8 ms·

Genuine question -- how how is it been a revelation? It seems to be very similar to HipChat, which was just an iteration on previous chat systems.

burkestar 11y ago
I think comparing feature for feature isn't the right way to understand why Slack is a disruptive innovation. Often it's an innovation along some other dimension - process, business model, etc. In this case it's Slack's business model and "platform" strategy. Other tools like HipChat were just that, a tool. Slack is a platform in the sense that it enables businesses and developers to leverage and extend the platform, thereby adding additional value to the platform. This leads to so-called "Network Effects" where as more apps are built on the platform, the more valuable the platform and the more likely others will want to build on that platform, etc. in a virtuous cycle.
- mariusmg 11y ago
  You definetly work in PR. You have the quality of taking something trivial and describing it as if it is a big deal.
johnmaguire2013 11y ago
The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot. The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
- fludlight 11y ago
  > a giant log for everything in your company The lawyers and Congressional subcommittees are going to love this.
  - mh- 11y ago
    big companies [in the US] already largely deal with retention/e-discovery requirements. there are many, many offerings, like Google Apps Vault, to facilitate this. https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en
- halostatue 11y ago
  I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangouts was used by everyone else).
  - Ayaz 11y ago
    Would you mind giving some examples of what are more useful integrations for you that Slack does not support? I am curious because we--at work--have been using HipChat for around two years and have integrated HipChat into our processes, yet now that we are exploring and using Slack (for another project), we find the integrations and APIs so much better to work with.
    - halostatue 11y ago
      The issue that I’ve had with Slack is more related to text like this from the New Relic integration: This integration will allow you to receive updates in a Slack channel when an alert is triggered in New Relic. If you would like web, transaction, server, and mobile alerts to be posted in separate channels, you will need to set up separate integrations. You can quickly hit the limit of ten integrations on the free service by having to set up a separate integration for each channel you want things to appear in. So…between GitHub, Bitbucket, Semaphore, a custom API integration, and a couple of others we ended up hitting the limit of 5 integrations (which is what the limit was as of May or June when we made the switch to HipChat; it’s double that now, but we’re starting to use even more tools, so it’s the same problem).
  - amatix 11y ago
    > the stupidly high price of Slack. really? $7 per active user per month? How little do you pay your staff? At the median wage, save an average of 90 seconds a day per person through better communication and it pays for itself. And it's pretty likely any team members using slack are at a 2-10x salary multiplier on that, a $100K engineer only needs to save 24 seconds a day...
- rfrank 11y ago
  "Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company..." Why would you ever want to entrust a log of everything in your company to a third party service? Honestly curious.
  - netcan 11y ago
    First, because the (perceived) risk is relatively small, both of damage and the chances of damage. Second (this is the point I think hn-like forums grossly underestimate) is because the alternatives are not really alternatives. In practice the likelihood of using Irc or some open source chat within a company with the same wide buy in as slack (or Skype etc) is 0. The way to judge this is adoption.
    - mugsie 11y ago
      HipChat is a real on premise alternative. It may not be quite as "slick" looking, but it works very well.
  - tedivm 11y ago
    You are right, a lot of companies would walk away from that pretty quickly as long as it's a third party thing. Github launching it's self hosted enterprise is what really enabled it to reach the larger companies, as they tend not to trust their valuable data to exist outside of their control. Slack has said before that they're going to release a self hosted version at some point, so they have to know this is true. I think it makes sense for them to focus on the larger market (personal use and the SMB sector) for now though, even though the enterprise market will really make them money, because it's a much lower pressure space where they can afford to experiment.
