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Comment by mikeg8 | Hacker News Reader

> There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole thing will come tumbling back down to earth.

What supports this claim? Yes tech and the tech world changes quickly but some of the core functions of running a business, such as effective team communication, will not go away any time soon.

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Slack is ridiculously expensive - $7/user/month for chat? It's ripe for competitors to undercut them.

It's a pity that Atlassian is still napping with Hipchat usability features (particularly multiple accounts).

Multiple accounts is supposedly in development/beta - https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sug... but yeah, they waited way too long to implement that.

For pretty much any business, that's pennies.

Approximately 700 pennies.

> such as effective team communication, will not go away any time soon.

Communication itself won't go away, but that doesn't imply that a platform/application which facilitates communication won't fade away. Just ask IRC, ICQ and AIM (All of which are still in active use today)

And yet Slack was able to seize large portions of the market. Did communication just recently become a need?

I agree with artursapek. Part of their success comes from better execution, many in the enterprise space are starting to argue that superior design for end-users is more important than ever (https://twitter.com/levie/status/586265289748307969), and also the market is dramatically expanding as we speak as more teams are working remotely than ever before, caused by a variety of technological breakthroughs. Part of Slack is execution, another part is timing.

Okay, which means exactly the opposite of what artursapek is saying: a better execution can displace the market leader.

It doesn't matter if the demand doesn't go away. A higher quality supply will displace Slack, just as Slack displaced the many before it.

There have been many before them, see Flowdock, Campfire, IRC, going back as long as we've had the Internet. What sets Slack apart is they've executed it better than anyone. They took the industry by storm overnight, it seems.

Thats not really en explanation.

There are several reasons why they are doing well and they have much less to do with execution than with the right people getting involved.

"right people getting involved" IS execution

That's an important clarification. Most people think execution is the inherent quality of the product. Obviously execution is having the correct people involved to open doors.

With the right people getting involved I am talking about the investors. That has nothing to do with execution but to do with access to distribution and press.

Have you actually used Slack? Where I currently work, we have gone through two other chat products in the past two years: Campfire followed by Flowdock. They all fizzled out and died - people just stopped using them for some reason.

Then we tried Slack, and it's the first time the entire team has adopted 100% and maintained it. Slack mobile has even replaced text messaging/GroupMe for a lot of us as well.

Don't hand-wave away their success by giving credit to investors. It makes you sound bitter and insecure, or at least uninformed. They've done a great job building their product and deserve the position they're in. Whether or not $2.8B is an accurate valuation is beyond me, but it does seem like they're minting money over there.

Campfire and Flowdock are both pretty awful compared to Hipchat (the previous market leader) and Slack. I think Hipchat is feature-wise mostly on par with Slack, but has a much more approachable interface. Hipchat is also learning from slack on how to make integrations easier to install and configure. Slack surged into the space by marketing to companies that were using nothing - not by winning people away from competitors. I'm not sure that Hipchat can take the space back from slack without a major new killer feature, but Slack's marketshare is hardly guaranteed.

I have not only used slack i am running a 600 people channel, use it for work plus several side projects. I am a huge proponent of Slack and I have used them since very early on. I am not disputing the quality of the App.

But it's not just an execution game as many would like to claim.

So you're making my argument for me: you don't believe in Slack's longevity because they're satisfying a permanent need. You believe in it because it executed well.

Nothing prevents anyone else from executing better. The permanence of the need doesn't point, in any way, to the permanence of this particular supply.

I suspect the MSN generation is only just reaching a level where they can make purchasing decisions. Good technical companies have been using slack-like systems for years, but traditional companies are... conservative.

Using multiple devices became mainstream; nowadays everyone needs to be able to use your system from their phone and their computer at the same time. This shouldn't be hard to handle but through accidents of history it's terrible on the big open-source options (Jabber or IRC). And companies need internally-hosted. If AOL had been willing to make a self-hosted AIM, or MS a self-hosted Skype, they would've killed it.

I'm not sure why they didn't. And I'm not sure why Atlassian didn't seize the whole market with HipChat, which is almost identical to Slack (it's very marginally less polished). At my current company we use Slack's free tier because we fit within the usage limits for that but not those for HipChat, so maybe it's that?

Do that many people really have work phones that are mobile devices? I've had a desk phone at several jobs, which I pretty much never use, but I was only issued a mobile device as work phone once. I never really used it either. Yet people talk about this as though it is a common thing. Is there some specific industry or type of job that routinely gives people mobile devices for work use?

It's more that tech people are willing to use company chat outside of work. At a minimum slack is very handy for "I'll be late in today" from the train, and I don't mind using my personal phone for that.

I agree. What exactly would be changing? The parent's argument rests entirely on a vague claim that seems very undeveloped.

such as effective team communication, will not go away any time soon.

But tools come and go my friend

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