Hacker News Reader

Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

> locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms

Locked down platforms can iterate faster than open platforms.

Eg. Email vs. Slack. Email hasn't change fundamentally in decades but slack is growing and adding useful (to some) features.

Many HN crowd say they don't want/need change, but customer bases tend to disagree.

View on HN

And yet more people use email than Slack. My parents don’t know what Slack is but both have email. So does my teenage daughter. VCs like to see growth of course, so Slack until recently was the winner from a VC’s point of view, and I suspect here at HN we are a bit biased towards that viewpoint. But growth of one single product doesn’t tell you much about the grand scheme of things. Email is a very good example because no other messaging product has more adoption than it.

But could email be invented and be massively adopted in today's world?

Honestly, lot more people use WhatsApp/FB Messenger/iMessage for personal communication. Slack/Teams are taking away huge amount of intra-office communication. For professional and inter-corp communication, email is still popular because LinkedIn product managers aren't smart enough to build de-facto comm. platform over there network.

They use FB messenger more than email to communicate. Email is basically the same as mail now, a place for receipts and newsletters and so on.

It’s a bad point from both of y’all tho since you’re ignoring what marketing verticals are. Email and slack are seen as pro tools, not everyday stuff

I hate new features in familiar applications. I think it’s marketing you are referring to, not consumer demand. While I’m only positing an anecdotal personal reaction, I’m also not seeing data behind the premise you proposed.

Slack is puzzling to me, as it’s a terrible product, IMO, which I feel bandwagoned from a few top down decisions by some larger companies to risk their essential internal communications on a third party proprietary app. It makes no sense to me and I would never specify it’s use on any team I lead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com