  - btown 11y ago
    Because the expected loss from a malicious actor with access to those logs cloning your product (without any access to the actual people who thought up your product!) is often more than balanced by the expected benefit from getting everyone on a knowledge base with a brilliant UX. Sure, you wouldn't have wanted to host the Apollo Program's lab notes on Soviet servers, but your cat selfie startup isn't quite as high-stakes as that. Unless your cats are taking selfies on Mars. In which case, yeah, maybe developing an in-house chat service is worth the investment.
tomasien 11y ago
Hipchat is awful and Slack is phenomenal. I mean I know that probably isn't what you want to hear but it's so hard to describe it any other way. UX/integrations/apps/speed/etc might all be the answer but it was visceral for me.
- Hupriene 11y ago
  At least on Windows slack has pretty terrible performance. I wish i could go back to hipchat. I regularly experience perceptible lag when typing, which doesn't happen anywhere else. EDIT: This is a fairly recent problem. A month or two ago, I had never experienced this.
  - Shog9 11y ago
    Not recent. May have gotten worse, but last I tried it was heavier than hangouts; yeah, text chat chewing up more cpu than streaming video. Pretty rough. Folks on Macs had no idea what I was complaining about though. Go fig.
- ssmoot 11y ago
  Once you add history to Slack, it's performance is just awful. One of the worst performing apps I use. It can take over a second to switch rooms. If I have to cycle through 4 rooms to get to the conversation I want, it can take seconds just to Option+UpArrow there. Plus I can't manually reorder rooms as I like. I don't get why everyone talks about the Slack UX. Slack has snippets. Which I find mostly useless. Especially since they kill performance. But HipChat lets you reorder rooms as you see fit. Which is something I actually used and miss desperately. At least Slack has finally gotten rid of the useless Channel vs Group distinction?
33degrees 11y ago
As someone who has used both, I really prefer Slack; it feels like a more polished product
Fishkins 11y ago
For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always works how I want. I don't know if I'd call it a "revelation", but it's way better than any comparable product I've used. [0] - I think HipChat recently added support for more granular notification settings, but I don't use it anymore. Also, it took over 3 years of this being their 1st or 2nd most requested feature before they addressed it, so I don't give them any credit for having it now. [1] - They might get an email depending on their settings, but the HipChat app would never give a notification.
- vacri 11y ago
  For me, one of the reasons why I don't like Slack is that in moving to Slack from Hipchat, I lost configurability in notifications. Slack chat window notifications are terrible. They consume immense amounts of space, and yet aren't clearly colour-coded for relevance. Hipchat notifications were tight and concise, and could be clearly colour-coded. A pattern I have seen in Slack that never happened in Hipchat is "Let's put notifications into the channel" > "ugh, this channel is impossible to talk in because of the notifications! let's create a new channel with no notifications". Kind've kills the point of notifications. Aside: does 'notifications' need to become 'n10ns'?
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen. Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?
  - endymi0n 11y ago
    Maybe you can't customize notifications extensively in Slack itself (I found them okay, yet slightly lacking), but if you're on a Mac, you can definitely comfigure Desktop notifications per App, which I also did.
ladzoppelin 11y ago
Honestly, also not being in SV, I think it could be the biggest thing for companies since email. Nobody in our 400 person shop wants to use anything but Slack. Its completely changed the company culture, brought together different teams, opened up a real time log of what ops is doing (employee worth), consolidated communications, searchable file server. The list goes on and on. Nobody wants to use email and most people despise JIRA (in our small company). Everybody from every department is trying really hard to integrate everything they do into Slack and Slack keeps making it easier.

