17 ms·

Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

295 points by philk10 10y ago

metilda 10y ago
I dunno, I just want to stop hearing about it here on HN, this single letter has been posted a dozen times in the past day: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dear%20microsoft&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dear%20microsoft&sort=byPopula...
- cdubzzz 10y ago
  Hey, if it takes a little away from the barrage of boring, half-reasoned opinions about the MacBook announcement, I'll take it. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
Mc_Big_G 10y ago
It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995. Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need luck to get users. How were the people at Slack not thinking "Holy shit, people are paying for this!" the entire time like it was a dream. I'm sure Slack will continue with much success now that they have their user base, so good for them, but to delude themselves into thinking no one can do it as good as they do is a bit naive.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  > I'm sure Slack will continue with much success now that they have their user base If they don't add something that is innovative I'm not so sure. I see companies and people who raved about it 10 months dropping it just as fast all around me.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    We have serious security concerns about Slack but insufficient time and motivation to explore alternatives. We've delayed the inevitable by coming up with a file sharing and secrets policy for what can and cannot go over Slack.
  - fairpx 10y ago
    I agree. In my previous startup, we've been jumping from one platform to an other without too much trouble. Because the people using these products are 'teams', it takes only 1 in the group to suggest everyone in the team to try out a new shiny platform and before you know it... you're deep in conversations in this new platform and see no reason to get back to the old one.
- buckbova 10y ago
  Agreed, they may have done it better than most or marketed their product better but nothing compelling here. > Slack could have done what most companies do when a competitor rips them off, and said nothing. Someone competing in your space is NOT ripping you off.
  - throwaway1892 10y ago
    But does copying the UI is ripping someone off?
    - blahi 10y ago
      The UI is pretty different than slack. And how exactly do you think a chat app to have a radically different UI. Did slack rip off mIRC?
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  We have IRC at work. Some people suggested switching to an open-source slack clone - with IRC integration! But... why? IRC works fine. It'd just be one more thing to maintain. (My firm is largely made up of old school unix hackers. I can see the appeal of something with a better UI and better integration than IRC for some, but when half the company are the type to run CLI IRC clients, it seems unnecessary.)
  - jjawssd 10y ago
    Look into Mattermost
    - greenshackle2 10y ago
      Yeah that's the one they wanted.
- mackmgg 10y ago
  >I'm sure Slack will continue with much success now that they have their user base, so good for them, but to delude themselves into thinking no one can do it as good as they do is a bit naive. The problem is, Slack has a user base consisting mainly of people willing to switch to the "next big thing" pretty quickly. That's how they got to Slack, but there's nothing preventing those people from leaving to move onto something new. Most slower to react companies are still using Lync, and probably won't ever switch to Slack. The reason I use Slack is because it is better than any of the alternatives, but I wouldn't hesitate to switch to something better if it comes around.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    It's also crazy easy to dump your Slack history out of Slack, as well as use their Discovery API, to have a competing service interrogate your team configuration and replicate it in a new service. Maybe not one click import, but it wouldn't be painful to move. Perhaps an open source utility will be written that can package all of the content and metadata required for your chat service up as a JSON bundle for import elsewhere. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-your-team-s-Slack-history https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo... https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248-Guide-to-Slack-data-exports https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248-Guide-to-...
    - mi100hael 10y ago
      IIRC that's an option when spinning up a Mattermost server.
  - rch 10y ago
    Slack just needs to deliver an on-prem version in the next 6 months. I'm happy they have a reason to bother now.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > The problem is, Slack has a user base consisting mainly of people willing to switch to the "next big thing" pretty quickly. I'm not so sure. I got us using Slack at work, and that was after about 12 months of hearing ads for it. It is IRC plus a slick UI and integrated bots, but putting all that together with a web UI and a dedicated client and phone apps makes it multiple times better than regular IRC for the common person. I don't use twitter. I only started actually using my Facebook account I've had for many years last week, after finally deciding it's curring me off from people to not use it. I've never used Instagram or Snapchat or any of those other newer things. I'm not what you would call "people willing to switch to the next big thing". Quite the opposite in fact. At this point, the new users of slack are hearing about it from other people that are themselves 3-4 people removed from those early adopters. That said, Slack isn't a perfect snowflake. It's a simple idea executed well. The reason I was so for it once I finally bothered to check it out is because my prior experience with IRC let me immediately see the value they had created by combining IRC and all the extras for IRC together in a nice package, and made it accessible to less technical people. > The reason I use Slack is because it is better than any of the alternatives, but I wouldn't hesitate to switch to something better if it comes around. Same here on why I use it, but I would hesitate switching (given most my usage is work related). If Google had a good competitor, we would probably switch, since it was our solution to crappy support for what we need in Hangouts, as all our other stuff is in Google Apps. I imagine a lot of people/companies might feel the same way with MS if their stack is dominated by MS products. For those that already have a fairly heterogeneous environment, there's probably less reason to switch to the major names, but I imagine those groups are already fairly on board with trying new tools to find what works best, so have little allegiance. Edit: s/seeing ads/hearing ads/. I think a really good case could be made that Slack was genius to market on podcasts as much as they did, and on the ones they did, and that might have been instrumental to their growth.
- harryjo 10y ago
  Time to update the old canard. "If you could have invented Slack... you would have invented Slack." Execution is everything.
  - murukesh_s 10y ago
    Execution is everything? Then Microsoft is also copying their execution. What's wrong with that? Why going overboard and trying to troll Microsoft?
    - dasil003 10y ago
      You can't copy execution. In the trenches every day decisions are made. The quality of the product that comes out deeply reflects the team that made it. You can clone an implementation relatively easily, and Microsoft has a ton of smart teams and has really upped its game recently, but Microsoft's next feature will not be the same as Slack's next feature, the cultures are just too different.
      - murukesh_s 10y ago
        Can't copy in one day for sure, but boy you sure can. Ask zynga how they did it. Or just look at Samsung phones with latest Android. Sure there are few products like Adobe suite & stackoverflow etc which have stood the test of time, but slack is a relatively newcomer who is yet to crack into the big enterprises.
  - mcphage 10y ago
    > Execution is everything. Execution is a lot, but so is timing. Execution can be controlled, timing is mostly luck.
    - 6stringmerc 10y ago
      From a creative sector perspective, this claim holds a lot of merit as well. A correlative phrase I've heard is "Success is preparation meeting luck" because the sands of time are littered with well executed failures. In many fields!
- jonheller 10y ago
  They did far more than "added a pretty UI". I used IRC for years, and getting it to do the things I use Slack for (mobile interface, file transfers, a half dozen API integrations, near instant search, etc etc) was either painful or impossible. Also, if all it took was a pretty UI, companies like Hipchat would have been the winner years ago. I mean, Slack has a better UI in my opinion than Hipchat, but it's an example of taking the basics of IRC and slapping an interface of it. Besides that though, I agree this letter was pretty stupid.
- Latty 10y ago
  I'm really weirded out that people can't see the value Slack added. Having your messages stored while you are offline is hugely valuable. If I have been out of signal range on a train, I want to be able to look at history on my phone once I'm back in range of a cell tower. Beyond that, a well made UI for web, desktop and phone that is consistent is valuable. 'Adding a pretty UI' isn't a zero-effort or skill thing. No, Slack isn't a world away from IRC or email - but it's enough better that people want to use it, that's good. I'm not sure where all the hate comes from.
  - NDizzle 10y ago
    I've had a persistent to IRC backlog since 1998. This is a simple task for anyone who reads a site that is called "hacker news".
    - praneshp 10y ago
      I had a persistent IRC backlog pre-Slack too. It's less difficult to get your colleagues that dont read "hacker news" to do it.
    - Latty 10y ago
      Yes, but are those the only people using Slack? Most of us communicate with people for whom that's non-trivial. Even if it is, it's effort to set up, has to run somewhere, and it doesn't integrate well. It's a crappy solution to the problem, when Slack's is 'scroll up'.
      - NDizzle 10y ago
        In my experiences using Slack, the people who aren't the normal IRC crowd (take that as you will, heh) fall out of common use after a short period of time. You're left with roughly the IRC crowd. That may be dependent on team dynamics.
        Latty 10y ago
        Obviously, small sample size, but that's not my experience at all. I've used Slack in two or three different environments for 1y+, and people didn't seem to drop it.
- brightball 10y ago
  Agree that "it's a chat room" but it's also a chat room that's pretty well entrenched at this point, hooked into a lot of people's entire operational workflows thanks to API hooks and bots, etc. In short, they are entrenched and have done a great job of ensuring that the cost of switching is high enough that it's going to take a lot of justification to get somebody to take the time to make the move. All they really have to do is avoid a colossal screw up.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Chat-bots are a dime a dozen on IRC.
    - throwaway1892 10y ago
