Slack Acquires Screenhero (YC W13) | Hacker News Reader

Slack Acquires Screenhero (YC W13)

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284 pointspallian74 comments

This saddens and frustrates me as a user. I love screenhero and it does its job well. I've used it for all of my remote interactions over the past year or so and was a happy paying customer (through our company).

Unfortunately, due to other concerns about paying for Slack[1], we probably will not be able to continue to use it. We'll be a once-happy customer that falls victim to this acquisition. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth :(

[1] It is expensive especially at our scale, we already pay for a couple chatroom-type/irc-like services, and the big one: long-lasting offsite chat logs present a difficult hurdle in client negotiations, a headache we just do not need

Slack has a feature where you can auto-expire chat channel logs. However, I have a feeling that may not good enough for your client's/industry compliance standards?

https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Settin...

Post Sony Pictures a lot of companies have become super wary of it.

I know a good number of high profile companies (including in the HN sense) that won't let you conduct dealings with them via any cloud service. Potential clients/partners really do ask what email service you're using quite early these days, the only universally acceptable answer is self hosted (either Exchange or something else), which strikes me as crazy considering how difficult to do properly that is, but there we are.

Do you know of a great resource for actually doing that self hosted email, based on your experience?

I wish I did. Personally I'm very much in the Google ecosystem, and this has been a repeat point of friction. Thus far the approach has been to go on site with a trusted intermediary that has the required infrastructure, but it's not sustainable.

Not much scares me technically like the idea of ineptly deploying a mailserver.

It isn't that bad. We self host. Dovecot + Postfix. Spam handling can be painful at times.

http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-ho...

These guys have a cool service to help ensure DKIM and all is working: http://www.port25.com/support/authentication-center/email-ve...

Mail is a good service to host yourself. With a couple of digital ocean boxes you are golden. Set up your backup MX to just hold mail and deliver it to your primary MX.

SMTP is forgiving and you can have many hours of outage of a primary mail server without losing mail.

You just have to be willing to do it.

If it's on DO, then does it legally count as self-hosting? I was under the impression that you needed to physically own your own hardware.

I've heard Mail-in-a-Box[0] is decent, although I've never tried it myself.

[0] https://mailinabox.email/

Zarafa is excellent (and works with MS Outlook if you need that).

Edit (to elaborate more): it's open source, has a very nice web ui, supports pop/imap/outlook, does activesync and mobile push, uses other standard opensource software (postfix, mysql), is easy to backup, comes with good documentation, is simple enough to get up and running (there are pre-built deb and rpm packages), integrates with LDAP and you can get a paid support contract if you need/want one. Their open source site is here: https://community.zarafa.com/

I'm not affiliated with them - just a happy sysadmin whose managed lots of Zarafa installs in the past.

Was there a specific slack/Sony Pictures connection, or do you just mean the general increase in awareness of third party risks?

I actually agree about self-hosted communications even when you use other cloud services; I've been thinking about something in this space a lot recently, and the alternative to BYOD. Not sure if this is just being whining about Sony or an actual market, though, so it might not be a worthwhile product.

In general. I had run into it prior to SPE, but it's far more common now, even with not particularly tech savvy companies. However, were I to name some of the tech companies that have this requirement there would be a lot of coffee getting into keyboards.

BYOD doesn't seem to be an issue as long as you can demonstrate their data isn't leaking to cloud services.

Why would the sony pictures hack make self hosted any better?! Their general network was hacked, and an exchange server would of been hacked too.

I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be able to continue to use Screenhero. This isn't just PR/marketing-speak, as someone who has spent many years of his life working on this product (that I love), it really does pain me to know that someone who also loved what we'd built will no longer be able to use it.

However, in the grand scheme of things, I (and our team) feels that this is the best step forward for everyone involved (including Screenhero users). Slack is on its way towards becoming the de facto communication tool used by teams (both big and small), and an integrated Screenhero + Slack product just makes the most sense for the most people.

I would love to learn more about why your team can't use Slack, and what we can do to mitigate the issues you've outlined and others that you may not have outlined yet. Please feel free to add me to Screenhero (j at slack-corp.com) and let's have a deeper conversation about this, if you're open to it.

We use slack (distributed team), and I was thinking of starting to use Screenhero.

When can we get Screenhero features in Slack? Any beta testers required? :)

There already is a Screenhero integration for Slack. If you pay for Slack, you can set it up in like 3 minutes, from slack.com/screenhero.

Tried this, didn't work... no Linux support.

Did Screenhero ever have Linux support?

