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Comment by remir | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don't really need a chat service. It's not a must for them.

On the other hand, what knowledge worker today can function without video conferencing, desktop sharing, file sharing and VoIP?

No that many.

Teams provide all of that natively. That's why they're wining.

Let's be frank, if Teams had been just a chat application, it would never have had the success it currently has, even as part of O365. Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that.

The reality is that MS made Teams a complete collaboration platform and Slack couldn't do the same with their product.

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I disagree that Slack couldn’t have survived when Zoom exists. We will see where Zoom is 5 years; but Slack never expanded beyond Chat and their video calling product just isn’t competitive.

From the outside, Teams (and Zooms) growth was accelerated because video conferencing became way more important. People didn’t need video conferencing pre-COVID because that would have just been a meeting. When they suddenly did, Slack wasn’t that good. My pet peeve continues to be that on Slack I cannot see someone’s screen on iOS - that one annoyance had us move to Zoom then teams.

An argument could be made that Slack was ultimately unable to compete in video by virtue of not having an army of high paid engineers to throw at the problem like MS does, but the features that Slack chose to focus on (like the WYSIWG editor) doesn’t say that to me

My suspicion is that slack has hit the wall with their core product. User growth has flattened and that's why we're seeing a pivot to random experiments in layout and UI and no meaningful new features. Video conference is barely usable, but somehow adding user icons and a command pop-up (that doesn't support all their commands) all made it out to production.

The most meaningful thing they've had recently is the cross-org shared channel thing, which is awesome when it works but still onerous to manage. That was two years ago. And it doesn't open up that many new users, it just keeps people in slack longer (good for stickiness, bad for growth).

In those same four years where Slack’s user base tripled, Microsoft Teams claims it gained 115 million users, showing the world that product quality can’t save a startup when Big Tech wants a piece.

This is the important point: because of tech monopolies it is no longer possible to compete on software quality. This is why Congress needs to break them up.

I've done a lot of video calls since pandemic started, usually with our company's chosen vendor, but with some outside companies, it's on their system. It was only a couple weeks ago that I experienced my first Teams call ever, while I've had many external zoom calls, many Google, some Chime, some webex, and I've had many, many external Slack invites.

I wonder if Microsoft's Teams numbers were pumped up by it being freely included in O365 subs. "Oh you're a paying O365 customer; we'll just go ahead and count your included Teams sub as a Teams sub."

I dunno. We got Office 365. If Slack was significantly better than Teams I'm pretty sure we'd pay for it.

As it stands it seems to be the other way around, at least for the features we care the most about (meetings, screen sharing, voice calls).

So I think it's possible to compete on quality, but it's definitely harder as a lot of people will get by with a lower-quality offering.

Slack will add the calling capabilities of Zoom and Zoom will need to add the chat system of slack.

It would have made more sense for either of the two to buy the other, or some kind of merger tbh.

> Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that.

Not sure what the example of IE would entail. IE was insanely popular during its prime of 2006-2008. Even today, Chrome has not captured as much of the market as IE6 did at that time.

It was only years of neglect (i.e nearly the entire IE6 team was reassigned to other projects), and governmental intervention that allowed other browsers to even have a significant plurality.

So yes, you can win merely by being bundled for free with another popular product.

If Slack for instance just came preinstalled on iOS/OSX, then people would have standardized on it so long as it was also available on Windows.

To add to this, bundling IE with Windows effectively killed the browser market. Netscape anyone? Microsoft was even subject to an anti-trust case centered around their IE handling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Dominated, maybe. But definitely not killed. There was never just one contender for the crown. IE vs Netscape, then IE vs. Firefox nee Firebird nee Phoenix, then IE vs Firefox vs Chrome, and now Firefox vs Chrome

There's a bit of a gap between when netscape was relavent and when firefox/firebird/phoneix was.

Yes there were other browsers, and yes there existed people who used them, but it was very small

Yes, you CAN win by being bundled with a popular product, it helps tremendously. But I said it's no garanty.

Android is the most popular mobile OS on earth and I remember when Google+ was bundled as part of the base OS image. Even that and the huge marketing Google did wasn't enough to popularize the service and Google ended up killing it.

It proves Jobs' adage that "this is not a company, this is a feature." He was talking about Dropbox at the time, but he might as well have been referring to Slack.

At my current job, you would have to pry Slack from my cold, dead hands. I would rather deal with conference calls on personal cell phones than go back to e.g. Chime that Amazon used. For me, it's not just about communication (although there are 1,000 ways that Slack reduces friction), it's also about the searchable archives. It's the equivalent of Stack Overflow for our internal issues.

That's funny because there's a stack overflow for business and it was passed over for slack.

Another thing is -- the public stack overflow is really nice for reference, but in my experience I don't like the culture around it. It isn't inclusive. The thing that turned me off was when they would shut down a question because it would lead to extended discussion.

Now slack allows extended discussion - properly off in a thread - and through that fosters a corporate culture in a good way.

Slack seems like they already had everything they needed. You can do video calls natively in Slack. You can store and transfer files. They just didn’t put the pieces together; everything was kept as a minor complement to chat.

That said, I’m not sure they could have competed with Teams in MS corporate deployments under any circumstances. If a company is already using Outlook, Exchange, AD, O365, Teams plugs in very nicely. But, seems like that still leaves a pretty big market.

Plus it is zero marginal cost for those places where slack has expensive per user pricing.

How important is Office365 interactivity really? Calendar is nice but otherwise?

> The reality is that a lot of enterprises and organizations don't really need a chat service. It's not a must for them.

I don't understand this. Chat has always been an integral part of work in all my jobs. Before Slack it was Skype. I can't imagine working through email only. It would be hard enough when we were sitting in the same office but impossible now when we're remote.

I'm saying a lot of organization don't see value in something similar to IRC like Slack. Obviously IM is different, but I work for an MSP that is, among other things, deploying Teams, and this has been my observation.

I've seen teams go from mailing word files back and forth with "revision dates" on them, to using Teams to manage their files.

SharePoint has always been too complicated for most people to use, but part of Teams is an easier to use UI over SharePoint.

Huge problem solved, right there.

Yeah, slack needs this badly.

I don't think any enterprise can survive without chat.

while i do love slack, it seems like ms teams was the iphone(smartphone) to blackberry. ... then again, not at all apples to apples, since ms was already mastering the corporate world.

I don't want more collaboration. Slack is enough of a distraction. Something integrated with even more tools sounds like a detractor to me.

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