      The problem is not if chat-bots exist in any system, but rather, does the chat-bot you need exists and how hard is it to change your integration (and perhaps workflow).
- geofft 10y ago
  > added a pretty UI to IRC And they didn't even add it, Metalab did. http://metalab.co/projects/slack/ http://metalab.co/projects/slack/
  - wikibob 10y ago
    Wow, really fascinating. Thanks for this
- hrayr 10y ago
  "So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky." If only luck made slack, then doesn't that mean Microsoft will need to be equally lucky to succeed?
  - kbenson 10y ago
    You often have to be lucky (in timing, in marketing, in whatever) to be the first. Once you've proven the market, later entrants don't have to be lucky. You've already given them a path to follow. They can follow you, letting you do the regular trailblazing while they easily follow and devote their effort into figuring out how and when to jump out in front.
  - pklausler 10y ago
    Software development is to Microsoft what olive oil importation was to the Corleone family: yes, it's their business and they're good at it, but no, it's not exactly how they got rich.
- hyperbovine 10y ago
  I remember thinking this to myself about five billion times back when Twitter blew up right as we were all busy writing Twitter-like Rails apps for fun. Timing is everything.
- nkw 10y ago
  I know from a technical standpoint Slack is just a pretty UI on top of IRC. However, consider for instance, one of the Slack teams I use on a daily basis is a law firm. The difference of getting users at a non-tech company, such as a law firm, to use a chat client like Slack vs an IRC client is a huge chasm. I've been guilty several times myself of saying UIs or veneers over long existing technology isn't that impressive and dismissing companies that do so, but companies have made billions doing just that.
  - duderific 10y ago
    Right. Here on Hacker News, we look at things through techie lenses. Most companies are not tech companies, and cannot set up their own IRC. User experience is the only thing that matters to these companies. They don't care if you're using MongoDb or Postgres, or that you're using React instead of Angular. They just want something that works reliably and is easy to use. It is extremely hard to create a compelling and delightful user experience that is also maintainable so that new features can be added quickly. So to say "they just slapped a nice UI on IRC" is a little short sighted.
  - hvs 10y ago
    Yeah, but Hipchat or Campfire are just as easy to use. And Microsoft's will probably be as well.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  Another day, another post dismissing success as luck. Let's take this somewhere. So what if it's just luck? What useful information can we glean from your dismissal?
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >Another day, another post dismissing success as luck. I thought it was pretty well known that luck plays a significant factor in success. Are you disputing that?
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      Not at all. If you need to add words to a person's statement in order to refute it, you are engaging in rhetorically useless behavior.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  The Bloomberg Terminal lock-in strikes me as a similar walled garden of sorts and ripe for upstarts to break the grasp in time. Not overnight, of course, but in time.
- inthewoods 10y ago
  Yeah tend to agree - but I do they innovated in terms of the user on-boarding process. Very delightful.
- iblaine 10y ago
  I thought the same thing with VNC. GotoMyPC took something that was free, improved it, then made a fortune on it. While the technology improvements were notable, I think their success was derived from marketing.
- cm2187 10y ago
  > Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room I'd like to see them succeed with skype first. I still can't message someone using a mac from a pc...
  - kzisme 10y ago
    Skype for business is a train wreck I'd rather see them abandon that and work on something new.
- Balgair 10y ago
  One Hyphenated Word: Follow-through. Yes, Slack's core tech has been around for decades now, and that it is pretty much a gussied up IRC with some bots. But they found that IRC is awesome for what it does and they found that businesses needed something like IRC with bots. Luck is for sure what they have, but they also followed it up. A favorite site of mine recently had a post on follow-through [0]. I'll quote the part that is relevant to Slack: "There’s a dearth of people who know, or have the will, to do the stupidly easy stuff to be charming and successful. Let me give you just one example. Both off the air and on, guests of my podcast will tell me, “I can tell you actually read my book before this interview and I really appreciate that. It’s so rare.” I don’t bring this up to toot my own horn, but rather to point out how ridiculous it is that this might even be something worthy of mention! An interviewer reading someone’s work before asking them questions about it would seem like the barest of bare minimum job requirements — a prerequisite rather than something above and beyond. And yet the majority of podcasters aren’t even taking care of this most basic of basics. There are tons of people doing what you want to do, but how are they executing? In 90% of cases, not as well as they could be. That’s your opening. And such openings are absolutely everywhere." (emphasis from the source) Slack is this to a T. It's simple stuff, but they followed through with it. They spent time on the code, on iterating, on making sure it was not just ok, but good. And as a result they are not eating Ramen anymore. Is MS going to squish them? Who knows?! What we do know is that Slack is capable of following through with this product and the MS has a history of not being able to do so. I'd put the money into Slack over MS in the long run. But we will have to wait and see if MS will dump enough cash into their competitor to squish them out before MS runs out of follow-through and bureaucratic stamina. [0]http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/10/10/myth-scarcity-12-stupidly-easy-things-thatll-set-apart-pack/ http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/10/10/myth-scarcity-12-st...
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  Eh, it's a bit of both. Yes, it's IRC with a pretty interface. But that interface is comfy and useful. Juggling multiple devices is seamless. It keeps your history and you can search it. Not rocket science, sure, but not bad either. It's a step up from IRC.
- kevando 10y ago
  IIRC IRC doesn't switch messages to your phone when you close your computer. In fact I think IRC messages don't even tell the sender that you're offline.
  - zimpenfish 10y ago
    Slack is much more Jabber/XMPP than it is IRC (although they do provide an IRC gateway for oldsters).
- ascotan 10y ago
  Your absolutely right. There is really nothing innovative here. But never underestimate the power of eye-candy. Think about apple products. You could throw your hands up and say "but there's nothing innovative here! they just built a pretty UI on top of BSD and people have been using Unix operating systems for 50 years!". True, but it's the pretty UI that connects it to the masses. Slack took a concept that has been done to death (a chat server) and made it useable and accessible. I remember years ago installing pidgin, psi and adium at work because they all ran on different operating system and som guru had to configure an XMPP server somewhere in the company. Then at home i'd fire up mirc to work on some open source. My daughter would come home and hop onto yahoo chat so she could send terrible looking ascii/emoji bling to all her friends. Yesterday i came into work and some guy came over and saw i had slack up and said, "whoa i love slack, do we have a company server for this?" I said, "yep". He said "send me an invite! i'm gonna go get my boss on this". That sort of emotional reaction to a product I think is what makes something a success. I a chat room innovative? no. But i think success can't really be wholly described in terms of innovation either. Somehow software has to connect with real people (iXXX - because i own it?) and get people to buy into it like a brand of blue jeans.
  - oliv__ 10y ago
    ...and black turtlenecks
  - Theodores 10y ago
    The Fear Of Missing Out Fear of missing out or FoMO is "a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent".[2] This social angst[3] is characterized by "a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out Slack has this to it, a team gets using Slack for their own purposes, the initiative started by someone that wonders why the company/team use Skype still. Then other teams in the company want to be in on it, there is a party on Slack and they want to know all the gossip that goes down. Plus the Giphy memes. The next thing is that you then find that it is no longer a private chat room, the guys in HR are reading this too so no longer can some things be said in the banter. So then you move your important chats off Slack and onto WhatsApp or somewhere where whomever the bad guys are, e.g. HR, will not be reading. Obviously Slack then becomes something that your manager uses to tell you what to do and no longer becomes a channel for convo for things peripheral to the tasks in hand. This is how I see Slack shaping up in the long term, it might as well be a MS product and you might as well get the MS product since it is better integrated to Office things.
- Kiro 10y ago
  The big difference for me is that with Slack anyone can create their own network with their own plethora of channels. You can't really compare it with traditional IRC where everyone is on the same IRC network.
- lmm 10y ago
  > It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995. It is kind of amazing that Slack are the only chat system out of dozens our hundreds who can make a UI that doesn't suck (I wouldn't even call Slack good), but evidence would suggest it's true. > Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need luck to get users. Well they've tried four or five times and always managed to screw it up.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  > It's a chat room. With channels. And the iPhone was just a phone with a pretty UI. Slack is winning exactly for the same reason that the iPhone did, and you're misjudging it for the same reason that a lot of people misjudged Apple: It's all about execution. The first iPhone had the same features as previous phones, but those features were executed so much better than the competition. Slack is the same way. It's an evolutionary product with a revolutionary execution, and should be rightly praised for being innovative in an industry that often moves in surprisingly slow ways — which the state of IRC, HipChat, Skype etc. shows needed serious disruption. And as with the iPhone, Slack is facing the same problem: Once you've shown how things _can_ be done, everyone else will jump on the same wandwagon. (I realize you didn't say anything that contradicts the above; this is more about the dismissive attitude towards leaders like Slack.)
  - wcummings 10y ago
    >The first iPhone had the same features as previous phones The browser was the killer feature. Remember Jobs going to the NYT website?
    - lobster_johnson 10y ago