No. Its still a major blocker

We actually use slack (and hipchat, and jive, and whatsapp, and groupme, and skype, and who-knows-what-else.. ugh) for communications that we would consider sanitized for public consumption (so, no discussion about client IP, for example). The only approved chatroom/im tool that we use is GChat, though. The reason for that is that our internal team is comfortable with Google Apps as a (relatively) secure platform for communication.

They also approved of screenhero (I can guess why, but it would be a guess).

They have not approved of slack, hipchat, etc. for client-related communications because they are nervous about having that much liability not under our control. It also makes it difficult for our contracts team that would then be required to explain that client data could now be in either Google Apps or Slack.

I would say that these decisions are going to be SOP for a consultancy of a certain size.

I don't necessary agree with all of these decisions, but I understand and try to empathize with the other parties that would be inconvenienced.

Edit:

I think what happened is that screenhero got a verbal and passionate following within our consultancy that the decision to use screenhero was 'encouraged' into being adopted. We started using it under-the-radar when it was free and when it became paid, the organization realized how many people were using it successfully. It was a ground up effort.

It makes me sad that a tool we found so useful across our organization (which you can see above is incredibly fragmented) is being made inaccessible. I know you're trying to do right by your users and we're just a weird edge case, so no bad feelings. Just wish it were not so :(

>>>"(and hipchat, and jive, and whatsapp, and groupme, and skype, and who-knows-what-else.. ugh)"

I agree with your sentiment at the end of this sentence. I've gone through this as an individual. Sometimes you just need to cut the slack and regroup using a standard toolset for the organization (or group, or sub-group, etc.). Otherwise, org-wide (or group-wide) communication simply becomes too difficult. Or "fragmented", to borrow your diction.

I haven't used Slack or Screenhero, but I hope Screenhero thought through some of these potential "second order" effects on their customers that the acquisition would have before signing on the solid line. Hopefully the founders didn't just have $$$ in their eyes.

That's one of the primary risks of using/adopting a new service/system/product, in my view. Will the people building the product, and actively selling people on the idea, actually defend the product once "acquisition is in the air"...

> I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be able to continue to use Screenhero.

You know what you need to do, to keep these teams happy? You need to continue have a minimal tool that does the thing that people need -- screen sharing -- and does it well, instead of bludgeoning them with a massive general-purpose communications suite that they don't want, which is essentially what you were just cheering about in your recent email.

I'm sure you'll make more money this way, but you needn't expect the people you're abandoning to be happy.

Around 90% of the response we've gotten has been positive — our users love the fact that we're merging with a product that they already use and love. The combined user experience is going to be far better than the experience we have today.

Maintaining a minimal tool for screen sharing is a nice idea in theory, but I know from experience that we do best when we're able to focus on one thing. And we really want to do a great job of making the integrated communication + collaboration experience as awesome as we can. Based on many conversations with our customers, I know that communication of the sort Slack provides was something that most of our users either needed or already used within Slack. Agreed, that it's most and not all of our users, but we can't really make everyone happy all of the time. I do believe we are making the most people the most happy through this, though.

> You know what you need to do, to keep these teams happy? You need to continue have a minimal tool that does the thing that people need -- screen sharing -- and does it well, instead of bludgeoning them a massive general-purpose communications suite that they don't want, which is essentially what you were just cheering about in your recent email.

This is absolutely, 100% the way I feel. I look back to AOL Instant Messenger as a classic example of a product that forgot to do one thing well... and that's why I bet you hadn't thought of AIM for quite some time before reading this.

That said, best of luck to Screenhero going forward. Video chat w/ screen sharing is a crowded space and I'm sure they needed to hedge their bets.

Strongly disagree.

As a software developer, I've put off adding more features into my products for several years now. All because I feared introducing features will make my users think it's "bloated", "violating the Unix philosophy", etc.

But over the years, I've found that most users actually want more features. Most of them want more business value. And that there is value in having features integrated/builtin instead of external.

When I tell people "no, we don't do that, but you can use that other tool in combination with mine" most of them are like "what? I have to use TWO tools"? The "simple tool that does one thing" philosophy mostly appeals to a small number of hardcore nerds, but the rest of the world wants more features, more integration. They don't want theoretic purity.

The fact that I didn't add features and only focused on bug fixes actually hurted the reputation of my software in the grand scheme of things. So yeah, I'll be adding more features from now on.

Look to Adium for a counter-example

Counter example? I wish Adium would add more features. It's been stagnant for years and the only reason why I'm still using it is because there's nothing better.

For example, MSN file transfers have always been broken. They never managed to fix that before MSN's shutdown.

Google Talk file transfers are similarly broken.

No support for Skype.

No support for webcams.

All these issues have been open for years. They only introduce basic bug fixes but not much else.

> Slack is on its way towards becoming the de facto communication tool used by teams...

