Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Made it easy to set up real-time chat in a corporate setting, and normalized the idea.

First of all, before Slack real-time chat in a company setting was a novel idea. Your sysadmin may have been born in IRC, but non-tech people probably never used it. "Why would you chat online when you can in real life!?"

Setting up a chat was full of hurdles and questions without clear answers. Do you use XMPP? IRC? Which clients, which servers? Back then it was still common to have on-premise physical servers, so spinning up a server there was suddenly a big deal. Bigger companies did not appreciate "going rogue" with potentially sensitive company information they may had obligation to secure and archive. It was a lot of friction for something that people weren't convinced was a good idea in the first place.

Slack made it accessible, polished, and corporate-friendly, at a time when SaaS and web apps were catching on. You didn't need to get people install an XMPP client, which was designed for 1:1 chats and had awful afterthought UI for group chats, with different capabilities in each client on each platform. You didn't need to explain to anybody how to keep an irssi session alive. File transfers worked with pretty drag'n'drop without having to open ports.

There was a Microsoft Linq back then, but it was awful, and it was an ICQ clone, not a group chat.

Fun fact: Slack was salvaged from a group chat feature of a failed MMORPG "Glitch".

> "Why would you chat online when you can in real life!?"

Never met anyone I worked with well who thought that, even in the 80s (I ran a BBS (on a MSX2 by the way, written in Pascal) to communicate with my teammates and my business partner; he was sales and he loved it). I preferably only ever work with engineers so that might explain something. The real great thing about this day and age is that now you can just demand it from anyone; I have noticed that other roles in the company also prefer it vs 'real life' because there is a record of everything. So 'minutes of meeting' is copy/paste/export instead of writing from your very bad and biased memory; the latter is basically built in for many (especially corporate in my experience) people who insist on calls and face to face; it's easier to fudge the details and deflect blame for failure ('but I told you this when we had this little meeting a couple of weeks ago remember?'). And that happens basically all the time; it's nice that you can just search an archive and say ; 'you said x, we did x, x didn't work, own it please, now back to work'. Only in case of deflection or blaming of course; everyone does stuff, no-one needs to be called out but if someone calls someone out while being wrong, it's good to get the facts.

Microsoft Lync existed before Slack and was pretty common… just didn’t have concept of chat rooms

Lync for Business’ requirement for Microsoft’s (awful) Threat Management Gateway reverse proxy if you wanted to federate was terrible.

All the early startups I worked with used AIM or MSN Messenger. The main thing Slack did was 1) give each company their own private walled garden, 2) integrations/extension support.

AOL or Microsoft could've owned this space in the 90's... if they thought about it.

This. It sold to businesses and made it easier to deploy (simple wizard and voila - in the cloud!) and manage chat.

And also to monitor all communication on it. No more of those pesky P2P-encrypted XMPP messages.

Note that Slack was not the only or first software-as-a-service solving this problems. There were others, some even earlier. E.g. Flowdock https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/flowdock

Slack led the markets with best execution (maybe?) and good funding. Until Microsoft came around with its own unique non-replicable assets and skills.

> First of all, before Slack real-time chat in a company setting was a novel idea.

AIM, Yahoo, Bloomberg, etc were very commonly used I'm finance before slack.

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