      It just was one of many killer features. Contemporary phones also had web browsers, they just weren't as good, by far. I remember the awful browser on the Nokia N73 (my last phone before the iPhone), which had a largeish screen and a little joystick to control a mouse pointer, but no touchscreen.
      - wcummings 10y ago
        >they just weren't as good, by far. Exactly. The point of the demo was "this browser is just as good as one on a computer".
    - Mahn 10y ago
      Not the first internet browser on a phone though, just a vastly superior UX to what had been done before.
- barnabee 10y ago
  Also worth checking out the history of MindAlign [0] corporate group chat software. It's been around since pre-2000 (originally built in house by UBS) and has supported channels, offline chat history, bots and embeddable status widgets for years. So it's true, Slack isn't all that innovative - although they've done a much better sales job as MindAlign was only ever used (and still is) by a tiny number of companies! The fun thing is that Microsoft bought the product back in 2007 and sold it again pretty quickly but not before taking a bunch of the code and using it in their own group chat product (never as effectively as the original app, perhaps until now Slack have come along and shown them how valuable a product like that can be...) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindAlign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindAlign
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > We had chat rooms back in 1995. Not only that, on those days doing an IRC like server and chat client was a common programming exercise at the network programming classes on the university I attending.
- vit05 10y ago
  but it's not innovative, it's lucky. Or it is "time", or marketing, or just because it is mobile first. You could say the same about what's app, Instagram and others. Maybe it is not just about the big picture. Maybe they are successful because of small things like knowing they will always work when you need.
- akst 10y ago
  I think you're under estimating the amount of time and effort that goes into to making an ergonomic and approachable user interface, that both your technical teams and nontechnical teams enjoy using. Sure someone can replicate it, but I think you're underestimating the value of it. Like IRC could have the best features in the world but for the users who do not find it approachable it may as well not exist.
fairpx 10y ago
When Steve Jobs "Welcomed IBM" with a full page ad, it was fun. It fit the vibe of who he was and the slightly rebellious marketing campaigns Apple was running. Slack's "Welcome Microsoft" letter felt weird. It felt disconnected from the company and product many of us love and use every day. Might have been stronger to silently add a feature to Slack that lets you communicate with Microsoft Team's members.
- loceng 10y ago
  It definitely felt polar opposite to the tone of the wonderful animated animal character ad. Even visually the tone was too stark.
  - loceng 10y ago
    They should really do another full-page ad saying they fucked up and that they thought they were being clever and their ego got the best of them. Make it visually appealing, full of animals ... that'd make me feel good about Slack again, like they're grownups and can admit mistakes.
- twblalock 10y ago
  Slack's letter appears to betray defensiveness and fear of competition, rather than a tongue-in-cheek attitude like Apple's ad did. I think that's why it seems weird.
  - mbesto 10y ago
    It doesn't help that the snark from the CEO was awkward too: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793969175807098881 https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793969175807098881
- nashashmi 10y ago
  > It felt disconnected from the company. I felt a sort of haughtiness in the letter, like "you don't understand what chat is, but we do, and if you look at our success, you will never understand what chat is, but we will." This was not a letter of advice, but instead a letter of intimidation. But if I give them the benefit of doubt, maybe it was just an ad. Nothing more. Nothing less. One that touted the underlying coolness of Slack and the platonic posture of Microsoft. In all of this, Slack misses the point of Office 365 chat, e.g. tie users together when working on Office products, and build collaboration features for Office users. Maybe Slack slacked off on what the market was requiring now and was not able to keep itself up to date with what companies like Microsoft needed.
deleted 10y ago
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throwaway1892 10y ago
Or Slack may just die?
nilkn 10y ago
Our entire company switched to Slack within basically a day. While that's a big selling point for Slack's ease of use, it also means it'd be easy to switch away to a competitor within a day too.
- dionidium 10y ago
  Team communication tools don't suffer the same network-effect downsides to switching that other social apps do. The decision to switch can be made by one person. Everybody else is responding to a mandate.
  - ryanto 10y ago
    While the decision can be made by one person, I'm not sure this is true. There is a big switching cost for most team tools. * There's going to be a lot of discussion and consensus building. Most of the team is going to have an opinion on the subject. * Setting up new accounts for team members, teaching team members how to use the new tool, and change management all take time. * Most teams have integrations within their chat apps, these will have to be switched or re-implemented to use new APIs. I think it's fair to say that most team tools have good moats. The longer the team has used a tool the stronger the moat becomes.
- joesmo 10y ago
  Unless you use their API. Or you invited external users. Or you use one of the other features that lock you in. In fact, I think Slack wrote the letter because they feel so confident that they've locked in their current customers. Switching to Slack is easy. Switching from Slack is not.
  - rekoros 10y ago
    It's not necessarily true--Mattermost has a Slack-compatible API, and Sameroom can be used to mirror channels in both systems during the transition.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  My team has built numerous chatops bots and automation around Slack, mostly because of their great API. In a way, we're building our own lock-in, as any replacement would have to provide the same level of API access, from in-channel announcements to channel scraping for parsing by other systems. And it would require retooling the bots too.
_pmf_ 10y ago
Microsoft can just copy everything that Slack does right, give it away for a fraction or for free and there's nothing that they can do about it.
- test001only 10y ago
  If they give it away for free (as part of office365), is that not effectively anticompetitive behaviour?
  - hrayr 10y ago
    Well, now that slack has so "genuinely" welcomed microsoft as a competitor, I don't think they can turn around and argue the opposite for the same offering.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      Slack is going to look dumb if it ever sues Microsoft. "But, your honor, Slack told the world they welcome competition from us in this infamous letter from November 2016!"
      - kirubakaran 10y ago
        I get your point, but, if an anti-trust suit ever happened, it would be DoJ that sues MS, not Slack.
  - Delmania 10y ago
    You're not required to use Teams on Office365. The anti-competitive behavior would be if you couldn't turn it off, and it had to be on due to core functionality with Office. Most people just use o365 for exchange and office apps.
  - apetresc 10y ago
    Microsoft has nothing close to a monopoly in this space, so no.
deleted 10y ago
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fcc_authorized 10y ago
> Or maybe it will evaporate into the ether, like Yammer, which Microsoft spent $1.2 billion on to seemingly no effect whatsoever. Ah, Silicon Valley. Where growing slowly is the same as being already dead
- draw_down 10y ago
  Nah, that thing was a clunker its whole life. They spent the billion because Twitter was much more fearsome at the time.
bdcravens 10y ago
Slack-like chat in an integrated offering isn't new. Zoho has offered this for some time: https://www.zoho.com/chat/ https://www.zoho.com/chat/
- blahi 10y ago
  Yeah buddy, but Microsoft has more employees than Zoho's customers. When practically every office employee on the planet is your customer, it is kind of different.
romanovcode 10y ago
I didn't see such a catastrophic marketing decision for a long time.
muad 10y ago
Slack is the most overrated startup of the last couple years. A native ui for IRC with some extra features. Their valuation is laughable and is a prime example of the bubble forming in vc tech.
- randomsofr 10y ago
  > with some extra features That's what got them where they are right now.
draw_down 10y ago
I can't believe this has become a scandal. It's a bit tone-deaf. Okay. There are worse things.
joshu 10y ago
My prior experience with some of the now leadership of Slack indicates that they don't have sufficient moral authority for this kind of commentary anyway.
- kjbflsudfb 10y ago
  Can you elaborate for those of us not in the loop?
- CptJamesCook 10y ago
  I've been treated unethically by four relatively senior employees of Slack myself. It never occurred to me to complain until they started acting so holier than thou.
  - davesque 10y ago
    It's funny how achieving great success more as a result of luck than ingenuity seems to go hand-in-hand with arrogance.
hockeybias 10y ago
The writer's best line: "All this is harder than it looks," Slack warns. And then the company straps on its wax wings and flies into the sun.
antisthenes 10y ago
ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger and IRC were all entrenched at different points in time. To give a parallel, so were Teamspeak, Ventrillo, Mumble, Raidcall, Xfire or whatever have you (for gaming at least). Chat rooms and VOIP solutions are commodities and have been for a decade or more. Sure, some companies do some more value-add than others in terms of service and support, but at the end of the day it's still a commodity and no amount of rationalization and wishful thinking will change that. Which is why their mimicking of Apple ad seems condescending and arrogant. Personal PCs were at the top of the technological know-how in the early 80s. Glorified chat rooms haven't been new or high tech for 20 years (IRC is how old?). In fact the only innovation in recent years seems to be end-to-end encryption, which Microsoft seems to be on board with.
binarytransform 10y ago
What a badly written letter. No aim, no structure, no class.
deleted 10y ago
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wubalub 10y ago
I've been using skype for text messaging pretty constantly for the last 3 years, and I'm not sure why people hate it so. it has groups, 1-1 chat and video. Searching history can be a bit of a pain, but everything else seems to be there. Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing.
- uryga 10y ago
  I associate Skype with being slow and heavy for some reason. However it's possible that I picked this opinion up from other people and just started repeating it.
  - noxToken 10y ago
    Are you a Linux user? Skype was slow for me on Linux after a certain update. It has also become very bloated over the years, but the Windows and Android clients have always been reliable for me.
  - mxuribe 10y ago
    No, no...you are correct: skype (for business) is slow and heavy. At least it is for me.
