time, before it starts getting populated with content. And also have seen some truly terrible things done with sharepoint.
This reminded my of when we gathered project managers from virtually all continents to define the company's global PM methodology. We had chosen Teamwork our PMS and the backbone for the methodology. The product has a nice text notes feature the group could be using to document anything to the favor of "seachability". But hey, someone said "we can only make a good impression with customers if we use Office documents". So instead of using simple text notes we ended up flooding the system with 3 trillion Office documents. Unreal.
This is why I promote wiki's whenever I can. Locking data up in files makes it nearly useless.
When in reality tons of people spend more and more time "chatting" and trying to communicate in Slack than... actually working.
The whole idea that chat is a good way to get most work done isn't true, IMO. It's inherently synchronous and a terrible way to manage time.
This has always been the cases. Offices are social environments. Chat formalizes some of that communication, which is actually quite useful. But it doesn't suddenly make a chatty, distracting co-worker less chatty or more productive.
I don't think anyone is arguing that chat is how most work should get done, but rather that it a good tool for promoting legible communication and good communication is one of the most important factors in driving effective work.
Hell, searching for topic of discussion that happened more than a few days ago is pretty much impossible in Slack.
Basically, as a software dev I don't think there are actually too many things that need to be answered "right now". If that's the case then I would think there isn't enough planning involved.
Why is synchronous communication inherently a bad thing? Makes no sense.
Email? Conference calls? Daily meetings on site?
> Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. [...] what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about.
Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about?
"An application experience that trascends any device"... isn't this the web? I can access it in my smartphone (the real personal computer device), my laptop, ipad, you name it... All of these of course powered by "the cloud" (somebody's server on somebody else's giant datacenters)
Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling provider.
At this rate they'll be eating the lunch Google could have had but can't quite get...
It seems that Google is dangerously close to a crisis even if they cannot percieve this over all their ad revenue.
Google original's innovation which got them to where they are now is basically their better technology. But how good is google search today? IMO it is way worse than it was around 5 to 10 years ago.
I would agree that they are doing shady moves that can hurt search quality, but overall, the results look much better today than 10 years ago.
When I search for information about specific strings like class method names, now I quite often have to resort to GitHub search.
For example medical related searches right now prioritize covid related results, they are important _now_, but they are less important than general statistical data
A general purpose search engine shouldn't be about what social networks talk more about
GMail is unable using the web client. Google search results are not great when doing research on new topics, its good for telling you things you already know but forgot, but when trying to search about new topics the search bubbles are bad. They beg for adoption of new products and then cancel them within 18 months. Android is essentially a giant spyware platform, using your mic sends everything to google. Using chrome sends everything to google. On and on, I believe Google was a better company 10 years ago.
1. For a few years now, it has been very difficult for me to search for specific phrases, even with surrounding quotes, without getting results that don't include those phrases
2. Lately, every search where I am trying to research a topic or look up some instructrions for how to do something leads to to pages upon pages of products and services in that space rather than information about the thing. I can't look up how to install a stove without endless ads (whether posing as explicit ads or as official search results) for handymen or appliance stores. I want to know how to change my swamp cooler motor but instead I get professional HVAC services, and useless sponsored articles that aren't about "how to do <thing>" but "why you should do <thing> oh and by the way hire us".
On google search, results are neither informative nor accurate. The results exist only to sell something.
This happens most surprisingly when navigating with Maps. I have shortcuts for destinations I regularly use, and the number of times I've tapped one of those and had Google cover 90% of the screen with restaurants nearby and the announcement of some feature and the "start" bar across the bottom...my conclusion has been that Google's Maps UX philosophy is based entirely on discouraging use while driving.
Early Google took pride in following other people's standards and avoiding walled gardens: XMPP, RSS, semantic web/micro-formats.
Today's Google avoids traditional standards and many standards that don't originate from Google, doesn't mind walled gardens in their favor, or "standards" that they (almost) solely control (AMP as an obvious one, HTML nearly with the Chromium monopoly), and doesn't even use standards in many areas where early Google thought it important (communications apps that might use something like XMPP or Matrix to federate, for instance).
Yes and no. The web started off and until recently was a content-first and application-second system. Reversing those two priorities is just starting to happen now, to some extent.
I think you are being too generous with Microsoft. My take is Microsoft is forced into this strategy because it failed build a successful mobile phone and the ecosystem around it, unlike Apple and Google. It has to transcend the hardware as its only option. MS 365 is capitulation that the strategy of using Office as the killer app to keep people on Windows is no longer as effective as before.
Video calling (aka 2020's must-have) was always less than idea with Slack (prior org used Zoom for it) and the threaded interface was a mess (one colleague always replied to threads with the 'show in main feed' (owtte) option checked, which had the clumsiest UX of all time, with the main channel repeatedly interrupted with a linked header from a previous message). I do miss custom emoji and more diverse reactions (I long for a thumbs down particularly, I regularly disagree with suggestions without feeling sad/angry but have to add a text response).
