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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 p

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.

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.