- jamra 10y ago
  Slack gives you webhooks (post my team's commits to a chat room) and a great team-based chat. Groups in Skype can't really add the same value. Also, people tend to use their personal emails on Skype in my organization. Slack's sign up process makes more sense for an organization.
- troycarlson 10y ago
  One thing Skype doesn't do so well: when a new person joins they then have to add every other team member one-by-one. With Slack you simply join the team and have immediate access to everyone. Not a huge deal with small teams but adding 50+ people on Skype is a real PITA.
- pritambarhate 10y ago
  Skype on Android is terrible. It's slow to sync. It sometimes takes minutes to sync the messages. You get messages in the notifications, then you go to the chat and it's yet to sync. If they fix their mobile client, it would be pretty good.
asurty 10y ago
Microsoft has lost my trust in them after what happened to me with Skype. I was one of the many victims who had their account hacked. The worst part was how their customer support handled the issue. They almost gave me an ulcer by trying to convince me that it was probably a virus on my computer causing the problem. Look at your own Skype forums people! Be transparent, own up to having problems, and fix it! Communication is extremely important to me. That said, if all the employees in my company were only using 'Teams', 'Skype for business', 'Lync' or any other POS out of Microsoft then I'd be looking for a new job.
- aidbiuasbi 10y ago
  You seem like a real joy to work with.
deleted 10y ago
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lifeisstillgood 10y ago
The essential issue here is this - starting with the Fortune 500, how far down the business size stack do you have to go before this question stops being a laughing out loud no-brainer: "Shall we buy more-or-less the same chat application from Microsoft or Slack?"
- jdmichal 10y ago
  Let's really talk about a no-brainer... How far down that stack do you have to go to before the Microsoft choice isn't included as part of some already-priced-and-paid package? Free Microsoft or paid Slack... "Nobody was ever fired for choosing IBM."
  - lifeisstillgood 10y ago
    At my Fortune 500 client Office communicator / lync/ Skype for whatever is per seat chargeable. But as it's 3 bucks no one even blinks at signing it off. MS actually has done rather neatly out of that one
rrdharan 10y ago
Seems like the Slacklash I've been expecting has finally arrived.
mbarty 10y ago
So does this mean that Microsoft is 'UnDead'? Ref: Paul graham : Microsoft is Dead http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
- romanovcode 10y ago
  Looks like you didn't follow the news. Microsoft is the new Apple.
r2dnb 10y ago
Wow... So if I understand correctly : 1) They decided to mess with a company having $500B in-cash 2) Which decided to attack their low barrier-to-entry market 3) And took the unusual revealing step of building its own instead of buying 4) And is playing in its comfort zone (productivity tools, Office, API, cloud-scale integration points : azure, azure marketplace etc...) 5) While having a pool of 90M trustful paying customers and the ability to provide them the same offering for free in less than 1 second. The worst they could do was to help Microsoft define this offering as a direct competition. But this is just what they did with this arrogant and high-schoolish "Welcome" letter. What really has me roll my eyes here is the way they think that they can be frontal with a corporation like Microsoft playing in its comfort zone and having the dollars we know they have. This will cost them a lot. You can't easily backtrack from that and even if they somehow manage to do it, by the time they get there, Teams will have already seized a good chunk of their user base.
- blahi 10y ago
  0) Ask said company for a whooping $8B in cash.
- dingdongding 10y ago
  Who said Microsoft has $500B in cash? They have ~$100B in cash
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  Or maybe they knew all that, being the communication gurus that they claim to be, and it was a desperate move to be bought, essentially saying: "hey MS you got cash and loads of engineers but you can still fail at that because _reasons_; we have the know-how, consider buying us too". J/k, but who knows.
- asp_hornet 10y ago
  "Making my eyes roll" sums my feelings on this perfectly. Dear Slack, We built the cloud service, web framework, programming language and operating system our Team app runs on as well as the IDE it was built with, the source control its stored in and the office apps it integrates with, oh and 2 of the browsers we tested it on. The chat part really wasn't that hard. We'll probably be OK. - Microsoft
yarrel 10y ago
Welcome IBM. Seriously.
CptJamesCook 10y ago
What a smug, sanctimonious piece of writing. It's hard to imagine that anyone who read this came away with a positive perception of Slack.
627467 10y ago
Between this and the debate around the new macbooks/surface-studio, Microsoft is having very good week in terms on gaining some mindshare and good-will from the technorati and the (traditionally) anti-microsoft press. Slack is great. I'm part of many slack communities and until they move I'll stay (although they are all in the free-tier). While the many millions who are already part of the O365 subscription base (and who probably don't even know slack or why they need them) won't have reason to start a community on Slack I think Slack is safe in the short-run with those who don't pay the "MS-tax" or those who are already part of existing slack communities. And while Slack is a great product (as the IRC on steroids that it is) it is easy to replicate and so MS now did.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Does Slack even understand that there are MANY enterprise companies that don't use Slack simply because it's NOT Microsoft? Hubris is rarely a good quality.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  Does that really matter, since those companies by definition would never be Slack customers? It's not like Slack could ever become a Microsoft product -- barring the obvious buyout, which is not likely to ever happen since Microsoft rolled their own. So if they aren't buying now because it's not Microsoft, I don't see how Slack hubris changes anything in that equation.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    If (when, likely) Teams gets momentum, other companies will start making a choice between Slack and Teams. This could start cutting into Slacks market share.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use HipChat instead, because it is. Either way, this is a HUGE market Slack hasn't even begun to touch. (Although I see they now have a "coming soon!" banner on their homepage.)
  - stable-point 10y ago
    > More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use HipChat instead, because it is. Just one data-point, but: my employer went with HipChat because we needed an on-premise solution. (We were moving away from IRC because we needed persistent chat history for remote employees. Using IRC bouncers was considered too high of a barrier-to-entry, given we wanted non-technical employees to join the conversation too).
- ctide 10y ago
  Actually, they don't use Slack because Slack would be the most expensive piece of software they license. The enterprise model from Slack is so prohibitively expensive it's like they're intentionally trying to drive away large customers.
mdevere 10y ago
This is an opportunity to MS to reply in kind and demonstrate a sense of humour.
smegel 10y ago
> threaded conversations How does an instant messaging app not have threaded conversations?
sebastianconcpt 10y ago
Surprised by the tone of this. It's Slack declaring cultural war to Microsoft. All values subverted, what is praise is actually negative admiration (envy basically), probably based on fear. Kind of gramscian stuff what they did. Very unexpected and unnecessary. Unless they wanted to do some noise because of marketing? I guess they got scared but doesn't sound like Slack needs that. Wonder why they bought this battle this soon.
rcy 10y ago
I think the intended audience of this ad is people who haven't heard of or use Slack but are interested in this new thing Microsoft is doing with the hope of poaching some users. It's not actually intended to convince Microsoft of anything, obviously.
dfar1 10y ago
Can someone link me to a hi-res image.. or do I have to buy the newspaper in order to read the ad?
- kjbflsudfb 10y ago
  https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft-8d20965d2849#.1o0pg14v2 https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft-8d20965d2849#.1o0pg14v2
  - dfar1 10y ago
    thank you thank you!
StreamBright 10y ago
Let the IRC wars begin. :) Seriously, I am not sure what to think when a chat company is worth 1 billion. Sure it has nice UI but so does HipChat and a bunch of other tools. For me, Slack is just one of the many communication platforms I used ever since, starting with IRC, ICQ and other apps and protocols from the 90s. I am not particullary fond on Microsoft but they deliver. I cannot forget the initial uproar when they introduced their entering the gaming console industry with Xbox, and look at them now. Slack has to offer a bit more than just a nice UI for async messaging to be relevant in the corporate communication space in the next 5 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#History
intellegacy 10y ago
terrible judgment by the CEO to send this.
davesque 10y ago
The letter just makes me feel like the people calling the shots over at Slack are immature and can't handle the realities of running a competitive business. It just comes off as a disguised advertisement and I doubt it really earned them any more customers.
chiefalchemist 10y ago
Apples and oranges. The MS product is a paid version within a particular target/universe. That said, evidently, MS didn't study the never-rose and fell story of Google Wave. In short, collaboration needs people. Any people. All people. One outside within the team and a platform becomes irrelevant to the matter at hand. In addition, the communication market is bigger than the market for soda. Genuine or otherwise Slack and the market will benefit from competition. There's still plenty of upside for Slack, Microsoft and perhaps one or two more.
sleepnaught 10y ago
Why are we analyzing this as though it's supposed to be an honest statement from Slack (ie. arguing they're not an open platform or that Slack isn't actually as special and snowflakey as the ad makes them out to be)? It's pure marketing. Could argue it comes across too insincerely for positive impact, not sure if that will be true for the general audience reading it or not.
nikolay 10y ago
Slack copied Yammer and HipChat... and now it's angry that Microsoft stole some of its unique features - such a hypocrisy!
kwikiel 10y ago
Tangentially related. I'm using rocket chat - it's open source (MIT) alternative to slack. And i think it would be easier/safe for companies to adopt self hosted solution or use already trusted company like Microsoft. Slack had great UX - but one cannot compete only with that because it could be copied. Maybe Slack have some comparative advantage that could not be copied.
intended 10y ago
> "All this is harder than it looks," Slack warns. And then the company straps on its wax wings and flies into the sun. That was a very nice turn of phrase.