burkestar 11y ago

I think comparing feature for feature isn't the right way to understand why Slack is a disruptive innovation. Often it's an innovation along some other dimension - process, business model, etc. In this case it's Slack's business model and "platform" strategy. Other tools like HipChat were just that, a tool. Slack is a platform in the sense that it enables businesses and developers to leverage and extend the platform, thereby adding additional value to the platform. This leads to so-called "Network Effects" where as more apps are built on the platform, the more valuable the platform and the more likely others will want to build on that platform, etc. in a virtuous cycle.

mariusmg 11y ago
You definetly work in PR. You have the quality of taking something trivial and describing it as if it is a big deal.

johnmaguire2013 11y ago

The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot. The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.

fludlight 11y ago
> a giant log for everything in your company The lawyers and Congressional subcommittees are going to love this.
- mh- 11y ago
  big companies [in the US] already largely deal with retention/e-discovery requirements. there are many, many offerings, like Google Apps Vault, to facilitate this. https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en
halostatue 11y ago
I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangouts was used by everyone else).
- Ayaz 11y ago
  Would you mind giving some examples of what are more useful integrations for you that Slack does not support? I am curious because we--at work--have been using HipChat for around two years and have integrated HipChat into our processes, yet now that we are exploring and using Slack (for another project), we find the integrations and APIs so much better to work with.
  - halostatue 11y ago
    The issue that I’ve had with Slack is more related to text like this from the New Relic integration: This integration will allow you to receive updates in a Slack channel when an alert is triggered in New Relic. If you would like web, transaction, server, and mobile alerts to be posted in separate channels, you will need to set up separate integrations. You can quickly hit the limit of ten integrations on the free service by having to set up a separate integration for each channel you want things to appear in. So…between GitHub, Bitbucket, Semaphore, a custom API integration, and a couple of others we ended up hitting the limit of 5 integrations (which is what the limit was as of May or June when we made the switch to HipChat; it’s double that now, but we’re starting to use even more tools, so it’s the same problem).
- amatix 11y ago
  > the stupidly high price of Slack. really? $7 per active user per month? How little do you pay your staff? At the median wage, save an average of 90 seconds a day per person through better communication and it pays for itself. And it's pretty likely any team members using slack are at a 2-10x salary multiplier on that, a $100K engineer only needs to save 24 seconds a day...
rfrank 11y ago
"Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company..." Why would you ever want to entrust a log of everything in your company to a third party service? Honestly curious.
- netcan 11y ago
  First, because the (perceived) risk is relatively small, both of damage and the chances of damage. Second (this is the point I think hn-like forums grossly underestimate) is because the alternatives are not really alternatives. In practice the likelihood of using Irc or some open source chat within a company with the same wide buy in as slack (or Skype etc) is 0. The way to judge this is adoption.
  - mugsie 11y ago
    HipChat is a real on premise alternative. It may not be quite as "slick" looking, but it works very well.
- tedivm 11y ago
  You are right, a lot of companies would walk away from that pretty quickly as long as it's a third party thing. Github launching it's self hosted enterprise is what really enabled it to reach the larger companies, as they tend not to trust their valuable data to exist outside of their control. Slack has said before that they're going to release a self hosted version at some point, so they have to know this is true. I think it makes sense for them to focus on the larger market (personal use and the SMB sector) for now though, even though the enterprise market will really make them money, because it's a much lower pressure space where they can afford to experiment.
- btown 11y ago
  Because the expected loss from a malicious actor with access to those logs cloning your product (without any access to the actual people who thought up your product!) is often more than balanced by the expected benefit from getting everyone on a knowledge base with a brilliant UX. Sure, you wouldn't have wanted to host the Apollo Program's lab notes on Soviet servers, but your cat selfie startup isn't quite as high-stakes as that. Unless your cats are taking selfies on Mars. In which case, yeah, maybe developing an in-house chat service is worth the investment.

tomasien 11y ago

Hipchat is awful and Slack is phenomenal. I mean I know that probably isn't what you want to hear but it's so hard to describe it any other way. UX/integrations/apps/speed/etc might all be the answer but it was visceral for me.

Hupriene 11y ago
At least on Windows slack has pretty terrible performance. I wish i could go back to hipchat. I regularly experience perceptible lag when typing, which doesn't happen anywhere else. EDIT: This is a fairly recent problem. A month or two ago, I had never experienced this.
- Shog9 11y ago
  Not recent. May have gotten worse, but last I tried it was heavier than hangouts; yeah, text chat chewing up more cpu than streaming video. Pretty rough. Folks on Macs had no idea what I was complaining about though. Go fig.
ssmoot 11y ago
Once you add history to Slack, it's performance is just awful. One of the worst performing apps I use. It can take over a second to switch rooms. If I have to cycle through 4 rooms to get to the conversation I want, it can take seconds just to Option+UpArrow there. Plus I can't manually reorder rooms as I like. I don't get why everyone talks about the Slack UX. Slack has snippets. Which I find mostly useless. Especially since they kill performance. But HipChat lets you reorder rooms as you see fit. Which is something I actually used and miss desperately. At least Slack has finally gotten rid of the useless Channel vs Group distinction?

33degrees 11y ago

As someone who has used both, I really prefer Slack; it feels like a more polished product

Fishkins 11y ago

For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always works how I want. I don't know if I'd call it a "revelation", but it's way better than any comparable product I've used. [0] - I think HipChat recently added support for more granular notification settings, but I don't use it anymore. Also, it took over 3 years of this being their 1st or 2nd most requested feature before they addressed it, so I don't give them any credit for having it now. [1] - They might get an email depending on their settings, but the HipChat app would never give a notification.

vacri 11y ago
For me, one of the reasons why I don't like Slack is that in moving to Slack from Hipchat, I lost configurability in notifications. Slack chat window notifications are terrible. They consume immense amounts of space, and yet aren't clearly colour-coded for relevance. Hipchat notifications were tight and concise, and could be clearly colour-coded. A pattern I have seen in Slack that never happened in Hipchat is "Let's put notifications into the channel" > "ugh, this channel is impossible to talk in because of the notifications! let's create a new channel with no notifications". Kind've kills the point of notifications. Aside: does 'notifications' need to become 'n10ns'?
stephengillie 11y ago
Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen. Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?
- endymi0n 11y ago
  Maybe you can't customize notifications extensively in Slack itself (I found them okay, yet slightly lacking), but if you're on a Mac, you can definitely comfigure Desktop notifications per App, which I also did.

ladzoppelin 11y ago

Honestly, also not being in SV, I think it could be the biggest thing for companies since email. Nobody in our 400 person shop wants to use anything but Slack. Its completely changed the company culture, brought together different teams, opened up a real time log of what ops is doing (employee worth), consolidated communications, searchable file server. The list goes on and on. Nobody wants to use email and most people despise JIRA (in our small company). Everybody from every department is trying really hard to integrate everything they do into Slack and Slack keeps making it easier.