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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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