295 points by philk10 10y ago

I dunno, I just want to stop hearing about it here on HN, this single letter has been posted a dozen times in the past day: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dear%20microsoft&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dear%20microsoft&sort=byPopula...

cdubzzz 10y ago
Hey, if it takes a little away from the barrage of boring, half-reasoned opinions about the MacBook announcement, I'll take it. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix...

Mc_Big_G 10y ago

It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995. Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need luck to get users. How were the people at Slack not thinking "Holy shit, people are paying for this!" the entire time like it was a dream. I'm sure Slack will continue with much success now that they have their user base, so good for them, but to delude themselves into thinking no one can do it as good as they do is a bit naive.

tluyben2 10y ago
> I'm sure Slack will continue with much success now that they have their user base If they don't add something that is innovative I'm not so sure. I see companies and people who raved about it 10 months dropping it just as fast all around me.
- busterarm 10y ago
  We have serious security concerns about Slack but insufficient time and motivation to explore alternatives. We've delayed the inevitable by coming up with a file sharing and secrets policy for what can and cannot go over Slack.
- fairpx 10y ago
  I agree. In my previous startup, we've been jumping from one platform to an other without too much trouble. Because the people using these products are 'teams', it takes only 1 in the group to suggest everyone in the team to try out a new shiny platform and before you know it... you're deep in conversations in this new platform and see no reason to get back to the old one.
buckbova 10y ago
Agreed, they may have done it better than most or marketed their product better but nothing compelling here. > Slack could have done what most companies do when a competitor rips them off, and said nothing. Someone competing in your space is NOT ripping you off.
- throwaway1892 10y ago
  But does copying the UI is ripping someone off?
  - blahi 10y ago
    The UI is pretty different than slack. And how exactly do you think a chat app to have a radically different UI. Did slack rip off mIRC?
greenshackle2 10y ago
We have IRC at work. Some people suggested switching to an open-source slack clone - with IRC integration! But... why? IRC works fine. It'd just be one more thing to maintain. (My firm is largely made up of old school unix hackers. I can see the appeal of something with a better UI and better integration than IRC for some, but when half the company are the type to run CLI IRC clients, it seems unnecessary.)
- jjawssd 10y ago
  Look into Mattermost
  - greenshackle2 10y ago
    Yeah that's the one they wanted.
mackmgg 10y ago
>I'm sure Slack will continue with much success now that they have their user base, so good for them, but to delude themselves into thinking no one can do it as good as they do is a bit naive. The problem is, Slack has a user base consisting mainly of people willing to switch to the "next big thing" pretty quickly. That's how they got to Slack, but there's nothing preventing those people from leaving to move onto something new. Most slower to react companies are still using Lync, and probably won't ever switch to Slack. The reason I use Slack is because it is better than any of the alternatives, but I wouldn't hesitate to switch to something better if it comes around.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  It's also crazy easy to dump your Slack history out of Slack, as well as use their Discovery API, to have a competing service interrogate your team configuration and replicate it in a new service. Maybe not one click import, but it wouldn't be painful to move. Perhaps an open source utility will be written that can package all of the content and metadata required for your chat service up as a JSON bundle for import elsewhere. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-your-team-s-Slack-history https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo... https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248-Guide-to-Slack-data-exports https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248-Guide-to-...
  - mi100hael 10y ago
    IIRC that's an option when spinning up a Mattermost server.
- rch 10y ago
  Slack just needs to deliver an on-prem version in the next 6 months. I'm happy they have a reason to bother now.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > The problem is, Slack has a user base consisting mainly of people willing to switch to the "next big thing" pretty quickly. I'm not so sure. I got us using Slack at work, and that was after about 12 months of hearing ads for it. It is IRC plus a slick UI and integrated bots, but putting all that together with a web UI and a dedicated client and phone apps makes it multiple times better than regular IRC for the common person. I don't use twitter. I only started actually using my Facebook account I've had for many years last week, after finally deciding it's curring me off from people to not use it. I've never used Instagram or Snapchat or any of those other newer things. I'm not what you would call "people willing to switch to the next big thing". Quite the opposite in fact. At this point, the new users of slack are hearing about it from other people that are themselves 3-4 people removed from those early adopters. That said, Slack isn't a perfect snowflake. It's a simple idea executed well. The reason I was so for it once I finally bothered to check it out is because my prior experience with IRC let me immediately see the value they had created by combining IRC and all the extras for IRC together in a nice package, and made it accessible to less technical people. > The reason I use Slack is because it is better than any of the alternatives, but I wouldn't hesitate to switch to something better if it comes around. Same here on why I use it, but I would hesitate switching (given most my usage is work related). If Google had a good competitor, we would probably switch, since it was our solution to crappy support for what we need in Hangouts, as all our other stuff is in Google Apps. I imagine a lot of people/companies might feel the same way with MS if their stack is dominated by MS products. For those that already have a fairly heterogeneous environment, there's probably less reason to switch to the major names, but I imagine those groups are already fairly on board with trying new tools to find what works best, so have little allegiance. Edit: s/seeing ads/hearing ads/. I think a really good case could be made that Slack was genius to market on podcasts as much as they did, and on the ones they did, and that might have been instrumental to their growth.
harryjo 10y ago
Time to update the old canard. "If you could have invented Slack... you would have invented Slack." Execution is everything.
- murukesh_s 10y ago
  Execution is everything? Then Microsoft is also copying their execution. What's wrong with that? Why going overboard and trying to troll Microsoft?
  - dasil003 10y ago
    You can't copy execution. In the trenches every day decisions are made. The quality of the product that comes out deeply reflects the team that made it. You can clone an implementation relatively easily, and Microsoft has a ton of smart teams and has really upped its game recently, but Microsoft's next feature will not be the same as Slack's next feature, the cultures are just too different.
    - murukesh_s 10y ago
      Can't copy in one day for sure, but boy you sure can. Ask zynga how they did it. Or just look at Samsung phones with latest Android. Sure there are few products like Adobe suite & stackoverflow etc which have stood the test of time, but slack is a relatively newcomer who is yet to crack into the big enterprises.
- mcphage 10y ago
  > Execution is everything. Execution is a lot, but so is timing. Execution can be controlled, timing is mostly luck.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    From a creative sector perspective, this claim holds a lot of merit as well. A correlative phrase I've heard is "Success is preparation meeting luck" because the sands of time are littered with well executed failures. In many fields!
jonheller 10y ago
They did far more than "added a pretty UI". I used IRC for years, and getting it to do the things I use Slack for (mobile interface, file transfers, a half dozen API integrations, near instant search, etc etc) was either painful or impossible. Also, if all it took was a pretty UI, companies like Hipchat would have been the winner years ago. I mean, Slack has a better UI in my opinion than Hipchat, but it's an example of taking the basics of IRC and slapping an interface of it. Besides that though, I agree this letter was pretty stupid.
Latty 10y ago
I'm really weirded out that people can't see the value Slack added. Having your messages stored while you are offline is hugely valuable. If I have been out of signal range on a train, I want to be able to look at history on my phone once I'm back in range of a cell tower. Beyond that, a well made UI for web, desktop and phone that is consistent is valuable. 'Adding a pretty UI' isn't a zero-effort or skill thing. No, Slack isn't a world away from IRC or email - but it's enough better that people want to use it, that's good. I'm not sure where all the hate comes from.
- NDizzle 10y ago
  I've had a persistent to IRC backlog since 1998. This is a simple task for anyone who reads a site that is called "hacker news".
  - praneshp 10y ago
    I had a persistent IRC backlog pre-Slack too. It's less difficult to get your colleagues that dont read "hacker news" to do it.
  - Latty 10y ago
    Yes, but are those the only people using Slack? Most of us communicate with people for whom that's non-trivial. Even if it is, it's effort to set up, has to run somewhere, and it doesn't integrate well. It's a crappy solution to the problem, when Slack's is 'scroll up'.
    - NDizzle 10y ago
      In my experiences using Slack, the people who aren't the normal IRC crowd (take that as you will, heh) fall out of common use after a short period of time. You're left with roughly the IRC crowd. That may be dependent on team dynamics.
      - Latty 10y ago
        Obviously, small sample size, but that's not my experience at all. I've used Slack in two or three different environments for 1y+, and people didn't seem to drop it.
brightball 10y ago
Agree that "it's a chat room" but it's also a chat room that's pretty well entrenched at this point, hooked into a lot of people's entire operational workflows thanks to API hooks and bots, etc. In short, they are entrenched and have done a great job of ensuring that the cost of switching is high enough that it's going to take a lot of justification to get somebody to take the time to make the move. All they really have to do is avoid a colossal screw up.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  Chat-bots are a dime a dozen on IRC.
  - throwaway1892 10y ago
    The problem is not if chat-bots exist in any system, but rather, does the chat-bot you need exists and how hard is it to change your integration (and perhaps workflow).
geofft 10y ago
> added a pretty UI to IRC And they didn't even add it, Metalab did. http://metalab.co/projects/slack/ http://metalab.co/projects/slack/
- wikibob 10y ago
  Wow, really fascinating. Thanks for this
hrayr 10y ago
"So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky." If only luck made slack, then doesn't that mean Microsoft will need to be equally lucky to succeed?
- kbenson 10y ago
  You often have to be lucky (in timing, in marketing, in whatever) to be the first. Once you've proven the market, later entrants don't have to be lucky. You've already given them a path to follow. They can follow you, letting you do the regular trailblazing while they easily follow and devote their effort into figuring out how and when to jump out in front.
- pklausler 10y ago
  Software development is to Microsoft what olive oil importation was to the Corleone family: yes, it's their business and they're good at it, but no, it's not exactly how they got rich.
hyperbovine 10y ago
I remember thinking this to myself about five billion times back when Twitter blew up right as we were all busy writing Twitter-like Rails apps for fun. Timing is everything.
