> But migrating everything is _so painful_
This is a key point is the popularity amongst VCs in investing in B2B SaaS. I take their (and your) word for it. But honestly, I don't actually understand this.
Why is migration so hard?
This is a key point is the popularity amongst VCs in investing in B2B SaaS. I take their (and your) word for it. But honestly, I don't actually understand this.
Why is migration so hard?
This is not to mention the fact that half our staff aren't hugely technical, so have actively _learnt_ how to use Slack and it's features around notification control (things that may come "naturally" to the tech-savvy crowd on HN), @-things, bots, etc, and they would need to re-learn a new tool that is going to work in a different way.
This would be a substantial effort for us, and we're a small company. Are there ways to materially minimise this cost?
If you had a small shop with a dozen tech-savvy people and Slack became a problem which was used exclusively for quick business chats, you could probably push a change to another chat platform the next day. You might struggle when you have thousands of employees, some that needed training to use Slack and still aren't that proficient.
Plus, it will just take a long time to get everyone on board and using the replacement system. My department is slowly plodding towards using Teams over Slack, but there are enough hold-outs (my sub-department being one of them) that it still doesn't have wide-spread adoption.
* Getting out of the Enterprise Contract, or waiting for the year to end. * Training people on new software. * Loss of productivity. (1) Learning a new UI, processes, workflows -- both individually and organizationally. A feature or concept in "Tool A" may exist in a completely different form in "Tool B". Or not exist, and then people need to adapt to and work around the missing feature. (2) Missing out on needed information due to the above. Ultimately, software exists to move and transform data, and when you change the software people have to adjust. Sometimes that doesn't go great. "Oh, I didn't realize I needed to check this checkbox".
Another way to say this is "organizational inertia", which is a fancy term that means "it's hard for people to adjust to change".
And you might think developers and other technical people would have an easier time of it. They (we) do, but not to the extent you may expect. I've been on the front lines of a handful of migrations that affected only the IT staff, and it was a long and arduous process each time.
Man it bothers me so much when applications change their UIs on updates for no apparent reason other than "it looks better".
IntelliJ changed the way build and debug buttons looked in some update and it took me days to get used to it and I could find them in a snap again. Slack did a couple of no-reason changes as well.
The really big one, for companies of a certain size / cash flow, is compliance. Companies spend a lot of time developing compliant work flows around a service like Slack.
Migrating to another service requires rewriting the compliance narrative. The current compliance people might not have the confidence or willpower to do that effectively, and can raise legal objections to any such migration indefinitely.
Why would anyone make it easy
Things that are easy to migrate from get replaced by things that are hard to migrate from, eventually.
IRC is incredibly easy to migrate from.
The parent meant a law as in "a law of physics", not a piece of legislation.