Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
salesforce.com
salesforce.com
Then they tried making another MMO, but ended up making Slack instead.
I really hope they get cracking on another MMO soon.
So, getting close with that one.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/how-an-accountant-cre...
(Yes, I know Chime exists. But I don't think I've ever heard of anyone using it, and Slack is still rather popular.)
Before long, they’ll own the entire feature for “oh, I need to buy cereal. Alexa buy me cereal. Ok, done. <few mins later>. I’m passing by the Amazon Go store on way home, Alexa. Can I return these shoes I bought last week and pick up my cereal there. Sure.”
Eero devices require this customer support, but that can be merged with their IOT support team for all other in-home objects. I think Amazon made an exception to their “user support is never our priority” choice because they know it’s the only way to get a physical foothold in our homes, with Kindle and Echo, and I think the burden of Eero support was worth it to them for the mesh networking technology that has been harvested for Sidewalk.
Slack customer support cannot be easily integrated with any existing Amazon support team that I’m aware of, and does not offer a world-changing advantage to that degree.
If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void.
If we move the goalpost to "have I been able to resolve problems", then yes — after 30 minutes of research into how to hack Amazon customer support in order to talk with a human, followed by multiple phone and chat interactions with generous on-hold time, I can share that Amazon support for retail technically exists and is excellent except when compared to 95% of other customer support experience I've ever had.
> If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void.
Ooof, I believe you. I'm Facebook-free, but maybe it's time to start looking for another email provider.
Also paying user of google products and GSuite - support not great on the gsuite side, but retail order for Google Wifi etc pretty OK.
I've had good experiences. But when you have bad experiences, they can be really bad. I ordered a TV on Amazon (Prime) and it was scheduled for delivery in 3 days. Because it's a large shipment truck delivery, they give you a window. Like Spectrum/Comcast. So I sat home all day and... nothing. I checked my messages and almost the exact time the delivery window was closing they left a message saying "could not deliver will try some other time" basically.
It took a month and about 15 customer service reps before a single person could tell me where my TV was. I'm not exaggerating. They had no clue what happened to a $1,000 purchase. It fell into their bureaucratic black hole like some scene from a Monty Python skit.
when this happened to me, I simply filed the claim online and they resolved it, no need to talk to anyone
Amazon is virtually the singular FAANG company that not only has customer support, but has generally very good customer support.
I think even Amazon realized how awful Chime is, given that they, as a company, switched to Slack just a few months ago.
That may just be a peculiarity of my department, but saying "Amazon as a company switched to slack" is definitely overstating what happened.
Switching to slack was brought up in our org and most people were at best noncommittal, because the option wasn't really "chime vs. slack", it was "chime vs. chime AND slack".
We'd still all need chime for meetings and interacting with any groups that hadn't switched.
I can imagine that the main driver behind IT announcing Slack support was for their customer-facing staff to be able to provide support for their customers.
It definitely helped to have a faster turn around time and provide more visibility for people.
It must be just your org/team, because a few of my friends working there in entirely different orgs had their teams switched to Slack fully within the week of announcement. Not claiming you are wrong though, because my sample size of 3 people/teams is purely anecdata.
You cannot leave individual channels of a Team though you can mute them and you have even less permissions than Discord.
So maybe it isn't a 1:1 replacement for Slack but it certainly could compete in the field.
EDIT: Another example of discord's permission system being a poor match for the business use case is pinning messages to the channel is the same permission as deleting other user's messages. Additionally, the channel per server limit is 500.
It's like they took IRC, saw it worked for businesses, and were like "how can we fuck this up, slowly, to destroy the very essence of what made chat channels useful in the first place?".
"Ok, you know our motto, 'Don't be Evil.'?"
Heads nod.
"What if ... what if ... what if we simplify that?"
"How so?"
"Just cut off the first word, 'Be Evil.' Simple, elegant."
"I like it!"
----
Jokes aside, I think Google does a pretty good job of keeping the major products steady. Our little cohort on HN isn't a great sample for determining what "major" is.
They've killed off a lot of buds, but they've also killed some great products.
They still haven’t fully closed on their Fitbit acquisition, so I’d expect they’d have a tough hill to climb for a Discord or a Slack.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/Ending-Support-for-Voice-Ch...
Curse Voice released in June 2015. Discord released in May 2015.
At best you could fudge the numbers and claim that Discord and Curse came out at the same time. A claim that Curse Voice was anything before Discord existed is flat out false.
[1] https://www.player.one/curse-voice-vc-funded-skype-gamers-be...
[2] https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/17/curse-gets-a-million-game...
My gut reasoning is that cloud infrastructure is not the same product as office productivity and the two use cases are not the same, the purchasing decisions aren't made by the same people (except at scale, I guess, I'll concede that), and the boots on the ground building shit in the cloud take the path of least resistance where that logic would never apply.
I don't really subscribe to the belief that a company should half ass a product or acquire something in a new market because they aren't already there, but I may be in the minority. Amazon has shown they can build a trillion dollar enterprise without caring about office productivity or chat, but they'll sell the shovels to anyone who wants to try and dig those holes.
And then you want to automate or do some nice charts, and there is Power platform just around the corner...
and then you find yourself limited so you go Azure Functions... and then start one VM on Azure...
Power Platform is for "power users" to be able to "no code" things, this is targeted (MS Claims) as non-IT Users, as is the Rest of the office/Microsoft 365 stack
Azure (including Azure AD) however is targeted at IT Staff, dev's,sysadmins, etc. There is a clear line in how the tools are marketed, deployed, licensed and utilized
After that, you already have some firewalling and VPNs in place so adding the odd server is just a step away.
Adding dedicated lines and firewalls and rules and all bella and whistles with all four big players (AMZ, IBM, MSFT, GOOG) plus 2 ISPs adds cost fast, so you typically pick 2. MSFTbis already there for O365 so yeah, they have a head start
Edit: in 2016 Dropbox stored 400PB (https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/magic-pocket-infrastruct...), in 2018 S3 was storing multiple exabytes (https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Amazon-S3-across-all-region...)
I suspect multiple exabytes is a low ball.
Probably -- came back to my comment 24 hours later and realized I mixed up DB and S3 in the sentence.
Not sure why using Office would be a reason to prefer Azure over something else. Can you elaborate? Are there some useful integrations one can benefit from?
Regarding Amazon buying Slack. My guess would be it's too expensive. If you look at Amazon's acquisitions history, you would see they almost never spend more than $1B. The one exception I recall is Whole Foods which they paid ~$13B for.
It's nice to be able to get your email (Exchange), identity (Active Directory), productivity/office apps (Office), and underlying infrastructure (Azure), and even business intelligence/analytics (Dynamics) all from one place.
Kubeflow is an OSS framework for doing distributed data science / machine learning (including Tensorflow hence the name) on Kubernetes.