nkw 10y ago
I know from a technical standpoint Slack is just a pretty UI on top of IRC. However, consider for instance, one of the Slack teams I use on a daily basis is a law firm. The difference of getting users at a non-tech company, such as a law firm, to use a chat client like Slack vs an IRC client is a huge chasm. I've been guilty several times myself of saying UIs or veneers over long existing technology isn't that impressive and dismissing companies that do so, but companies have made billions doing just that.
- duderific 10y ago
  Right. Here on Hacker News, we look at things through techie lenses. Most companies are not tech companies, and cannot set up their own IRC. User experience is the only thing that matters to these companies. They don't care if you're using MongoDb or Postgres, or that you're using React instead of Angular. They just want something that works reliably and is easy to use. It is extremely hard to create a compelling and delightful user experience that is also maintainable so that new features can be added quickly. So to say "they just slapped a nice UI on IRC" is a little short sighted.
- hvs 10y ago
  Yeah, but Hipchat or Campfire are just as easy to use. And Microsoft's will probably be as well.
oldmanjay 10y ago
Another day, another post dismissing success as luck. Let's take this somewhere. So what if it's just luck? What useful information can we glean from your dismissal?
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >Another day, another post dismissing success as luck. I thought it was pretty well known that luck plays a significant factor in success. Are you disputing that?
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    Not at all. If you need to add words to a person's statement in order to refute it, you are engaging in rhetorically useless behavior.
6stringmerc 10y ago
The Bloomberg Terminal lock-in strikes me as a similar walled garden of sorts and ripe for upstarts to break the grasp in time. Not overnight, of course, but in time.
inthewoods 10y ago
Yeah tend to agree - but I do they innovated in terms of the user on-boarding process. Very delightful.
iblaine 10y ago
I thought the same thing with VNC. GotoMyPC took something that was free, improved it, then made a fortune on it. While the technology improvements were notable, I think their success was derived from marketing.
cm2187 10y ago
> Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room I'd like to see them succeed with skype first. I still can't message someone using a mac from a pc...
- kzisme 10y ago
  Skype for business is a train wreck I'd rather see them abandon that and work on something new.
Balgair 10y ago
One Hyphenated Word: Follow-through. Yes, Slack's core tech has been around for decades now, and that it is pretty much a gussied up IRC with some bots. But they found that IRC is awesome for what it does and they found that businesses needed something like IRC with bots. Luck is for sure what they have, but they also followed it up. A favorite site of mine recently had a post on follow-through [0]. I'll quote the part that is relevant to Slack: "There’s a dearth of people who know, or have the will, to do the stupidly easy stuff to be charming and successful. Let me give you just one example. Both off the air and on, guests of my podcast will tell me, “I can tell you actually read my book before this interview and I really appreciate that. It’s so rare.” I don’t bring this up to toot my own horn, but rather to point out how ridiculous it is that this might even be something worthy of mention! An interviewer reading someone’s work before asking them questions about it would seem like the barest of bare minimum job requirements — a prerequisite rather than something above and beyond. And yet the majority of podcasters aren’t even taking care of this most basic of basics. There are tons of people doing what you want to do, but how are they executing? In 90% of cases, not as well as they could be. That’s your opening. And such openings are absolutely everywhere." (emphasis from the source) Slack is this to a T. It's simple stuff, but they followed through with it. They spent time on the code, on iterating, on making sure it was not just ok, but good. And as a result they are not eating Ramen anymore. Is MS going to squish them? Who knows?! What we do know is that Slack is capable of following through with this product and the MS has a history of not being able to do so. I'd put the money into Slack over MS in the long run. But we will have to wait and see if MS will dump enough cash into their competitor to squish them out before MS runs out of follow-through and bureaucratic stamina. [0]http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/10/10/myth-scarcity-12-stupidly-easy-things-thatll-set-apart-pack/ http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/10/10/myth-scarcity-12-st...
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
Eh, it's a bit of both. Yes, it's IRC with a pretty interface. But that interface is comfy and useful. Juggling multiple devices is seamless. It keeps your history and you can search it. Not rocket science, sure, but not bad either. It's a step up from IRC.
kevando 10y ago
IIRC IRC doesn't switch messages to your phone when you close your computer. In fact I think IRC messages don't even tell the sender that you're offline.
- zimpenfish 10y ago
  Slack is much more Jabber/XMPP than it is IRC (although they do provide an IRC gateway for oldsters).
ascotan 10y ago
Your absolutely right. There is really nothing innovative here. But never underestimate the power of eye-candy. Think about apple products. You could throw your hands up and say "but there's nothing innovative here! they just built a pretty UI on top of BSD and people have been using Unix operating systems for 50 years!". True, but it's the pretty UI that connects it to the masses. Slack took a concept that has been done to death (a chat server) and made it useable and accessible. I remember years ago installing pidgin, psi and adium at work because they all ran on different operating system and som guru had to configure an XMPP server somewhere in the company. Then at home i'd fire up mirc to work on some open source. My daughter would come home and hop onto yahoo chat so she could send terrible looking ascii/emoji bling to all her friends. Yesterday i came into work and some guy came over and saw i had slack up and said, "whoa i love slack, do we have a company server for this?" I said, "yep". He said "send me an invite! i'm gonna go get my boss on this". That sort of emotional reaction to a product I think is what makes something a success. I a chat room innovative? no. But i think success can't really be wholly described in terms of innovation either. Somehow software has to connect with real people (iXXX - because i own it?) and get people to buy into it like a brand of blue jeans.
- oliv__ 10y ago
  ...and black turtlenecks
- Theodores 10y ago
  The Fear Of Missing Out Fear of missing out or FoMO is "a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent".[2] This social angst[3] is characterized by "a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out Slack has this to it, a team gets using Slack for their own purposes, the initiative started by someone that wonders why the company/team use Skype still. Then other teams in the company want to be in on it, there is a party on Slack and they want to know all the gossip that goes down. Plus the Giphy memes. The next thing is that you then find that it is no longer a private chat room, the guys in HR are reading this too so no longer can some things be said in the banter. So then you move your important chats off Slack and onto WhatsApp or somewhere where whomever the bad guys are, e.g. HR, will not be reading. Obviously Slack then becomes something that your manager uses to tell you what to do and no longer becomes a channel for convo for things peripheral to the tasks in hand. This is how I see Slack shaping up in the long term, it might as well be a MS product and you might as well get the MS product since it is better integrated to Office things.
Kiro 10y ago
The big difference for me is that with Slack anyone can create their own network with their own plethora of channels. You can't really compare it with traditional IRC where everyone is on the same IRC network.
lmm 10y ago
> It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995. It is kind of amazing that Slack are the only chat system out of dozens our hundreds who can make a UI that doesn't suck (I wouldn't even call Slack good), but evidence would suggest it's true. > Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need luck to get users. Well they've tried four or five times and always managed to screw it up.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
> It's a chat room. With channels. And the iPhone was just a phone with a pretty UI. Slack is winning exactly for the same reason that the iPhone did, and you're misjudging it for the same reason that a lot of people misjudged Apple: It's all about execution. The first iPhone had the same features as previous phones, but those features were executed so much better than the competition. Slack is the same way. It's an evolutionary product with a revolutionary execution, and should be rightly praised for being innovative in an industry that often moves in surprisingly slow ways — which the state of IRC, HipChat, Skype etc. shows needed serious disruption. And as with the iPhone, Slack is facing the same problem: Once you've shown how things _can_ be done, everyone else will jump on the same wandwagon. (I realize you didn't say anything that contradicts the above; this is more about the dismissive attitude towards leaders like Slack.)
- wcummings 10y ago
  >The first iPhone had the same features as previous phones The browser was the killer feature. Remember Jobs going to the NYT website?
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    It just was one of many killer features. Contemporary phones also had web browsers, they just weren't as good, by far. I remember the awful browser on the Nokia N73 (my last phone before the iPhone), which had a largeish screen and a little joystick to control a mouse pointer, but no touchscreen.
    - wcummings 10y ago
      >they just weren't as good, by far. Exactly. The point of the demo was "this browser is just as good as one on a computer".
  - Mahn 10y ago
    Not the first internet browser on a phone though, just a vastly superior UX to what had been done before.
barnabee 10y ago
Also worth checking out the history of MindAlign [0] corporate group chat software. It's been around since pre-2000 (originally built in house by UBS) and has supported channels, offline chat history, bots and embeddable status widgets for years. So it's true, Slack isn't all that innovative - although they've done a much better sales job as MindAlign was only ever used (and still is) by a tiny number of companies! The fun thing is that Microsoft bought the product back in 2007 and sold it again pretty quickly but not before taking a bunch of the code and using it in their own group chat product (never as effectively as the original app, perhaps until now Slack have come along and shown them how valuable a product like that can be...) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindAlign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindAlign
pjmlp 10y ago
> We had chat rooms back in 1995. Not only that, on those days doing an IRC like server and chat client was a common programming exercise at the network programming classes on the university I attending.
vit05 10y ago
but it's not innovative, it's lucky. Or it is "time", or marketing, or just because it is mobile first. You could say the same about what's app, Instagram and others. Maybe it is not just about the big picture. Maybe they are successful because of small things like knowing they will always work when you need.
akst 10y ago
I think you're under estimating the amount of time and effort that goes into to making an ergonomic and approachable user interface, that both your technical teams and nontechnical teams enjoy using. Sure someone can replicate it, but I think you're underestimating the value of it. Like IRC could have the best features in the world but for the users who do not find it approachable it may as well not exist.

