If this was so easy, teams wouldn't suck, matrix would be everywhere, and discord would be replaced already by the furries (as much as stoat is trying).
Many people now think they should be broken up.
I see what you are saying though, a business can expand beyond it's initial constraints, but I'm not sure that chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.
Getting hung up over the "asked" phrasing is irrelevant to the discussion.
When I was there from 2012-2022 it really wasn't a thing. Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
You know, I've never looked at Valve in that light before.
Once you have a money printing machine, of course any corporate hierarchy becomes antithetical to creativity, because there are huge financial rewards for climbing up. And the primary way you climb up is by turning direct reports to complete tasks you get rewarded for.
Not that Valve doesn't have its own problems.
> chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.
that's all taking risks means
2. Half (or more) of those things they bought.
now i know the bar is 1000 feet below the earth with teams but matrix is still only maybe a foot or two above the surface
i really want to like it but every few months i try it and it’s clearly just not ready :(
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/633164558/slack-flickr-stewar...
Stewart Butterfield is absolutely terrible at making games, but incredibly good at building successful companies.
When Glitch failed in 2012, founder Stewart Butterfield offered to return the remaining $6 million to investors. Ben Horowitz instead encouraged Butterfield to pivot and build out the internal communication tool the team had developed for themselves, which eventually became Slack.
I saw an interview (don't have the link at hand unfortunately) where Horowitz said he didn't much care for the $6M as he had already been set at that point moneywise, and essentially wanted to gamble on an off chance Slack succeeds.
Horowitz continued to support the company through its rapid growth and eventual direct public offering (DPO) in 2019.
I think all of the big tools are drowning in complexity by trying to be hugely scalable, integrate with a whole bunch of different tools and so on.
What most of us need is SimpleSlack or SimpleDiscord - something you can deploy on a cheap VPS as a single instance for your community/company of 10-200 members. No complex federation, no enterprise crap, just channels, media, voice and video calls with screen sharing and search, probably an API. Single Go binary for the RESTful API and SSE, PostgreSQL and Garage/SeaweedFS for object storage, maybe an additional binary for handling calls/video cause the hardware requirements of that use case kick everyone's butt and that thin will inevitably crash. Docker containers for resource limits and management.
Something a bit like phpBB back in the day, but more instant messaging, although one could imagine supporting the forum format too. Network effect be damned.
Mattermost is pretty close to that, though they place a bunch of restrictions on you in regards to calls, last I checked. Stoat looks pretty cool, though, hadn't seen much of it before! Maybe Zulip for the people that need something with fewer restrictions (though the mobile app push notification limitations are weird, still hate how mobile OSes handle that per-app).
What is wrong with this line of thinking? Anthropic is the power company that has a 3D printer to make a faster Maglev than anyone.
If Enterprise companies are restrictive to make your own data their only moat, that moat can be broken. Have you tried building any AI agent or using an AI product with Slack MCP? This is one of the hardest problems in SaaS data access and Slack tries to literally block any form of API or OAuth based access. Even Google workspace is not that restrictive and has opened up a cli for the workspace.
And yet they can't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281246
Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful. And Slack costs way too much. If there were any competitors, the price would drop significantly. It's not like chat is a hard problem. And Slack's app is an absolute bear.
Ah yes. It's shameful that Slack won't open data moat to AI. You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this
I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information.
There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born. Breathing in the air molecules that come from other people's bodies. Looking at ugly things. Hearing annoying sounds. It'll be okay.
It does. And a lot of this information is highly sensitive. Imagine my company's surprise if Slack would not be shameful and would just open up its data moat to AI.
> There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born.
Demagoguery and non sequiturs are not arguments.
But I guess that's what passes for "arguments" for AI maximalists.
Slack is monopolizing data access and not giving companies access to their own data.
Companies want to hook up their chat BI to LLMs so it can be instantly and richly queried. Slack search sucks, and an LLM could increase employee efficiency by an order of magnitude. It could also make a lot of requests self serve rather than having employees interrupting each other constantly.
Slack is prohibiting companies from surfacing their own data to AI. They're perhaps worried this will erode their leverage.
That's the entire point here.
Companies should have the option to leverage their chat data for AI rather than having no option at all.
Slack bad.
Could there ever exist anything that wouldn't be okay? What's the difference between something that will be okay and something that won't? I'm guessing the things that will be okay are the things that might pose an obstacle for AI "progress".