With the AAD integration it's just much more convenient to give a team of data scientists access to a Kubeflow Kubernetes cluster - AAD with the Kubeflow OpenIDConnect component will handle AuthN & AuthZ. Kubeflow itself sets up different Kubernetes namespaces for each authorized user upon first login.
You definitely don't need to run Kubernetes on AKS or Azure in general to take advantage of the AAD features.
/s
While slack and Dropbox are customer facing and build on top of Amazon.
Theoretically that stuff is more value added, but I think their markets are smaller compared to what Amazon is going for.
If the goal is to be the buggy whip maker for the universe there’s a lot more there until they need to start vertically integrating and buying stuff that uses the buggy whips.
Hosted AD on Azure and Office 365 are _so good_ that nobody is coming close, not even Google.
I am sorry but the concept of "Beta release level" is a complete misfire/mismatch for what an enterprise needs. For example, you cannot, on one hand, advertise that you have a competitive feature (Google Functions competing with AWS Lambda), but then, on the other hand, turn around and label it beta and basically use that an an excuse for inferior reliability and inferior documentation. How can you basically GA a major piece of platform functionality, call it beta, and then ask any enterprise (that has lower risk tolerance) to use it? Enterprises don't want to invest into beta-labelled features, because they know it's an excuse for bugs and half-baked support. No wonder GCP is struggling for adoption.
("beta release" level is a conversation you have with select trusted partners that are willing to tolerate your early stuff in exchange for early access to value... it is not something that is acceptable to advertise as open enrollment to all)
This is all obsolete anyway, since GCP has announced they're moving to two stages: Preview or GA. That's it.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-gets...
My point was that features were being advertised as essentially GA that were not actually GA. When evaluating the Google Cloud Platform sans-beta features, I was suddenly looking at a much more barren offering, in comparison to AWS.
Flow, Teams, Lists, Planner, Sway, Stream, Forms, Kaizala...
Sorry, but these aren't battle tested enterprise apps at all. Could as well pull random apps from the Google store.
Whenever something new releases the first reaction already is "not again"...
Anyone who uses GCP knows you type “gcloud beta ...” an awful lot. But enterprise sales are made on the golf course between people who have never and will never use the product themselves.
While I think an MS environment can be a boon to enterprises, I think the MS cloud is very lacking, especially on performance.
Maybe because I am located in Europe, but it is not fun to work with.
We produce hardware and in dire cases we can do that with the pen and paper office solutions as long as our basic ERP solutions are working.
It would be no problem to use Linux and Libre office, it wouldn't affect productivity at all.
MS has good long term support but their cloud is certainly an exception to that. Not yet sure if good or bad.
Are you suggesting an enterprise is going to leave Office for Dropbox and Slack? Cause that's not happening.
I think Salesforce compares itself to Microsoft and sees its ambitions to enter ERP, CRM and BI markets and they already have a collaboration platform with Teams, for better or for worse.
I truly hope not. I like discord for its informal, gaming, and specifically not enterprise or "professional" approach/atmosphere. I use it to chat with friends and talk in some communities (eg. programming ones).
SaaS apps are comically, stupidly profitable at scale. That's educational.
[1] https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-announces-fourth-quarter-a...
We're still remarkably separate from IBM, just as was promised. I do find myself collaborating from time to time with IBMers but most of the time we're pretty separate. Their culture is very different than ours so it can be interesting when we team up. I think Red Hat is having a big impact on IBM honestly. They seem to be really embracing Red Hat tech and culture. I was really worried when the acquisition happened, but I no longer am worried about it. In fact, for the first time in a long time I'm optimistic about IBM. I'm looking forward to see what they do.
You have to use what others are using.
Nice theory but overwhelmingly disproved by the existence of SAP.
So if your customer makes the effort to leave your SaaS, then you know that they were really very much not satisfied.
A company that uses G Suite certainly isn't going to use MS, and usually won't choose to pay separately for Slack.
In what sense therefore could it possibly not be a real competitor? It's there, it works, it's fine. It's also relatively young and so we can expect it to improve significantly over the coming years, similar to how Meet has been improving over the past few years.
I have weekly Beaver meetings with my daughter using google chat and _every time_ nearly all the feeds are frozen.
Whereas my wife uses Zoom all day to talk to patients, with nary a hitch.
Google chat video is the worst I've ever used.
It's a team chat, included into Google Workspace (G Suite). It's not terrible, and not great. It runs in the browser and integrates with Gmail; is really slow; has 1-to-1 messages, groups, and rooms; rooms have threads to organize conversations, but you can't see a list, you just end up scrolling a lot.
I'm sure it'll die off soon, like everything that Google attempts that doesn't have a stellar launch and rapid growth rate.
Which one?
Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?
It's also interesting to note that most of those backwards compatibility breaks in developer APIs in the Microsoft product mentioned have occurred as Microsoft has adapted to changes in (security) standards over the years, from entirely proprietary system, through custom extensions of WS-* and SAML standards, to today's OpenID Connect-based system. It's a very stark contrast to Google's messaging apps which started with the (XMPP) standards-based Google Chat and each subsequent product has been more proprietary, more of a walled garden, and less interoperable with other products.
1. MSN Messenger (+ rebrands)
2. Skype
3. NetMeeting
4. Lync (+ rebrands)
5. Yammer
6. Kaizala
7. Teams
8. SharedView
9. Windows Meeting Space
10. Groove
11. Qik
I tried to err on the side of assuming that any time they killed one product and immediately replaced it with another, it was a rebrand. (E.g. were Office Communicator / Office Live Meeting / Lync / Skype for Business actually compatible? If not, they clearly weren't just rebrands.)
Overall this seems like a very similar amount of churn, product overlap, and politics-driven product management.
Yammer is a social network and if Yammer counts for Microsoft as a "chat app" then Google gets to add Buzz, Reader, Orkut, G+, Wave, etc to the list.
Groove wasn't exactly a chat app either. It was more the P2P bastard child of Lotus Notes (or a P2P relative of SharePoint, sort of, in Microsoft terms). Chat was a feature, but it wasn't the emphasis of the app, the emphasis was more on shared workspaces (folders, documents). Some ideas that have resurfaced elsewhere in O365 and even Teams, though not in the P2P way without big cloud internet services that Groove attempted.
Windows Meeting Space was the last rebrand of NetMeeting, apparently. There's also evidence according to Wikipedia that SharedView piggy backed on the Windows Meeting Space codebase and in some ways was a "trial version" of Windows Meeting Space with different internet services backing it and paid for by ads.
Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated. (Except for support of on premises installs which still has a few more years on the clock. Another contrast to Google who has never supported on premises installs, much less for years after the projects died/moved on.)
Qik was a Skype off-shoot/relative.
The list of supposed Google chat apps up the thread did in fact include both Buzz and Wave, so I'm just applying the same criteria. Hangouts was the chat part of G+, so I think it'd be double counting to include G+.
