Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsweeney21 | Hacker News Reader

This will be another example of the power of distribution. It doesn't have to be better than Chat GPT. It just has to be good enough.

This is similar to Slack vs Microsoft Teams. Slack had a several year head start on product, but Microsoft had a massive lead on distribution (their Office 365 install base). Teams is good enough.

View on HN

> Teams is good enough.

Man, them's fightin words ;-).

Teams is atrocious, like it is stuck back in the 90s. It's only popuplar because Microsoft gives it away. For all of it's warts I'd take Slack back in a heartbeat.

I'd bet that 90% of Teams users had never used Slack and never would have through their employers. To them, Teams is like all software in that everybody can complain but it's still much more advanced than... Lync.

Why do you have to insult '90s software like that? Software back then was fast and functional.

Teams << Slack < Discord when it comes to chat but it's still Slack << Teams < Zoom for video which is where I see it displacing competitors the most.

If your office has a culture of email for written communication and the chat feature is sparingly used and mostly for quick 1-1 messages or "can I call you?" then it's passable.

I wonder how long before our IT folks switch us to using Teams for video. Mid-2020 we switched to Zoom (from Webex, before Cisco decided to make it a copy of Zoom) for video, along with Slack (from HipChat). The combo of Slack+Zoom worked fairly well. And I got very reliant on the Slack plugin for Outlook to keep me on schedule. Now we're on Teams, which I still find frustrating on a daily basis, but still using Zoom for video. And Microsoft's own calendar integration for Teams is not at all as good as the plugin for Slack was, so I'm back to hit-or-miss for my scheduling.

Not the most onerous of problems, for sure, but I'm not liking how much our IT department is clamping down on everything. Between cost cutting on software and the myriad malware packages they install to monitor our MacBooks, I'm not their biggest fan.

Large part of the value of LLMs is how good they are. Large part of the value of various chat apps are how many already have them installed. The quality of responses is definitely important for LLMs, otherwise the FOSS ones would have eaten OpenAIs lunch already, which doesn't seem to have happened, at least not yet. The FOSS ones are still trying to catch up with GPT3.5, which compared to GPT4 doesn't even come close.

Ironically there’s nothing teamy in Teams in our team - just 1 to 1 chat and massive isolation.

Compare it to Slack here you can safely meme in #random…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com