Silicon Valley hubris. Slack rose quickly and it can fall just as quickly. Being anointed by Silicon Valley doesn't make real success a foregone conclusion.

This one's on the money!

I still don't get how Slack is different than HipChat. In fact, I think Slack just copied the latter.

Seriously, am I missing something?

I use hipchat at my place of work. It has so many issues. People appearing offline at least every other day when they aren't. Auto reconnect may have never worked even once for me that I can recall. Even worse, when trying to auto-reconnect and it's not reconnecting, the only thing you can do is close the app and open it again.

From what I understand, Slack came out of the gate with integration with a bunch of other apps, whereas Hipchat had to play catch up on that front.

Hipchat has had integration for everything we have ever needed. Slack is far prettier and more polished though. And lately Hipchat has been unreliable, so we are thinking of moving on that basis.

Or Kato

Have you used both?

Hipchat was basically unusable for me. Constant crashes, sloppy integrations, poor search, and a notification system that did more harm than good.

Slack is completely different. Pre built integrations mean I don't have to spend time writing a bot. Starred search means I can find that message from a few months ago with the click of a button. Auto responses mean I can inject some humor into conversations during the work day. Image comments mean I can use slack to gain feedback on wireframes. I could go on but theses are just some of the things that make slack far better than Hipchat.

HipChat can't handle multiple accounts, making it almost completely unusable if you belong to more than one team.

The issue I have with Slack is that the one thing I want to pay for is more integrations, but in order to do that I need to shell out $7/mo/user, and doing ten integrations instead of five isn't worth $350/mo. As a result, we just straight up aren't using most of what Slack is great at, and we probably never will.

If they offered a paid tier for just extending the number of integrations available, I think it would quickly become far more useful to my team, but none of the rest of the paid features are of any use to any of the teams I'm on at all. I get that I'm probably not the target market, but I would wager that whatever those two extra integrations would cost them to provide us, our team would be able to pay and then some.

This would be the sweetest pricing structure for a billion uses like a friend-group Slack, a slack for your open source project, a slack for gaming clans, a slack for your minecraft server, a slack for small non-profits or small businesses, a slack for families.

Right now, the free tier only gets you basically an isolated version of every other free messaging service around. If you could pay $8/month for each additional integration, small slacks would go from being an {inconvenience OR huge bill} to something everyone with technical ability could use to integrate a million different signals with the people they care about.

I really, really hope slack lets us pay per integration someday.

What's the benefit of using solutions like Slack when there's free (unlimited users/groups/etc.) solutions like Kato.im?

It's a Slacquisition ha ha.

Been using Slack a lot the past few months and really love it. Pairing it with Trello has given us a powerhouse of open communication and task management. I'm interested to see how it scales for our team as we grow, although the way Slack sets up channels I think it won't be a problem.

It will be interesting to see the screen sharing stuff too. Maybe it could replace Skype, which I cringe whenever I have to open (slow desktop app + tons of ads + incessantly begs me to update almost every time I open it).

We're big users of both Slack + Screenhero at Thinkful for our students communicating with each other in real time (Slack) and pair programming with mentors (Screenhero). We were even spec'ing a feature to make Screenhero the only tool for mentor sessions. Congrats to the Screenhero team – you built a great product and deserve this, but it's sad we'll have to switch to another product. We can't wait months to have something available, and it's not clear the new features will do what we need :/

Yeah, congrats to both teams. I agree wholeheartedly with Dan's comment; I love each of your products separately and look forward to playing with the integration down the road, but I'm disappointed to lose the existing Screenhero now.

according to @tptacek, you might be fine:

> There already is a Screenhero integration for Slack. If you pay for Slack, you can set it up in like 3 minutes, from slack.com/screenhero.

My business partner and I have been using Slack as our primary messaging tool and been somewhat stuck with Skype as a secondary tool for voice and screen sharing. I am definitely interested in seeing where this goes, and it's definitely a feature we'd pay for.

I'm totally agree with you. Same here.

You could have paid for Screenhero before. Maybe if more people did, they wouldn't have sold to Slack.

We used Screenhero when it was free. It is better than Skype. But, it's not really worth the price when Skype is free.

To be more clear, I'm actually hoping that it becomes a tightly integrated feature within Slack vs. using it as a separate service.

Me too. Seems like it is and that will be awesome =)

I used Screenhero a lot when I worked remotely. It's a great tool. Shared screens from the East coastto West coast (US) with hardly ever experiencing problems. Great service.

(Screenhero co-founder here) I'm very glad to hear this! Your screen sharing (and voice and video communication) experience is going to get even better in the coming months. Stay tuned :)

I have to agree with the frustration of the apparent minority. We've been using HipChat corporate-wide, and the subset of users that have been using Screenhero aren't going to be able to change to Slack now (even if we wanted to).