> Groove wasn't exactly a chat app either
Neither are Duo and Meet, which were in the list of supposed Google chat apps.
> Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated
I don't understand. The entire thing we're supposed to be mocking Google for here is that they launch chat apps, and then force users to migrate away. Now you're saying that all these Microsoft ones don't count, because they've either already killed them and forced a migration, or are already in the process of doing so.
> Skype, Qik, Yammer, and Groove were all acquisitions. (None of Google's messenger churn has the excuse of being an acquisition.)
Fair enough that this is different. But first, note that when Google discontinues a product they got from an acquisition, HN does not consider that to be an exenuating circumstance. I think it's fair to apply the same policy here. And second, nobody forced Microsoft to buy Skype when they already had a popular app doing just the same thing, which they then killed to make room for Skype.
> Neither are Duo and Meet, which were in the list of supposed Google chat apps.
Duo and Meet were video chat apps, which seems to be a part of "chat apps". You did include video chat apps/meeting/conference apps in the Microsoft list.
Groove is more like P2P Google Docs is maybe the closest Google analog. You wouldn't include Google Docs as a chat app would you? (Although I do know some folks that use it as such.)
>> Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated
> I don't understand. The entire thing we're supposed to be mocking Google for here is that they launch chat apps, and then force users to migrate away. Now you're saying that all these Microsoft ones don't count, because they've either already killed them and forced a migration, or are already in the process of doing so.
I wasn't saying that they don't count, I was simply furthering the conversation on exactly that sort of semantic question, and relatedly also this one:
> Hangouts was the chat part of G+, so I think it'd be double counting to include G+.
While the clients are nothing alike and there's a backcompat break in the servers, Lync/S4B provided the foundations for the tech that became Teams' voice and video chat. Does that make Lync the "chat part" of Teams? (Hangouts was also a briefly separate "product" before G+ and then again briefly after.)
Kaizala I don't know anything about directly, but what I was reading suggested that it has a ton of features, especially for bandwidth limited networks, that have never been a part of Teams before whenever the merger is supposed to happen and those features are added to Teams. When those features merge, does that make Kaizala a part of Teams? Supposedly (according to sources cited by Wikipedia) Microsoft has even been considering a "powered by Kaizala" sub-branding on those features, for the target users. If there is a "Kaizala part" of Teams, is that double counting?
> And second, nobody forced Microsoft to buy Skype when they already had a popular app doing just the same thing, which they then killed to make room for Skype.
Windows Live Messenger and Skype lived side-by-side for several years and Microsoft at the time was criticized by confusingly marketing both and keeping both alive. From what I saw as an outside observer, WLM died by its own hand and a death of a thousand papercuts. Skype, too, seems to be on the long path of killing itself with self-inflicted papercuts. I do admit both of those sad tales seem politically similar to what we observe of Google's chat efforts. That's two products I definitely feel are comparable to all that.
We pay for gsuite and we pay for slack. google chat is no where yet.
I can understand Facebook or WeChat building everything into the same app, making the app into an inner platform within the platform, but when Google already control the outer platform it doesn't make much sense.
If Chat is built in, I don't see it yet.
I have two G Suite domains and I'm utterly and absolutely confused.
- in one domain I have "Chat" just under "Important" messages. But somehow I cannot send any chats. I see only chats from 2018 or so (when they shutdown Gmail Chat). The cool thing is that they look like read email messages. But I cannot send any chat.
- in other domain I have "Hangouts" but no Chat.
I hope this real world example illustrates why parent comment is correct when asking "Which one?".
Messages sent in Google Hangouts on my own domain today show up in my email under the "Chats" label, so this functionality is still working -- if you use the right/latest app, I guess.
...Yeah, I'm not expecting that to happen en masse either, honestly, as long as we live in capitalism.
And now the big fish has spent a massive amount on a worthless product.
Kinda like MySpace.
Switching from one dominant service for posting your meal photos to another dominant service for posting your meal photos is relatively easy. But if a web tool you depend on decides to finish their "incredible journey", you're likely to remain without an equivalent replacement (VC subsidies making it easy for few players to suck out oxygen from a market segment), and you end up having to adapt your workflow to whatever remains or comes after.
Apple and Sweden have about the same valuation right now. Apple is worth 30% more than Saudi Arabia.
Apple is also growing faster than Sweden’s economy.
Sweden doesn't have valuation, so you can't compare them.
Apple has valuation which is measured in dollars. Sweden has GDP which is measured in dollars per year. The units are different, so the numbers aren't comparable.
I guess one can say "Sweden produces about one Apple's worth in a year", or "Saudi Arabia produces about one Apple's worth in a year and a bit". This however makes owning Sweden/Saudi Arabia look better than owning Apple by a shot.
Of course. I was referring to Sweden's national wealth[1], which is roughly equal to Apple's market cap of $2T. Sweden's GDP of $560B is only roughly twice Apple's FY2020 revenue of $275B.
Apple is worth roughly 2% of the national wealth of the United States, which is $106T.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wea...
For the little sense that comparing a public company to a nation state makes, one still might be inclined to compare Apples to apples (and not to Oranges).
In this case, one should compare National Wealth (country's assets minus its liabilities) against Apple's assets minus its liabilities. That calculation gives us about 65B dollars, which puts Apple somewhere between Ghana (95th) and Turkmenistan (96th).
That advice seems laughable now, even if you hold for years. Companies are going public while nowhere near profitability. And others are experiencing surging prices on the basis of hype and rosy promises about the future. You can say "that's just tech companies", but it's not 1999 anymore. 'Tech' is not a new and mysterious industry with made-up metrics, they make up the largest companies in our economy.
The time to invest in an IPO stock is before it goes public, not after. IPOs are priced to extract the maximum possible capital, partly why the prices usually dive within the first trading day. Buying on the secondary market (NYSE/NASDAQ)is putting money in the pockets of the investment bank that underwrote the issue.
Of course once a company has been public for a while and there is sufficient public information about their performance, you can choose to go the value investing path.
I always thought the lack of adoption in this feature set was a marketing failure of Slack, but I'm now seeing it as bait for a Salesforce integration.
Google Chat? What’s that?
I’ll stick with Slack.
The problem is that the people responsible for mandating its usage don't care how much it sucks, they care that it's working enterprise IM and they get it for free with the Office subs they're already paying for.
It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.
Good grief! Teams, suck!
The calendar integration is nice and the video chats are good, but The Linux version of their client just stops pulling audio all the time unless I do a `killall -9 pulseaudio` and restart it (and it's the only app left where I still have to do that).
Teams gets a big "Meh" for me on calls and awful for text chat.
Yes, it's odd. For those who haven't used Teams, it defaults to showing you a team's channels you use most frequently (I guess? I never quite understood the logic) and then you have to click to see the full list. Maddening.