fairpx 10y ago

When Steve Jobs "Welcomed IBM" with a full page ad, it was fun. It fit the vibe of who he was and the slightly rebellious marketing campaigns Apple was running. Slack's "Welcome Microsoft" letter felt weird. It felt disconnected from the company and product many of us love and use every day. Might have been stronger to silently add a feature to Slack that lets you communicate with Microsoft Team's members.

loceng 10y ago
It definitely felt polar opposite to the tone of the wonderful animated animal character ad. Even visually the tone was too stark.
- loceng 10y ago
  They should really do another full-page ad saying they fucked up and that they thought they were being clever and their ego got the best of them. Make it visually appealing, full of animals ... that'd make me feel good about Slack again, like they're grownups and can admit mistakes.
twblalock 10y ago
Slack's letter appears to betray defensiveness and fear of competition, rather than a tongue-in-cheek attitude like Apple's ad did. I think that's why it seems weird.
- mbesto 10y ago
  It doesn't help that the snark from the CEO was awkward too: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793969175807098881 https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793969175807098881
nashashmi 10y ago
> It felt disconnected from the company. I felt a sort of haughtiness in the letter, like "you don't understand what chat is, but we do, and if you look at our success, you will never understand what chat is, but we will." This was not a letter of advice, but instead a letter of intimidation. But if I give them the benefit of doubt, maybe it was just an ad. Nothing more. Nothing less. One that touted the underlying coolness of Slack and the platonic posture of Microsoft. In all of this, Slack misses the point of Office 365 chat, e.g. tie users together when working on Office products, and build collaboration features for Office users. Maybe Slack slacked off on what the market was requiring now and was not able to keep itself up to date with what companies like Microsoft needed.

deleted 10y ago

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throwaway1892 10y ago

Or Slack may just die?

nilkn 10y ago

Our entire company switched to Slack within basically a day. While that's a big selling point for Slack's ease of use, it also means it'd be easy to switch away to a competitor within a day too.

dionidium 10y ago
Team communication tools don't suffer the same network-effect downsides to switching that other social apps do. The decision to switch can be made by one person. Everybody else is responding to a mandate.
- ryanto 10y ago
  While the decision can be made by one person, I'm not sure this is true. There is a big switching cost for most team tools. * There's going to be a lot of discussion and consensus building. Most of the team is going to have an opinion on the subject. * Setting up new accounts for team members, teaching team members how to use the new tool, and change management all take time. * Most teams have integrations within their chat apps, these will have to be switched or re-implemented to use new APIs. I think it's fair to say that most team tools have good moats. The longer the team has used a tool the stronger the moat becomes.
joesmo 10y ago
Unless you use their API. Or you invited external users. Or you use one of the other features that lock you in. In fact, I think Slack wrote the letter because they feel so confident that they've locked in their current customers. Switching to Slack is easy. Switching from Slack is not.
- rekoros 10y ago
  It's not necessarily true--Mattermost has a Slack-compatible API, and Sameroom can be used to mirror channels in both systems during the transition.
stephengillie 10y ago
My team has built numerous chatops bots and automation around Slack, mostly because of their great API. In a way, we're building our own lock-in, as any replacement would have to provide the same level of API access, from in-channel announcements to channel scraping for parsing by other systems. And it would require retooling the bots too.

_pmf_ 10y ago

Microsoft can just copy everything that Slack does right, give it away for a fraction or for free and there's nothing that they can do about it.

test001only 10y ago
If they give it away for free (as part of office365), is that not effectively anticompetitive behaviour?
- hrayr 10y ago
  Well, now that slack has so "genuinely" welcomed microsoft as a competitor, I don't think they can turn around and argue the opposite for the same offering.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    Slack is going to look dumb if it ever sues Microsoft. "But, your honor, Slack told the world they welcome competition from us in this infamous letter from November 2016!"
    - kirubakaran 10y ago
      I get your point, but, if an anti-trust suit ever happened, it would be DoJ that sues MS, not Slack.
- Delmania 10y ago
  You're not required to use Teams on Office365. The anti-competitive behavior would be if you couldn't turn it off, and it had to be on due to core functionality with Office. Most people just use o365 for exchange and office apps.
- apetresc 10y ago
  Microsoft has nothing close to a monopoly in this space, so no.

deleted 10y ago

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fcc_authorized 10y ago

> Or maybe it will evaporate into the ether, like Yammer, which Microsoft spent $1.2 billion on to seemingly no effect whatsoever. Ah, Silicon Valley. Where growing slowly is the same as being already dead

draw_down 10y ago
Nah, that thing was a clunker its whole life. They spent the billion because Twitter was much more fearsome at the time.

bdcravens 10y ago

Slack-like chat in an integrated offering isn't new. Zoho has offered this for some time: https://www.zoho.com/chat/ https://www.zoho.com/chat/

blahi 10y ago
Yeah buddy, but Microsoft has more employees than Zoho's customers. When practically every office employee on the planet is your customer, it is kind of different.

romanovcode 10y ago

I didn't see such a catastrophic marketing decision for a long time.

muad 10y ago

Slack is the most overrated startup of the last couple years. A native ui for IRC with some extra features. Their valuation is laughable and is a prime example of the bubble forming in vc tech.

randomsofr 10y ago
> with some extra features That's what got them where they are right now.

draw_down 10y ago

I can't believe this has become a scandal. It's a bit tone-deaf. Okay. There are worse things.

joshu 10y ago

My prior experience with some of the now leadership of Slack indicates that they don't have sufficient moral authority for this kind of commentary anyway.

kjbflsudfb 10y ago
Can you elaborate for those of us not in the loop?
CptJamesCook 10y ago
I've been treated unethically by four relatively senior employees of Slack myself. It never occurred to me to complain until they started acting so holier than thou.
- davesque 10y ago
  It's funny how achieving great success more as a result of luck than ingenuity seems to go hand-in-hand with arrogance.

hockeybias 10y ago

The writer's best line: "All this is harder than it looks," Slack warns. And then the company straps on its wax wings and flies into the sun.

antisthenes 10y ago

ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger and IRC were all entrenched at different points in time. To give a parallel, so were Teamspeak, Ventrillo, Mumble, Raidcall, Xfire or whatever have you (for gaming at least). Chat rooms and VOIP solutions are commodities and have been for a decade or more. Sure, some companies do some more value-add than others in terms of service and support, but at the end of the day it's still a commodity and no amount of rationalization and wishful thinking will change that. Which is why their mimicking of Apple ad seems condescending and arrogant. Personal PCs were at the top of the technological know-how in the early 80s. Glorified chat rooms haven't been new or high tech for 20 years (IRC is how old?). In fact the only innovation in recent years seems to be end-to-end encryption, which Microsoft seems to be on board with.

binarytransform 10y ago

What a badly written letter. No aim, no structure, no class.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wubalub 10y ago

I've been using skype for text messaging pretty constantly for the last 3 years, and I'm not sure why people hate it so. it has groups, 1-1 chat and video. Searching history can be a bit of a pain, but everything else seems to be there. Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing.

uryga 10y ago
I associate Skype with being slow and heavy for some reason. However it's possible that I picked this opinion up from other people and just started repeating it.
- noxToken 10y ago
  Are you a Linux user? Skype was slow for me on Linux after a certain update. It has also become very bloated over the years, but the Windows and Android clients have always been reliable for me.
- mxuribe 10y ago
  No, no...you are correct: skype (for business) is slow and heavy. At least it is for me.
jamra 10y ago
Slack gives you webhooks (post my team's commits to a chat room) and a great team-based chat. Groups in Skype can't really add the same value. Also, people tend to use their personal emails on Skype in my organization. Slack's sign up process makes more sense for an organization.
troycarlson 10y ago
One thing Skype doesn't do so well: when a new person joins they then have to add every other team member one-by-one. With Slack you simply join the team and have immediate access to everyone. Not a huge deal with small teams but adding 50+ people on Skype is a real PITA.
pritambarhate 10y ago
Skype on Android is terrible. It's slow to sync. It sometimes takes minutes to sync the messages. You get messages in the notifications, then you go to the chat and it's yet to sync. If they fix their mobile client, it would be pretty good.