That’s not a valid argument. The company itself would still need to consent.
Lots of companies want this.
Companies should have the option. Right now they're completely locked out of taking advantage of AI with their business data locked away in Slack.
Slack is a graveyard.
I would be a customer of this. It's a pain in the ass that I can't just ask a question to an LLM about knowledge that I know is locked away in past conversations. I have to go bug that person and sync up with them. Latency, annoying context switches for everyone, ... these things have a simple solution. Let AI have the data.
Today there is no option because Slack is scared to death of losing their leverage.
Companies want full rights to their data, and Slack is lording over it like a dragon protecting treasure.
Company pays for the bills = company data
The issue here is that Slack's attempting to build a moat by restricting access by a company to that company's data.
Thereby allowing Salesforce to sell additional features on that same data that only it has access to at scale.
>> "costs way too much"
>> "It's not like chat is a hard problem"
Surely these statements can't all be true. Since Slack is expensive and has little competition, I think chat is a harder problem than you think.
To have a successful chat business, you need the network effect of lots of users (big marketing spend), you need lots of capital for operations (big spend on disks and compute) and after all that you get only a few dollars per user. Its just not a great business on the balance sheet. Notice that quality software doesn't even get a mention in this niche.
I think that's probably what makes it hard.
MS Teams is free.
I’ve built such system many times. They’re basically all the same, especially if you introduce real time updates. Channels and threads are just organization strategies.
A better option is to have Claude as an assistant or bot in every group chat and triggered when needed. That is just a different interface for Claude or Cowork chat with the group chat context.
Leaving aside the implementation details, the call for action here is valid since Slack is a black hole of your enterprise data and tribal knowledge and Slack is extremely restrictive. Try using Slack MCP in Claude Chat or any AI product
It's almost shocking that these AI companies aren't "magicking" up open source replacements for things like Slack, even as just a proof-of-concept. And if not the providers directly, this seems like an easy win for agencies/organizations that build crap to show off "how good they are at AI".
Lastly, where's the one-person start up that's putting Slack, JIRA, and Photoshop out of business? I believe in the value of these tools but there's clearly more progress required before we can type in "replace slack and generate me a million dollars, make no mistakes".
[0] https://dahp.wa.gov/live-better-electrically-the-gold-medall...
But I agree, having Anthropic building this is like having DJI building planes because they know how to create things that fly.
Slack itself originally ran on irc servers as the back end, and I consider it a modern IRC implementation.
So why can't Anthropic build a CLI client that doesn't flickr and doesn't consume 68 GB to run a CLI wrapper on top of their API? https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
The thing lags a few seconds while typing a message on a 20 core 128g ram machine. That's with their desktop (electron) app. Mercifully, the web app works better.
Still, CC blows it out of water. Slack is that bad.
Not to say it doesn’t, but it’s clearly not a universal issue.
We're a small company (about 150 Slack users), and I've run the Slack (Electron) app on a 16GB M2 (macOS) and a 4GB Chromebook (running a non-ChromeOS Linux), and it has never had any noteworthy performance issues.
It still sucks, but not because of performance.
It's a terminal wrapper for Anthropic API. It somehow baloons to 68 gigabytes when all it needs to do is call an APi and slowly draw a few hundred characters on screen. And they can't even do that without flickering. Oh yes, and until very recently it would also consume a significant percentage of CPU just waiting for input to a slash command.
Yes, on that same 20 core 128g RAM machine.
You surely must be kidding. Slack is an amazing cutting edge high performance tech in comparison as it has about two orders of magnitude more features that a TUI API wrapper.
E.g. they claim it's a difficult task to render a few hundred characters on screen, and that their CLI wrapper is a tiny game engine: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427
They literally had to buy bun to have someone who understands how things work to fix this
Not even joking
Even if AI with autonomous agentic development made something that worked at the average of code quality, I wonder if the code might be a little more sturdy, predictable, and the compromise is a little more verbose for the level that works for the AI to manage it.
Humans would then help oversee the input, insight, and extension and improvement above and below that.
AI could be a baseline.
While it's a great tool in the hands of capable and well intentioned people, there's not a world out there where the average quality of software goes up.
For years I struggled to answer "what company is Apple's equivalent in software?" and I think it might be Anthropic.