As a result, I ignore them all.
They need some sort of “feed” feature.
Unfortunately your killall workaround does not work for me. I have to restart my laptop every time I have a Teams meeting -.-
I'm quite a happy user of Teams, the only thing I'm missing is ability to share my desktop with giving control to a remote caller - but I only needed that maybe once or twice over this entire year so far.
Note that outside of audio being disabled on a regular basis (and there being no way of setting it back up properly), I am also happy with the product. It beats Skype Business, which I could never get to work on Linux.
But then I got a member of a different Team, for one of our customers, as part of some integration work. And boy is that a CF.
Unlike Discord you either have this team or that team active. Notifications from the other are horribly unreliable, and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client.
So as such, "Teams" really should have been named "Team".
AirSend gives you a few simple (chat, voice/video, files, tasks and wiki) but powerful tools and then get out of the way.
This was largely fixed, you may have to enable the "new meeting experience" though, which starts your meeting / call in a separate window from the main client
Last tried this a couple of days ago.
I see now that what I've always thought of as "channels" is called Teams, no idea how I've overlooked that for over two years but there you go.
My point is in Discord I can be on a dozen different servers with different administrators and seamlessly go between them. Not so in Teams. I'm stuck to one tenant (team) at a time. Which sucks if you need to switch between them.
You are correct that Teams today does not support Multi-Tenancy but that is really not an issue for 99.5% of organizations who would only ever have 1 tenant anyway
Teams is structure as
Tenant -> Teams -> Channels
Anyway, up until this became an issue, Teams has worked quite well. It does what we need when we need it, so can't complain really.
1. Many users have issues where the unmute button is unresponsive. Typically the workaround is to turn off incoming video feeds which isn't exactly ideal. This is a major turnoff.
2. Difficult to stay involved in multiple channels as described by another comment. I find it tedious to find what's happened if I've been away for a while.
3. Slack has bots that do various helpful things including leaving channels you don't use, asking you for your daily standup feedback if you don't have an in person meeting, referencing external content, etc. I assume Teams must have something similar but I've never seen them used which likely indicates its a lot easier to do with Slack.
4. Nicer UI as you allude to yourself
5. Slack works with several video chat options including their own (based on AWS tools I believe?) and Zoom. I actually prefer Slack video chat over Zoom or Teams for pair programming as its so easy to annotate the screen without clicking into a bunch of menus or being the meeting owner or something. You literally just start drawing on the screen and your coworkers see it
6. Excellent mobile app which is quite important for a chat client
7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually)
8. Not tied in to only Microsoft products
Looks like there's a free [0] version of teams that supports unlimited search, unlimited app integrations and meetings of up to 100 attendees. Compare to free [1] slack that has limitations of 10k searchable messages, 10 app integrations and only 1-1 meetings
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-team... [1]: https://slack.com/intl/en-au/pricing
The integration and embedding of office/powerbi/etc is neat, but it forces it into a Teams frame.
For some reason, some things launch SharePoint with its own bag of shit for trying to make its own version of web sites.
I’m in a big org with Teams for almost a year. We have thousands of employees who aren’t as active as hundred person free slack open source projects. People aren’t using it to communicate much with each other.
They keep emailing, or texting or IMing. I get more Skype IMs a day than Teams. And do you know how horrible Skype is?
Because of this, I think it sucks as a superset of Slack. Sure, it nominally has all those features, but in practice they aren’t usable.
I hope that MS just keeps iterating and it eventually gets better. I think it’s better now than a year ago.
Apart from that, I find it clunky, unwieldy, and it has that unfortunate soullessness that permeates many 'productivity' applications (exemplified by the sterile selection of reaction emoji).
For me: Slack has character, and works well.
So while the collab works well, it’s a lot of work to then organize the files so anything beyond literal ephemeral scratch pads sucks for “power users” and completely confuses regular users.
Also it's really slow.
Is that really true? I'm biased since I'm on the dev side, but everyone I know is using macbook pros, with very rare stragglers using windows or linux, and they use web clients for most stuff (e.g. gsuite, etc) rather than thick clients. I suspect with the push to working from home this will only accelerate.
This is a shame, since I like Microsoft Office products and am one of the few people I know who thinks VB is a great productivity tool, .Net is superior (in terms of language design) to Java, and Excel, Visio are better than anything else out there. But it's been almost a decade since anyone I know has needed to use that stuff in the office.
Teams comes free with the suite. My company moved from webex + adhoc solutions to teams and it has worked well, at least for video chat.
MS office apps have decent support for Apple these days
- Slack wasn't going to survive as an independent. Their anti-trust efforts against Microsoft + Teams seemed to go nowhere.
- Salesforce is one of the only companies that can go to-to-toe with Microsoft in the enterprise - 80%+ of the Fortune 500, 150k+ customers, 200k+ people at their conference each year
- Salesforce already know your org chart so can roll out slack to anyone already on force.com easily.
- Salesforce are building out from a data-up direction to take up what employees have open on their screens at work. Slack/collab was a big part they were missing (so is video/conf - zoom would be perfect but it's overvalued, Workday also fits)
- Integrations with CRM, customer support, social media management, etc. are a no-brainer into slack
- Microsoft are weak exactly where Salesforce are strong so a lot of customers are across both and would be tempted by free Slack over free Teams
- They're issuing stock for half the acquisition and have a cap of 250B+ which is a bit bubbly but they're doing well P&L wise recently
> everyone has Teams for free
Prevalent sentiment at my workplace: Teams integrates well for outlook meetings, but it‘s a CPU hog, has crappy chat UI.
It paralyzes work to the extent, that I only prefer to use Slack. Or zoom for bigger video calls.
- Zoom for large team meeting
- Slack for collaboration between our teams
- Skype for upper management meetings who are still only know Skype
- Teams is free with office subscription and our company has been pushing everyone to use it instead of using slack but everyone hates Teams. Terrible UI and slow
I've been using slack/mattermost/discord And functionality wise only discord can be onpar with teams.
You can integrate this into the SF platform and your get a good defense against other players (MSFT, SAP, Oracle).
If I can schedule a customer call and register it inside salesforce it would be great. Today I have to enter all manually on their interface :-(
Some integration into core Salesforce might make sense for reps / teams.
Another useful product might be live chats based on Slack tech.
Seems good fit, but I do wonder how well they are going to integrate.
I always thought it strange how big Slack got to begin with. History will probably remember its ultimate accomplishment was getting lots of companies to switch from direct-message communication to chat rooms. However, that was probably inevitable as an internet savvy generation took over more companies, and Slack was simply well-timed. It's not like the product was light years ahead of its myriad of competitors. It had a little better design and had friendly corporate terms.
Which is good news. If Salesforce really does ruin Slack, I have no doubt someone will swoop into the space just as quickly as they did.