Now, any time a OS technology/etc. points me to a community Slack I'm hugely hesitant to join, the interface is unfamiliar and loud since the recent refreshes, and the difficulty to actually leave once one has joined is substantial (along with public emails which often lead to spam).
Things that need love -
1. The UX. The navigation bar, tabs along the top of the chat window, separate chats and groups, ugh. In Slack, the navigation panel is tidy and chats and groups are in one consistent place, the chat header is minimal and functional.
2. Message formatting. Pasting code into a message doesn't automatically change the style to monospaced, and there's no syntax highlighting like in Slack.
3. Pasting a picture or attachment into the chat waits for another ENTER keypress before sending, presumably so that you can add some text alongside the picture. This seems counter intuitive, compared to the behaviour in messaging apps (whatsapp, fb, signal, etc).
4. Experience parity across all versions/platforms. It bugs me that Teams for Web is incapable of video and phone calls. But worse, the Linux version doesn't have feature parity with the Windows version. Useful tools such as remote control and video call background blurring don't exist.
5. More emojis! There are so many times when I've tried to use an emoji and it's just not there. Slack has this pretty well covered, as does every other messaging app out there.
6. @channel usage. If I type @channel, when the message is posted, it's converted to the channel name. So I type "Good morning @channel, just to let you know...", Teams will convert the message to "Good morning General, just to let you know..." - that makes no sense when you're reading it! Who's "General"!?
7. The General channel. WHY?! I can make it read only, I can't hide it, I can't rename it. UGH.
8. Sending a new message. I can type Ctrl+/chat name to start a new message, or click the icon (WHY is right aligned at the top of the navigation pane?). This should be as easy as Ctrl+K name messsage, like in Slack.
9. The linux version seems to run 2 threads, both using around 800mb of RAM. I wouldn't mind so much, but one of threads seems to be just for the system taskbar icon.
12. Users over 40 in my Teams instance seem to have a hard time distinguishing between the UI for starting a new thread and replying to an existing thread.
13. It's system for highlighting messages you haven't seen is pretty janky. It frequently highlights my own relpies as messages I haven't seen.
14. If someone posts a message to any thread in the current channel when I am typing a message, the message editing box will lose keyboard focus.
15. It uses its own notification system instead of the system one. I basically have to have the left half of the window always visible so I can manually check for visual indicators in the app itself.
16. Sometimes you can pause gif playback, sometimes you can't.
Businesses already using some kind of microsoft software that get something "on top" which is "like slack!" are never going to switch.
It doesn't matter that teams is basically sharepoint+email+skype (and not, as slack is: an IRC-style chat system) and it certainly does not matter that bringing bots to the platform is eggregiously painful.
It only matters that business executives and people that have never stepped outside of the microsoft ecosystem perceive it as "being the same" and "being included".
I am not implying that they are equally good - Slack has a huge advantage for power users with non-MSFT integrations and bots, but the core "channel-based chat" use case is pretty much 1:1.
For full context: teams came out during my current employment and I have not moved to another company to see it used any other place.
From my understanding; at least how it's configured for my company... A "channel" is more like a series of threads, reminiscent of a forum post per message which can be replied to. This is what I mean when I say it's like email; it's heavily thread based.
"Chats" are ad-hoc, un-ordered and will become inaccessible/removed when they cycle out of the sidebar (as in, you can have 20~ chats, the one last interacted with the longest ago will be dropped if you add a new chat).
Voice calls work well though.
My hat is off, it has been a pretty successful business model for him. :)
With Teams, it’s all business. No more #random channel or water cooler chats. Not sure which of the tools actually is better but personally I really miss Slack :-/
– Video chat integration (not as seamless as Teams)
– Threading (not as good as Zulip)
– Information discovery (i.e. slow search)
In addition, Slack faces a bigger challenge that the “moat” described by OP might not be as defensible as the author suggests. I’m not convinced that an “enterprise social network” is a key feature sought by users of chat apps, and even if it is Microsoft has the stronger hand with its Office 365 user base supplemented by LinkedIn.
At my company we use it and there's a timeline to shut down Skype for Business in favour of it.
The app is incredibly slow, doesn't have tabs so if you're in a chat, then you want to reference a file you're making in the tools you have to click out of it.
Teams chats and 1 on 1 chats are another "web page" to load.
Clicks load as fast as my 1mbps internet connection in 2004
Skype for Business is still used for chat even though we're told by IT to transition because the app is so slow.
I just see it as crap clone that Microsoft coded together in a messy hurry to copy Slack, and then included it free in their Office subscriptions.
The conversations around using slack are that it's really expensive in comparison to free.
Why isn't that anticompetitive?
I wish the forces didn't align to make every "enterprise" application drop performance down the priority list to somewhere around position 20 or 30. I understand how it happens, but I don't have to like it.
Slack has been slowing down on me lately too. It seems like every couple of months, the amount of time between typing someone's @name and it finally resolving is growing longer, meaning I have more time to type more stuff before the cursor snaps back to just after the @name.
(I wish there was a "hey, be less rounded and polished and deeply nested in HTML tags and be fast" mode....)
