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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely.

Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company.

Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company.

File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company.

The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat.

These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have gargantuan budgets, extensive engineering headcount, and rich product ecosystems to pair these features with.

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> Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company.

That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations.

For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built out with Slack's APIs.

That sounds painful for an ops person. When I did ops work I much preferred to have as little abstraction as possible seeing how critical each action is.

I would never want my production deployment rollback tied to my instant messenger plugin working.

That sounds about as natural as using Xbox Kinect gestures. Additionally, your SLA is now also tied to Slack's, which is a multiplicative downgrade.

Not every integration makes sense. I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs, and I'm also reminded of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Just because you make a choice to integrate with a product doesn't mean it's widely adopted, practical, or wise.

Or supported.

Edit: I want to clarify. I don't mean to be rude, and I wasn't in the room when y'all made these decisions. I just don't think Slack is the ship you want to tie yourselves to, especially not as your control plane.

> I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs

Sorry, but I have to post this now:

https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl

"xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes."

"You can finally administer your cluster from the same spreadsheet that you use to track your expenses."

It's a (working) joke of course, but a hilarious one.

If they are like me, they use chatOps as a way to consolidate and shortcut different commands and dashboards. But by no means are operations dependent on our chat. If chat goes down, then you will simply need to login to our ci/cd service to initiate deployments, rollbacks, etc.

How often are you rolling back production deployments that you need a Slack command to do it? Perhaps I am missing something but this does not seem like a good use of time for whoever put it together.

It's funny you'd say that when there are so many companies doing chat and video software and they're all billion dollar companies.

Quick math, assume one tool is charging $8 per employee per month (meaning $100 a year). It only takes one million customers to be a billion dollar company ($100M yearly recurring revenues at 10x valuation).

And one million customers is just a couple of fortune 100. The whole market is orders of magnitude bigger than that!

That's assuming there is a monopoly. The cost of providing a chat service is low and dropping. If Microsoft or Google can provide it for free on top of the communications services companies are already buying, why would anyone pay an additional $8 per user per month for chat?

Companies are paying as much as $25 per month per employee for minor tools. It's not uncommon that a company has 3 different tools doing the same thing. Enterprise are not rational actors trying to save money. Vendors don't go below $5 a month because they know enterprise will bear the cost.

> The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is.

So Google? Microsoft might count too, but I haven't used their suite in a while.

Also, I would think integrated email would be necessary too.

It is 100% going to be Microsoft. Google is laughably bad at enterprise software and Microsoft really has no meaningful competition at this point. Teams is now crushing Slack in market share for the exact reason he mentioned - enterprise IT managers do not like the Unix approach of small targeted tools. They like product suites. Office 365 is as every bit as dominant today as Windows was 20 years ago.

Why do they like product suites? This is alien to me.

Probably because the product suite components integrate much more easily than a bunch of separate tools from different vendors. And there are fewer particulars to know if you stay in one ecosystem. Maybe there is even a unified administration console.

I see that Teams has full Linux support. I am glad.

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