That is, unless some start-up dreams up some kind of revolutionary paradigm shift in how people communicate online.
Maybe something in the AR space ~10 years from now.
Teams feels entirely too tied to MSFT. The UI seems unbearable.
If I get it right, from all the group messengers that appeared around 6 years ago, the only one with an open protocol seems to be Matrix, but it hasn't proven to be to their advantage, apparently. Only Element, Zulip and Mattermost are open source?
Honorable mention: IRCCloud was a "hot thing" for a while, but it seems like it wasn't enough to revitalize IRC. [2]
--
Appendix, initial releases:
* Slack: August 2013; 7 years ago
* Discord: May 13, 2015; 5 years ago
* Mattermost: October 2, 2015; 5 years ago
* Zulip: ca 2014, at least 5/6 years ago?
* Matrix protocol: ca September 2014; 6 years ago
* vector/riot/element: ca September 2016, 4 years ago
--
1: https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/30/element-acquires-gitter-to...
Self-hosted an instance two or so years ago and have never run into issues, besides the occasional kick to my reverse proxy. You can create accounts for your friends/family/coworkers, the web app is fast/clean on mobile, and chat logs are persistent.
Matrix was focused on things that deter enterprise customers while Slack built a machine for locking them in.
I don't really think so. If Slack had exactly the same UX as it has but federated, I don't think that would have deterred very many customers. Maybe a few that have come on only after Slack already got so big.
Federation is actually pretty hard. It's real that federation makes it harder/slower to make changes or add new features -- but on top of that spending time on federation (even on open source projects) necessarily takes time you could be spending on the non-federation UX.
And it's not just enterprise customers for whom in the end federation isn't nearly as prioritized as a good UX in other places.
100% of companies require a way of communicating with other companies/people, and federated email and phone calls are extremely common ways (granted that non-federated means are becoming more popular, and I can believe there are a few companies whose only communication with the outside world is via non-federated means).
Companies have lists requirements for their tools and "not federated" isn't one of them, it's just that so far non-federated tools already fullfil the other requirements. Once Element is mature enough (and I'm sorry, but looking at the incoming issues on https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues?q=sort%3Aupd..., it doesn't look like it yet), then hopefully more companies will start considering it.
Also, some companies (at least some people in the one I work for, so I'm extrapolating) want to be able to text chat with other companies/people, and they currently do this with Teams (which requires both parties to have a Teams account). Slack allows this too if I understand. Federated chat would also give them this, so it is something they need, even if they don't realise that.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "their advantage". Designing and promulgating an actual open federated protocol is way harder/time-consuming than doing the same for a closed proprietary one. So taking this approach has only hurt their flexibility and speed-to-market for features.
However, if done right, an open protocol can be way more advantageous to the global community as a whole! IMHO Matrix started out as just another crazy moonshot. "Let's make something like email and xmpp only better." But, fast-forward to now and they have built a very usable chat ecosystem with multiple server implementations and many clients.
My hope is that things like this Slack acquisition (and the inevitable cooperate shenanigan that will follow) will continue to push individuals and companies to invest in open federate-able alternatives.
Seems like it's been around at least since 2015, it is open source, and it supports audio and video chat. Pretty impressive... and yet, I truly forgot about it!
1: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/graphs/contributor...
Anyway, I think it's still here and growing, but it pops into the HN consciousness every now and again. That doesn't mean it's popularity is similarly varied :)
Meanwhile, we're about to finish the main milestones of making Gitter natively speak Matrix (planning to announce on Thursday), and on the FOSS side in general, Mozilla has successfully moved over entirely to Matrix for community facing work (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/03/03/moznet-irc-is-dead-long-l...), and a few other similar sized open source projects are in the process of finalising doing the same manoeuvre; watch which this space for updates. https://element.debian.social/ looks to be a thing, for instance :)
In terms of naming, it's really not hard: Matrix is the protocol; the core team set up a company called New Vector who made a flagship Matrix client called Riot, but we then renamed both the company and the app to be Element in order to simplify things. Hopefully most people have forgotten the renaming and moved on by now.
In terms of what's next for Matrix:
* Loads of effort making Element more mainstream-friendly; going through improving the UX and making it consistent cross-platform and predictable for new users. The approach we're taking is to film new users using the service, and literally tight-loop fixing the thinkos that they trip over until they stop tripping over. It sounds obvious, and we should have done it years ago, but it's starting to make a big difference. The first wave of changes ship in the next 2 weeks.
* Social login - implementing OIDC Connect to simplify onboarding if you're willing to hand over your identity to an existing identity provider (Github/Gitlab/Apple/Twitter/Google/FB)
* We're in the middle of implementing Spaces - super fun feature to define arbitrary hierarchies of rooms; a bit like discord servers, or slack workspaces, or possibly a usenet hierarchy or IMAP folder tree depending on how you squint. We're hoping to get the first cut out by the end of the year, which is super fun.
* We're also working hard on freeform threading (you too could implement HN/Reddit/Email/NNTP/Twitter on Matrix if you want!). https://github.com/matrix-org/cerulean has some details for the intrepid.
* Peer-to-Peer Matrix is going great guns; we've just finished the first cut of a new P2P overlay network called Pinecone (based on Yggdrasil, but using source routing).
* We've almost finished a wave of work to make 1:1 VoIP not suck; fixes are already shipping in Element on all platforms, but we're almost at the point where VoIP is robust and reliable rather than a quick proof-of-concept which we'd not had a chance to ever really polish.
* Finally, lots of work queued up to make end-to-end encryption more usable. Particularly, chasing bugs where encryption fails (we just fixed a major one in iOS for instance, which shipped a few days ago, thanks to the Push service extension sometimes racing with the main Element process desyncing). We're also looking at simplifying the E2EE key recovery process and just switching to using the same password to both login and decrypt your messages, rather than separate login password & security passphrases as we have today.
I could go on, but TL;DR: I think "the only one with an open protocol seems to be Matrix, but it hasn't proven to be to their advantage, apparently." is bogus. We'd just be another random open source chat webapp if it wasn't for Matrix; instead it's a global open network with 25+ million users and about 60,000 servers. So not yet as big as Email or the Web, but bigger than (say) bitcoin, and continuing to grow exponentially.
Very good
The reason I ask is that it seems to me (as an entirely uneducated outsider) that if they're using the Matrix protocol as-is, then they have incentive to support and assist with the further development of the Matrix protocol, which is great. But if they've already started customizing it, then I would worry that they eventually will decide they don't need Element or the main Matrix protocol and will just go off and do their own thing.
> "In terms of naming, it's really not hard: Matrix is the protocol..."