That's not because your company loves it, it's because Microsoft is starting to discontinue some versions of Skype for Business and forcing everyone over to Teams.
It’s always been this way though, we started using it during the public beta, and the performance has not appeared to improve at all.
I’m very curious with what’s going on here... Microsoft of all companies should have the resources to either make native apps for Windows and Mac, or share some best practices from the VS Code team.
FWIW, that's the article's thesis.
For my part, I've never used a chat or company communication tool that was better than Slack. Not saying it's good or that I "enjoy" it. But it's the least bad option available AFAIK.
Both Teams and Slack are slow chat apps that run in the browser. One uses AWS and the other uses Azure. I’m not surprised there aren’t 100 alternatives at this point.
This is also why Atlassian is so popular in enterprises. I don't particularly like Jira or Confluence or Bamboo or Bitbucket/Stash, but they're "good enough", and the way they work together is effectively magic.
Leadership basically sees Teams as a version of Slack that is already integrated into Outlook and Office. Slack doesn't offer enough for them to switch to it. That would also require clearing it with all of our customers, too, for communicating about customer projects.
Microsoft has something Slack doesn't have: a built-in customer base that is already fully committed to their products.
I thought Azure was number two in the Cloud-as-a-service game.
Intuitively this makes sense, I've seen an out-sized number (compared to their market-share) of enterprise products hosted on Azure. To the point where I'm usually surprised at how low their share is. I spend a lot of time working with large companies, so one way to square this would be large companies being more likely to use Azure than the average.
But Slack Connect, while better than Teams, still doesn’t get the job done well. So Slack’s so called “competitive edge” isn’t that competitive.
For outside collaboration / communication - I like AirSend (www.airsend.io). It’s a lot simpler than Teams or Slack - less integrations, but perfect for people who work across organizational boundaries on a regular basis.
The idea of self hosting Slack is appealing to me. But I don't know how close it is to Slack.
Mattermost is an open source Slack alternative - it's got the same core features, familiar user interface, Slack-compatible integrations (so you can migrate them easily if you choose to), and more.
The added benefit with self hosting is privacy, customization - and basically full control of your data.
If you're curious to know who uses Mattermost, you can check out https://mattermost.com/customers/ for some examples.
- On the business social network side, I now get as many Teams invites as Slack invites. Teams won the bigger social moat. Hard for a #3 to enter, and sounds like Slack quietly lost #1.
- On the tech community Slack side, Slack community features are hostile, so pushed to discord and friends. Slack is losing their base ('love').
Interesting times for one of the oldest internet technologies. Or.. were for a second there.
While Teams doesn't do anything good to write home about, it avoids one giant misfeature of Slack - the fact that if I start typing a message, get distracted, then come back to Slack later, the person or channel that I was chatting in is gone. Into the invisible Drafts section.
I never want this behavior. And there is no way to turn it off.
I'm not about to try using Teams, but I'm also not about to use Slack, and for mostly the same reasons.
Closed source, centralized platform, and "you must use our frontend". Fuck that.
My team recently switched from Telegram (yes, seriously) to Slack and you'd be surprised but for small teams Telegram is great. Specifically, the fast easy video notes save management time and prevent confusion.
The inability to turn off notifications shouldn't be a feature. People (at least me) want more work time, less noise.
Voice/video chat is completely broken (at least for Linux).
Having to very often "clear the cache and hard reload" on the "native" app, makes me feel I'm using a bloated browser tab.
How, with all those quirks, do they want to compete with Teams - (from a well established company with such a big user base?
(edit: clarification)
RIP Slack: It turns out IRC-but-with-emoji isn't really that compelling.
There's a lot more messengers than ever before. Signal, Matrix, iMessage, FB Messenger,...
I think the product is facilitating remote collaboration, chat is just one very significant feature.
If you were to somehow manage to convince exec or director level leadership to implement something like IRC as your main communication platform, I'm sure they'll be more than happy to let you be the person who's full time job becomes fielding helpdesk requests from non-technical users who are struggling to use IRC :)
Tools like Slack and Teams win because they're all-but-frictionless. One of the competitive edges that Teams has out of the gate is integration with an existing account that is tied to your entire workplace identity if you're in a Microsoft-heavy shop.
It's really easy to assume that things that are easy for us as devs are a "no brainer" for everyone else, but they really aren't. My parents recently had to begin using chat apps for work under COVID restrictions, and although both are plenty proficient at general computing, IRC configuration would be an absolute nightmare for them.
Not to mention the bigger issues of security, log preservation, HR compliance, or any other myriad things that a toy implementation of IRC wouldn't offer. What happens if you lose your backups? What happens if your server becomes compromised? What happens if an employee textually assaults another employee through DMs and you need to audit it? These are all very real questions that people ask, and are questions that Slack and Teams have very sleek answers for. It's not just emojis - it's letting someone else handle the headache of maintaining a critical piece of your communication infrastructure.
Sure you could build that on a small server with open source tools, but is it really worth the effort to build and maintain it for most people?
Maybe so. But apparently demand for a product with chat as its one and only one feature is very high.