And now that Microsoft has stolen a bunch of customer to Slack through their anti competitive practice, they are now making this move to avoid lawsuit, even though the harm is already done…
The current crop of students are all using Discord to collaborate during lab work. Wait 2-3 years until they are team leaders at work and there will be Discords everywhere. I can promise you every Fortune 500 already is using Discord in production, just as they are using generative AI.
From my perspective stagnant would be better than taking away useful features.
Slack, by design, makes it painful to engage in more than one conversation at a time. It's so annoying to maintain a "save for later" list of things you need to come back to, or mark things as unread.
You can do this with slack by using the web client, but that has its own annoyances with not being a native application.
Except for that, they could stagnate. For example, what the huddles were for? Did I miss any new functionality that they added to the old calls?
Its an attempt at making something an open office / standing room type situation so people can wander in and out of huddles to check in with folks.
In practice, I don't see it used much. Everyone wants to setup a Zoom call.
All the customers that are not paying for Slack are using Meet. One attempted to use Teams once but it's too complicated. Zoom for work calls? It surely happened but I can't remember when. Skype, I had a customer using it and actually screen sharing in Skype is good: it wastes as much of the screen in useless borders and toolbars as all its competitors but at least it's possible to zoom and get a pixel perfect view of what is shared.
[1] mostly because it's slow, their UX is clunky as hell, and it still doesn't support audio/video calls on Firefox despite WebRTC being supported there since 2015.
just not at looking appealing to companies
I mean they have:
- good chat
- new okayish forum feature
- pretty good video calls (better then Teams AFIK)
- many of the same misc features
- good probably better moderation features then slack
- a nice balance between convenience and security wrt. their login
- ways to ad good code highlighting for a lot of programming languages
- somewhat okayish (AFIK better then modern slack) accessibility features
it's just that all of this features are tweaked with small to mid sized hobby communities in mind instead of companies
For better or for worse, Slack has a huge UI overhaul right around the corner: https://slack.com/blog/productivity/a-redesigned-slack-built...
Zoom is a better value if you need features beyond the base teams. You pay a simple fee and get the whole shebang. With Teams, you may need different SKUs, including Azure AD, etc to get the full feature set. It’s a funnel to E5.