First time I read that it was clarifying. Second time I read it it reminded me - naming is important. Always think about customers and don't dismiss things that confuse customers / end users. I 100% want to see y'all succeed. But this customer friction area and similar ones are not to be overlooked. If I were you, I'd focus 100% on the best way to surface Matrix's value to others. That's all we're looking for.
is awesome. A CLI client that is reliable and cutting edge would be awesome (looks like some contenders - I'd love to see one in Clojure or Rust but that's just me..). Bridges with other providers like Slack etc. would be a good way to make in-roads into the Slack user base - would get developers using it for work, and then able to switch over, etc.
Most users of Slack, etc., are getting a little tired of it. We'd love something new - and something we could customize more! Awesome. But you have to position yourself as: (a) a strong, stable, growing alternative with a strong customer focus and appreciation (knowing that if you want to be Linux v. Microsoft and not GNOME/KDE v. macOS/Windows - i.e., succeed in the Enterprise outside of Europe, you have to be a new kind of customer obsessed than what has come before) (b) a low risk alternative to start experimenting with.
Biggest focus should be developers creating enterprise apps (like the German army). That's the sweet spot it seems like to get exponential traction. If you can tap into engineers who are using Slack/Teams/etc. and get them to build more clients, etc... it could be really good.
I.e., implement the difficult parts of Slack really, really well (again be Linux OS v. Microsoft OS - and let hypervisors and whatever else innovate on top of your platform -- and not try to boil the ocean with UI features, etc. - which I feel like is just difficult to compete with - there's a mountain of engineers in Cupertino who are going to out-innovate on a stronger platform with a lot more advantages.. but something like the Linux kernel.. is key).
YMMV, just one person's thoughts.
Weechat is really impressively good on Matrix, and the plugin is in the final stages of being rewritten in Rust. It has full E2EE support, and the developer is funded to work on it full time.
> I.e., implement the difficult parts of Slack really, really well
Yup. The balance between features and core stability is Hard, but hopefully we're getting the balance right (at last).
Hydrogen (hydrogen.element.io) is an example of a ludicrously lightweight, stable, but not-yet-featureful Matrix client fwiw, as an example of what the balance looks like for "implementing the difficult bits really really well".
One thing that really stood out to me is that you can cross-sign your device certificates! That means your chat partners don't need to verify the signatures of all your device keys, but only one. Even though this is the only good option (in my opinion), the only other messenger that does this that I'm aware of is iMessage.
I wish more people used it. Not just individually, but for their communities. There's a couple of good bridges which I intend to try, to bring my Signal/Telegram/... contacts all into one place, but you need not only the bridge, you also need to host your own homeserver and I haven't made the dive into all of that yet.
From a business perspective, data sovereignty and end-to-end encryption seem to be really potent differentiators for certain market segments, especially government. To wit, the French government has a massive Matrix deployment under the name "Tchap", and the German military began rolling out a similar initiative called "BwMessenger" last month: https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger-...
On the opposite end of the spectrum you've got Mozilla, who replaced their IRC network with open, federated Matrix and saw greater far greater community engagement as a result.
October also saw a commercial entity (Famedly.com) begin sponsoring the development of a third-party homeserver implemented in Rust (Conduit). So we're starting to see glimmers of a potential ecosystem around the Matrix protocol independent of Element.
We don't have the same pop culture buzz as Slack or Discord, but I absolutely think there is something of substance here.
Edit: not forgetting XMPP via the actually-usable-these-days bifrost bridge! https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost
Corporations don't want to spend the manpower to run something like this, considering Slack is relatively cheap and Teams just comes with their Azure/Office365 license.
It's more for hobbyists and hacker types. If you want a nice mobile client for Matrix, try out FluffyChat. It supports room emojis!
That's been the most disorienting part of joining Element. We have kind of a bimodal distribution of constituencies with peaks both on the enthusiast side and the boring bureaucratic government side. The mass market in the middle won't know what hit 'em! ;)
It's a shame -- I'm hopeful that the situation will be better in the next year or so, but if these issues aren't corrected I can't see how they won't forever be in the shadow of mainstream apps like Slack, who have much stronger sensibilities around UX and accessibility (dark patterns and lack of E2EE notwithstanding).
In terms of improving documentation and usability, we're on the case, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270858
In the meantime, Matrix makes it possible (not trivial, in my experience) to bridge to other chat services. Bridging requires a fair bit of technical know-how.
To quote: "Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world"
I work day to day in Slack. It's better than email and the need for workflow and knowledge integrations is clear. Asana needs to get a chat layer going ASAP.
The knowledge workflow integration sector is the next big thing.
Is it? I regret every time I have to search for some information in past chats. Even M$ Outlook is better.
I have to chat with like ~10 vendors on a weekly basis for short-burst communication and end up having a bunch of weird shared slack-room things. Salesforce could clean that up and it'd be a great b2b messaging system.
Now instead they can get more efficient at wasting time by using both slack and crm at the same time!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25269934 <--
OP was asking how Salesforce got so huge when it has a medium-negative reputation among tech folks, and that was my answer: Management loves to hear "this will save $$$ on software"
Is it better to spend X every year to just make the Salesforce solution work (thereby not having to admit to a mistake, and mitigating personal risk), or spend 3X in one year to write something in house (that requires maybe 1/10th X to maintain/extend from then on, but which is riskier, and unlikely to show up on future evals such that they can claim credit and get a raise)?
Corporations seem especially vulnerable to sunk cost fallacies.
I’ve fixed 2 year headaches of billion dollar enterprises in a few hours.
Why couldn’t they do that themselves?
1. Because Salesforce is so effortless to keep running, that billion dollar companies can get by with a couple of admins, and never put any investment into building on its functionality.
2. The people who know Salesforce well enough to do that are gobbled up and paid boatloads of money by Salesforce and Consultancies.
I've been on the receiving end of boring acquisitions, and I can assure you that the financial upside can excite people quite effectively.
It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now. Start small, get big fast, get sold, get ruined.
I realize I am presupposing Salesforce will ruin Slack - but it's hard to see how they won't, unless they take the approach Microsoft took with Github and keep it as a totally separate business unit. Even then, there's often meddling (see e. g. Facebook with Instagram and Oculus).
...now?
I'm not sure I can think of a time when an acquisition or merger ever made a product better for the users.
I don't expect it to ever get any better than it is right now (which is a pretty mediocre product).
Salesforce software feels like Atlassian to me - lots of stuff, pretty much all of which is just ok.
I expect slack will similarly decay over time as another generic offering from them, but I guess we'll see.
Very unreliable at times eg latency, missed out of video calling, did not take advantage of WFH boom at all, document search was bad.
I haven't had that level of unreliability issue with text, though I _definitely_ have with calls.
I would agree that Slack had an opportunity to compete with Zoom and others because of COVID that it seems to have relatively squandered. Slack calls are still less reliable and usable than Zoom calls for many purposes. You can't dial in with a phone, you can't mute other people's video or even audio (though I'm not sure Zoom offers client-side video muting either), Slack's screenshare is less reliable and doesn't have as many options for limiting what you share, and so on.