asurty 10y ago

Microsoft has lost my trust in them after what happened to me with Skype. I was one of the many victims who had their account hacked. The worst part was how their customer support handled the issue. They almost gave me an ulcer by trying to convince me that it was probably a virus on my computer causing the problem. Look at your own Skype forums people! Be transparent, own up to having problems, and fix it! Communication is extremely important to me. That said, if all the employees in my company were only using 'Teams', 'Skype for business', 'Lync' or any other POS out of Microsoft then I'd be looking for a new job.

aidbiuasbi 10y ago
You seem like a real joy to work with.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

The essential issue here is this - starting with the Fortune 500, how far down the business size stack do you have to go before this question stops being a laughing out loud no-brainer: "Shall we buy more-or-less the same chat application from Microsoft or Slack?"

jdmichal 10y ago
Let's really talk about a no-brainer... How far down that stack do you have to go to before the Microsoft choice isn't included as part of some already-priced-and-paid package? Free Microsoft or paid Slack... "Nobody was ever fired for choosing IBM."
- lifeisstillgood 10y ago
  At my Fortune 500 client Office communicator / lync/ Skype for whatever is per seat chargeable. But as it's 3 bucks no one even blinks at signing it off. MS actually has done rather neatly out of that one

rrdharan 10y ago

Seems like the Slacklash I've been expecting has finally arrived.

mbarty 10y ago

So does this mean that Microsoft is 'UnDead'? Ref: Paul graham : Microsoft is Dead http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

romanovcode 10y ago
Looks like you didn't follow the news. Microsoft is the new Apple.

r2dnb 10y ago

Wow... So if I understand correctly : 1) They decided to mess with a company having $500B in-cash 2) Which decided to attack their low barrier-to-entry market 3) And took the unusual revealing step of building its own instead of buying 4) And is playing in its comfort zone (productivity tools, Office, API, cloud-scale integration points : azure, azure marketplace etc...) 5) While having a pool of 90M trustful paying customers and the ability to provide them the same offering for free in less than 1 second. The worst they could do was to help Microsoft define this offering as a direct competition. But this is just what they did with this arrogant and high-schoolish "Welcome" letter. What really has me roll my eyes here is the way they think that they can be frontal with a corporation like Microsoft playing in its comfort zone and having the dollars we know they have. This will cost them a lot. You can't easily backtrack from that and even if they somehow manage to do it, by the time they get there, Teams will have already seized a good chunk of their user base.

blahi 10y ago
0) Ask said company for a whooping $8B in cash.
dingdongding 10y ago
Who said Microsoft has $500B in cash? They have ~$100B in cash
K0SM0S 10y ago
Or maybe they knew all that, being the communication gurus that they claim to be, and it was a desperate move to be bought, essentially saying: "hey MS you got cash and loads of engineers but you can still fail at that because _reasons_; we have the know-how, consider buying us too". J/k, but who knows.
asp_hornet 10y ago
"Making my eyes roll" sums my feelings on this perfectly. Dear Slack, We built the cloud service, web framework, programming language and operating system our Team app runs on as well as the IDE it was built with, the source control its stored in and the office apps it integrates with, oh and 2 of the browsers we tested it on. The chat part really wasn't that hard. We'll probably be OK. - Microsoft

yarrel 10y ago

Welcome IBM. Seriously.

CptJamesCook 10y ago

What a smug, sanctimonious piece of writing. It's hard to imagine that anyone who read this came away with a positive perception of Slack.

627467 10y ago

Between this and the debate around the new macbooks/surface-studio, Microsoft is having very good week in terms on gaining some mindshare and good-will from the technorati and the (traditionally) anti-microsoft press. Slack is great. I'm part of many slack communities and until they move I'll stay (although they are all in the free-tier). While the many millions who are already part of the O365 subscription base (and who probably don't even know slack or why they need them) won't have reason to start a community on Slack I think Slack is safe in the short-run with those who don't pay the "MS-tax" or those who are already part of existing slack communities. And while Slack is a great product (as the IRC on steroids that it is) it is easy to replicate and so MS now did.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

Does Slack even understand that there are MANY enterprise companies that don't use Slack simply because it's NOT Microsoft? Hubris is rarely a good quality.

jdmichal 10y ago
Does that really matter, since those companies by definition would never be Slack customers? It's not like Slack could ever become a Microsoft product -- barring the obvious buyout, which is not likely to ever happen since Microsoft rolled their own. So if they aren't buying now because it's not Microsoft, I don't see how Slack hubris changes anything in that equation.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  If (when, likely) Teams gets momentum, other companies will start making a choice between Slack and Teams. This could start cutting into Slacks market share.
blakeyrat 10y ago
More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use HipChat instead, because it is. Either way, this is a HUGE market Slack hasn't even begun to touch. (Although I see they now have a "coming soon!" banner on their homepage.)
- stable-point 10y ago
  > More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use HipChat instead, because it is. Just one data-point, but: my employer went with HipChat because we needed an on-premise solution. (We were moving away from IRC because we needed persistent chat history for remote employees. Using IRC bouncers was considered too high of a barrier-to-entry, given we wanted non-technical employees to join the conversation too).
ctide 10y ago
Actually, they don't use Slack because Slack would be the most expensive piece of software they license. The enterprise model from Slack is so prohibitively expensive it's like they're intentionally trying to drive away large customers.

mdevere 10y ago

This is an opportunity to MS to reply in kind and demonstrate a sense of humour.

smegel 10y ago

> threaded conversations How does an instant messaging app not have threaded conversations?

sebastianconcpt 10y ago

Surprised by the tone of this. It's Slack declaring cultural war to Microsoft. All values subverted, what is praise is actually negative admiration (envy basically), probably based on fear. Kind of gramscian stuff what they did. Very unexpected and unnecessary. Unless they wanted to do some noise because of marketing? I guess they got scared but doesn't sound like Slack needs that. Wonder why they bought this battle this soon.

rcy 10y ago

I think the intended audience of this ad is people who haven't heard of or use Slack but are interested in this new thing Microsoft is doing with the hope of poaching some users. It's not actually intended to convince Microsoft of anything, obviously.

dfar1 10y ago

Can someone link me to a hi-res image.. or do I have to buy the newspaper in order to read the ad?

kjbflsudfb 10y ago
https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft-8d20965d2849#.1o0pg14v2 https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft-8d20965d2849#.1o0pg14v2
- dfar1 10y ago
  thank you thank you!

StreamBright 10y ago

Let the IRC wars begin. :) Seriously, I am not sure what to think when a chat company is worth 1 billion. Sure it has nice UI but so does HipChat and a bunch of other tools. For me, Slack is just one of the many communication platforms I used ever since, starting with IRC, ICQ and other apps and protocols from the 90s. I am not particullary fond on Microsoft but they deliver. I cannot forget the initial uproar when they introduced their entering the gaming console industry with Xbox, and look at them now. Slack has to offer a bit more than just a nice UI for async messaging to be relevant in the corporate communication space in the next 5 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#History

intellegacy 10y ago

terrible judgment by the CEO to send this.

davesque 10y ago

The letter just makes me feel like the people calling the shots over at Slack are immature and can't handle the realities of running a competitive business. It just comes off as a disguised advertisement and I doubt it really earned them any more customers.

chiefalchemist 10y ago

Apples and oranges. The MS product is a paid version within a particular target/universe. That said, evidently, MS didn't study the never-rose and fell story of Google Wave. In short, collaboration needs people. Any people. All people. One outside within the team and a platform becomes irrelevant to the matter at hand. In addition, the communication market is bigger than the market for soda. Genuine or otherwise Slack and the market will benefit from competition. There's still plenty of upside for Slack, Microsoft and perhaps one or two more.

sleepnaught 10y ago

Why are we analyzing this as though it's supposed to be an honest statement from Slack (ie. arguing they're not an open platform or that Slack isn't actually as special and snowflakey as the ad makes them out to be)? It's pure marketing. Could argue it comes across too insincerely for positive impact, not sure if that will be true for the general audience reading it or not.

nikolay 10y ago

Slack copied Yammer and HipChat... and now it's angry that Microsoft stole some of its unique features - such a hypocrisy!

kwikiel 10y ago

Tangentially related. I'm using rocket chat - it's open source (MIT) alternative to slack. And i think it would be easier/safe for companies to adopt self hosted solution or use already trusted company like Microsoft. Slack had great UX - but one cannot compete only with that because it could be copied. Maybe Slack have some comparative advantage that could not be copied.

intended 10y ago

> "All this is harder than it looks," Slack warns. And then the company straps on its wax wings and flies into the sun. That was a very nice turn of phrase.