And it seems that the wondering our remote development team has been doing about what happened to progress on Screenhero's video codec (pumping 800kb/s+ over my line when nothing is happening on screen is a bit excessive) is now answered with a resounding, "We've been trying to get acquired." Well, congrats on that.

Back to VNC and Skype with no cursor of my own, I guess. But at least it's free and has less chance of my ISP throttling my home connection due to saturating the pipes with Screenhero all day.

> Cross platform: Screenhero supports both Windows and Mac.

It's like there isn't any other operating system...

We do both, country AND western!

As a user of both Slack and Screenhero this makes me happy.

I've always felt they would make a cute couple. That said, integration seemed kind of sparse (limited to /username in Slack). We also struggled to have it work reliably in daily use.

Thus we mostly reverted back to the Skype/Slack combo. However this has proved to be suboptimal, partly because links and chatlogs shared in Skype are not archived in Slack for easy retrieval.

Hopefully this marriage will bring about a bunch of deeper and more polished integrations for users.

(Co-founder of Screenhero here) Thanks! We do think we look good together ;)

A great integration is exactly what we want to make happen. Stay tuned for awesomeness in the coming months! We are super excited to make something that you will love.

Been a long time user of Slack and absolutely love it... I've seriously got a bromance with this company. It's adored throughout the company I work at, and one of our pains is that we do all our communication through Slack, even if we're next to each other, we still have headphones on and we talk in Slack. But we still have to go to Skype to do stand up meetings with our remote users... Would be so much better if we could do video over Slack.

Give us a few months...

I'm patiently waiting. Keep up the awesome work.

Screenhero has been amazing for pairing remotely; something I do often. A co-worker was amazed when his custom keyboard layout worked seamlessly with my terminal session. Once people experience it I find it's not hard to convert them. It will be interesting to see how the Slack integration will improve the experience.

One thing I've always wanted though was integration between Screenhero and Sqwiggle. Any chance we'll see something like that, Slack?

Our entire company uses Slack for most communication since everyone works 100% remotely. It has been fantastic. Finding a good tool for screen sharing has been difficult, though. I pair almost every day, so I need a tool that is stable and has a good quality-to-speed ratio.

For people with good connections, Screenhero works well; only downsides are that we get a lot of crashes in the beta app and sometimes the mouse sharing changes window focus or mouse position for the other user, but in general it is the best tool we've found. For those without good connections, we have to use GoTo since it sacrifices refresh rates for quality.

Overall, I'm excited to see how this works out. Right now it's a small subset of people in our company that use Screenhero, but I expect to see that number jump with this announcement.

As a slack user, I think this is awesome. This is one thing that we do miss currently, a video calling facility.

I mean we can log into skype or google hangouts something else, but having it in slack would be totally cool!

I've never used Screenhero before, but going by the comments here, I wish I had!

What does this mean for Sqwiggle? Are you guys the next Slack acquisition?

I used screenhero for some remote work. It's great for pair programming and helping debug a problem remotely. Since our team used Slack, I really wished Slack would add similar functionality to their product. Glad to see that it's going to happen now, and will be built by the people who built the awesome screehero product. Congrats guys! hope to see more awesome work from you!

Thanks! We are looking forward to doing more awesome for you :)

Blog post from Screenhero: http://blog.screenhero.com/post/109337923751/screenhero-join...

Thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961845

We tested Slack some months ago, but rejected it due to lack of solution for VoIP and video conference.

I am not seeing this acquisition is changing this. In order to have a meeting with multiple participants, we will still need Skype/Hangouts/Lync/WebEx.

What are you using instead?

Our team has been using the Google Hangouts integration for months and it's worked flawlessly.

Hangouts has a maximum number of participants. For large phone conferences it's not usable.

So if I am an unpaid slack user how do I screenshare with a user that is not a slack user?

If I am an unpaid member of several unpaid slack teams how do I continue to use screenhero?

Can I opt in to a paid single user and use screenhero across my multiple slack teams?

is there anything else out there that I can pay for now that's like screenhero? This actually looks like something I need, but now I can't sign up.

As a screenhero and Slack user I'm excited to be able to experience one experience across both products. They're both best in class in my opinion.

Screenhero reps, do you have a gameplan for being able to "invite" users for one time sessions? This is what I often need Screenhero for.

This would be amazing. I use Screenhero all the time for work, but every so often I need to help my mother with something on her computer and there is no free solution available that is better than Screenhero.

I'm just not going to pay for another subscription just to help my mother out with tech support once a quarter...

i am sure they will think about this. Plus slack is working on public channels which would be a workaround for one time users.

I am extremely excited about this.

Pair Programming++

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