So I guess I'd say it fulfilled its core promise: "decent enterprise real-time communications", but it's the failure to innovate or even keep up with competing services in some important areas that's the issue. Maybe that's splitting hairs?
It's statistically likely to happen.
It's interesting to read through lists like this and see what happened:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electr...
Why does every business have to be a $100G business? Can we support a model in which we have a lot of $100M businesses that are doing great things and delivering quality instead of quantity?
Investors seem to not like that idea, but customers would love that idea. It's unfortunate that our markets are not optimized for customers.
Because too many businesses fail for the model to work without multi-billion-dollar home runs, I think?
> but customers would love that idea
Sounds like an opportunity. :) There are many domains where small-ish scale SaaS is extremely profitable. The typical HN reader is usually not the target market, so we don't hear about them.
The real problem is when VCs think there's a billion-dollar business in your market, but there's not. And you have to spend millions in VC money just to compete with "we'll-make-it-up-on-volume" free services, and poof goes your nice margin. There were app-based delivery services long before DoorDash, GrubHub, etc. -- where are they now?
Because the VC model relies on big returns for early investors and founders, both have no reason to change anything about it.
It's open source and you can self host pretty easily.
We've been using it for 6 months and really couldn't be happier.
Will be fascinating to see this rivalry pick up steam as time goes on.
I guess I could be wrong but I feel like the chances of Slack surviving with its genuine "compatibility with everything" story and overall usability intact 3 years from now is small.
"Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020."
Lets say you own 100 shares of WORK. Does that mean you get both
1. $4,434 in cash (100 * 43.84 current value of WORK)
and
2. 7.76 shares of CRM (100 * .0776)
Edit: I can't read!
The current value of WORK doesn't matter, it's the closing price on 11/30. The stock price will effectively be pinned at that now since nobody will want to trade at another price.
WORK closing price. I just realized I can't read though, misinterpreted the press release.
Won't it fluctuate with Salesforce's value?
1. $2679 in cash (100 * 26.79)
and
2. 7.76 shares of CRM (100 * .0776)
I don't understand this sentiment at all. Slack is a nicely-done, enterprise-y chat app with a lot of users, most of who liked the idea of not paying for anything. There are many competitors, including several open source options.
FAANG becomes FAANGS
This transaction shouldn't be the catalyst for regulatory action; regulators should have already taken action.
You can have IRC-style chatbots that parse messages and do things but Slack "integrations" are a lot more powerful and "magic" if your mental model of Slack is just fancy shmancy IRC.
Slack bundles basically all the features you'd have to implement out of band with IRC like chat history, search, user statuses, notifications for mentions, formatted content, media content like gifs and videos, reminders, attachments, pastebins.
Then there are things that you can't really do with the IRC protocol like reactions, threads, editing messages, messages with dynamically updating content (our Github bot for example changes the color of PR messages as the status changes), and embedded content like Polls that only take up one message and don't spam the chat with votes, shared history across devices.
As it turns out, UX matters and Slack delivers far better UX than IRC since one single entity can control the entirety of the communication pipeline (from protocol to how messages are displayed).
1. You can't send IRC messages to people who are offline (yes you can work around this with bouncers etc. but that's beside the point). You can send Slack messages to people who are offline.
2. Slack is a proprietary, centralized system. Slack, the company, decides who is allowed to participate, and at what cost. IRC is a federated protocol, where different servers can be part of the same network, or part of a different network. You can set up a server or client by yourself if you want.
The later will work the same for half a percent of the users, but the 99.5% left would be crying tears of blood. I remember Mozilla employees’ blogs about the contraptions they had at individual levels to make IRC fully work for them, and you just can’t ask that to the HR recruiting intern.
maybe they'll spin off a business oriented division with a different name,
Slack started as an internal business tool and it remains so.
It just doesn't present itself as something you'd consider for your business.
Business, for worse, will demand features catered to their workflow.
That was easy.
‘And we’re going public on day 1!’
The one feature I wish they'd clone from Slack are threaded replies. I know they're rolling out a new way to reply, but it still makes the chat flow messy. I really enjoyed the way Slack allows for breakout threads/replies to a particular message. It was a great way to display enough context, but not make the flow confusing.
Signed, Someone who used IRC for decades
- you have your info pre separated in channels instead of needing to sort your emails into folders
- you can pin important data to the channel for future reference
- even sending small files is less complicated via a chat app
- you can get up to date just by scrolling up a bit
That's all I could think of in 2 minutes.
If it's truly async then just close slack until you're ready to talk, then open it back up and go through all of the red badges / white channels.
If you absolutely need to keep all notifications off and still want to read any thread replies, the very top channel in the slack app is called "Threads" and will show threads you've participated in or subscribed to, listed in chronological order based on most recent replies.
I have a lot of problems with slack (namely, performance and lack of solid video/audio calling), but threads are fine.
How does that help with noticing threads that someone created while I wasn't looking?
Discord - Not enough thread
M$ Teams - Just right thread
As much as I hate to say it, after using all three, I definitely like the Teams threads the best. That model offers the best balance of visibility and organization that I have seen.
The nesting-within-a-larger-conversation aspect felt very intuitive to me. I've been in other Slack workspaces that didn't use threads nearly as well, though -- I do think they take some "correct usage" to perform well.
Thread notifications are another pain point, as others have also noted. For some reason, all thread updates/notifications are clustered together in a separate tab called "Threads", regardless of what channels these threads belong to. If a thread (that I am following) belonging to a channel has an update, shouldn't that channel be highlighted? Now that I think about it, if that channel is highlighted and the user clicks on it, how is the user going to know which thread to check... all I can say is, threading in chat rooms is a non-trivial problem and while Slack gets some part of it right, there's still a ways to go.
In practice you're going to get violators, but that happens with Slack as well. In part because Slack's thread UI sucks so occasionally you'll wake up and see a couple people in after-hours last night who just didn't care and filled up 50-100 messages on the unthreaded channel, forcing people to skim through it or if they were foolish enough to leave notifications on after-hours to get all these pings.
One nice thing basically all modern chat systems have is easy group chat, so you don't have to create a new room, but rooms are nice too. e.g. any time we had a customer case requiring a few people to look into it, we'd just create a slack channel for it instead of using threads on the team channel. After a while someone would archive the channel.
Then there are people who use threads and occasionally click the "send to whole room" option which really screws up notifications. You're looking at it right there in the main team chat, but you have to open the thread or your notifications to dismiss the notification.
Next time I'm forced to use Slack I'll use Ripcord. You know what UI I miss most and would help Slack/Discord/Element tremendously? Tabs.
Discord's entire business model seemed to be geared toward toppling Steam by perfecting community features and then expanding into digital sales. Right when they launched their game store, Epic Games started one too and was throwing around Fortnite money to lock in exclusives. Discord quickly retreated and has seemed rudderless for the past year.
They already started shifting away from their gamer branding. Earlier this year they generalized to online communities. And they have a formidable architecture. Some game servers have 6 digit user counts. Their permission model is also way more robust than Slack's, and that's not an easy gap to close given how tightly woven into the architecture a permission model needs to be.
In comparison to Slack, this all could have been had for pennies on the dollar. They must really want the brand, or the customer base, or to already have the enterprise feature gap closed.
Our smallish company has used Discord all year long for our company communication and I could hardly be happier. They have an excellent bot API, a super clean yet playful interface, instant search and just don't feel/smell as "enterprisey" as Slack already felt (and that was well before now being acquired by Salesforce).
If Discord can maintain all those things and add a bit more Microsoft integration, they have a huge opportunity here.
(Either that or Microsoft can preempt the whole thing and acquire Discord).
It will be interesting how this impacts Mattermost [1] though - an open source developer collaboration tool for Enterprises, a closer competitor to Slack.
Microsoft must be cursing their decision right now..
1. Free
2. Included as part of Office365.
Teams is currently eatings Slacks lunch, but the lunch was paid for by a corporate IT guy who switched to Office365 so he could lay off some IT admins and save some money compared to managing an on-premise Exchange server.
[1](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-team...)
That's only about 3x growth in almost 5 years. Don't get me wrong, this is a massive acquisition, but I still say "only" given the hypergrowth experienced by many adjacent tech companies.
So I think Microsoft may be quite happy they decided not to acquire Slack at such a high tag price nearly 5 years ago.
No, really.
That's an unreal price. Slack benefits little from network effects. Deployment has no fundamental secret sauce.
This is a crazy number. This does not make sense.
Switching would be painful so there'd have to be some pretty compelling reasons. (And who's got time to recreate all our custom emojis? :-))
I think all the existing integration are examples of an indirect network effect -- companies wouldn't invest in providing them if there weren't already users on the platform.
> Combining Slack with Salesforce Customer 360 will be transformative for customers and the industry. The combination will create the operating system for the new way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world.
Oh. Oh no.
It really says something about a company that people see their name getting close as a sign they should stop using a product.
Sadly I suspect the people saying "we need to find a Slack alternative" today are the same ones that have been saying "Slack sucks" this whole time, to little effect.
feature-by-feature on paper, it doesn't necessarily stand out compared to the crowded landscape. It's not a new distributed protocol or anything unique.
but you really can tell it's well crafted, with love as slack used to say. And if you don't believe me, you can inspect the source code yourself!
I have wanted our company to move away from Slack to something w better thread discussions.
We have long resisted Salesforce because of pricing, say, compared to Pipedrive for CRM.
I am interested to see what happens with pricing and many orgs locked data.
I know we do not pay for the high uptime plan.
Salesforce is a reasonably good operating entity, I don't see any reason for Slackers to flinch.
But consider that 'Slack' was a movement - literally the name, the original premise, there was a corporate/hip aspect to it. Which now it's not, just the opposite, because it's 'Salesforce'.
So at least in part - 'it's not cool now'.
Products that people started hating with passion.
The real trick is, to figure out all those things we do that we think are based on utility, but are not.
The Saab ad comparing their car to the Jets the make appeals to our 'every little boy wants to be a pilot' fantasy.
But the Ford ads that tell us how 'strong' our vehicle is going to be ... even though many of us will never, ever use them for this purpose.
Like the guy with 1000 different tools in his shed - he buys them 'because they are useful'. But really, it's the 'emotion/novelty' of utility, not actual utility.
At least 1/2 of the tech industry is driven by this, it's hilarious. We HNers, so neurotically passionate about whatever it happens to be ... are the most guilty.
Of course a lot comes out of purely speculative and creative use of technology, it's just that we should be better at discerning.
Slack, if it's bad, is probably because it's a noisy channel, not because it's Salesforce.
That seems very reasonable from a purely rational POV, and I know we all like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. (It reminds me of this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rational-2)
I can still see a world where Slack is a tool that continues to operate and serve its customers, similar to Heroku post-acquisition, but Salesforce augments their services with Slack tie-ins (and vice-versa).
Short: there's a middle ground I think they can strike.
The clash of meaning in those two words says it all.
I'm just complaining, but... Why do people write things like this? I see it in my own employer and our marketing material, too. It's confusing bullshit that is devoid of any meaning.
I am also surprised, as I'd think the COVID pandemic would have boosted its use. Though, after thinking about it I've seen MS Teams everywhere outside of Open Source and startups. A post-mortem of why they sold, and the events leading to it, would be an awesome thing for one of the founders to do.
"We'll still be Slack. I'll still be the CEO."
Source: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/1333901107978936320
oh no. It sounds like they're not even going to try to maintain the whole "wholly independent subsidiary" act. Slack is being swallowed wholesale.
What are you talking about? Messaging products are so integral to Google's vision that they can't stop making them.
Google makes "messaging products" but it's just something that floats on top on top of the sea of Google stuff. Like oil on top of water.
MSN / AIM, IRC, Google Chat, Campfire, HipChat, Slack / Discord, ???
The place where this does seem to be evolving is in customer support. When you chat with a representative, they have a lot of context. Your account, order, possible issue, etc.
Some hardcore engineering there for sure.
It has a great approach to threads, where you can make them mandatory or optional on a per-channel basis (even when optional they have names and are more useful than Slack threads).
They also support adding external parties to channels/threads by email or SMS and even more interestingly, their model is such that you can direct message people in other Quill organizations if you know their details.
[0]: https://quill.chat
It doesn’t even have a pricing section.
We don't use video or audio chat at all; just text chat, pinning important info to channels, swapping small files, searching chat history and a few plugins like reminders and github. May be important to mention that we have a lot of separate projects going on and we separate each in its own channel.
We absolutely want mobile and desktop clients, not a "web UI" that happens to sort of work on all platforms.
Could the hive mind give me some names of alternatives to consider?
Google isn't capable of putting together a useful chat and then keeping it alive for a meaningful amount of time to save their lives.
Discord seems to be on a streak trying to re-invent their image as a competitor in the space, and having used it for enough gaming related things, I'd definitely consider it for work.
Zulip seems to garner a lot of positive attention as well.
It seems like it will be a little while before Salesforce can start integrating into Slack at least
Good on Slack I guess! A very nice exit.
That's not the only world, right? Anyone wanna succeed in the real world?
I’ve risked very little money in my first share purchases - I couldn’t even buy a new low end mountain bike for what I’ve got at risk.
Because of course.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/jun/20/digitalmedia.y...
·····•····· ᗤ ᗣᗣᗣᗣ
https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-announces-fourth-quarter-a...
Finally!
Congrats to the Slack team on building a $28B product.