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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

by 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.
    - fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
      Depends upon age. Anyone in the UK under 30-35 grew up using MSN messenger so even the least technical of non-technical people are happy using something that as far as they can see is basically the same as MSN.
geofft 10y ago
Email does the stored-history thing. So does every other mobile IM app I have (the built-in SMS app, Google Hangouts, BBM, etc.). Furthermore, in the IRC world that's not uncommon either; Quasseldroid does this. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembilen.quasseldroid&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembile...
- Latty 10y ago
  Email sucks for real-time communcation. Most of the other IM applications you list suck for multi-person communication. Quassel looks good, but clearly harder to set up than Slack. People always point at everything and go 'this stuff existed!' - even if all Slack did was pull everything together into a single cohesive environment, that's useful to people, it provides value. I'm shocked people are shocked by that idea.
  - geofft 10y ago
    It absolutely provides value! But I don't think the commenter above is claiming that it doesn't provide value. They're claiming it's not innovative. Some of the most important work in the tech industry is highly valuable and not one bit innovative. CRUD apps that bridge data from two different parts of an organization are amazingly valuable and amazingly important, but have no innovation. There's nothing wrong with that CRUD app—but there's nothing making that app better from another CRUD app that also bridges those two departments. None of this thread is saying that Slack is bad. It's not criticizing Slack. It's not saying people are wrong to use it. It's just saying that people can jump ship very easily because there's nothing innovative. Slack is great. I use it daily and love it. But the things I like about it aren't tied to Slack the company in any way, and it would be easy for me to love Microsoft Teams (or some hypothetical open-source, competent-at-UX, mobile-enabled version of IRC) every bit as much. Slack doesn't seem to realize that.
    - Latty 10y ago
      Yeah, except people were saying they were hoping Microsoft would kill Slack, as though it's some cardinal sin to not be innovative. (And I contest that, Slack definitely bought things together that other people didn't. It's obvious in hindsight, but so was Dropbox, for example).
dleslie 10y ago
Adding a backlog to IRC is something that has been around almost as long as IRC. Bots to sit in channels to passively log; bots which act to send messages to people who are presently offline, at the time at which they come online again; and so on. Adding a log to IRC isn't particularly innovative. Slack's value is almost entirely in its user engagement, not its technology.
- Latty 10y ago
  Bots? It's awkward. In Slack, you scroll up. No bot is going to be as simple to use and obvious as that. If you do manage to integrate it that well, you will need to set up the bot, which is a separate service, get your clients to understand the bot, etc... It's like suggesting a tin can with strings to solve a communication problem. A rough, imperfect solution. Who gives a damn about innovative? It may have been obvious and simple, but if no one else is doing it well, and they do, sneering at it seems dumb. They made a good call, and are profiting from it.
  - kzisme 10y ago
    I'm sure OP was using bots as an example - IRC bouncers exist ,and if that's too technical for you then there are multiple other solutions.
    - Latty 10y ago
      Sure, and none of those solutions are as good as 'scroll up' after clicking five buttons to make a slack team. By quite a way.
      - donum 10y ago
        When I used a Bouncer, all messages that I missed just were there after logging in. I could just scroll up. Easy!
        kzisme 10y ago
fizzbatter 10y ago
Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. There's no hate coming from me - i'm just a realist. Slack didn't do anything amazing. It just did things right. Which is unfortunate for all of us users, as it took so many years to do things right. Unfortunately for slack though, they showed what is a good UX.. how hard do you think it is to copy that UX? Not easy, sure, but the template is there. Spend some time copying Slack, and i think you can manage to make Slack.Clone.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  > I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. This reminds me a lot of HN dismissing Dropbox on the original show HN or something: "We have git, rsync, FTP. We can hack something like this together in an afternoon." Except that was before Dropbox went ahead to become a huge success. This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]
  - fizzbatter 10y ago
    So what? you don't have to innovate to be a success, that's where a lot of HNers get stuck imo. Sure, i'm not calling Slack amazing - but i very clearly said i use slack, love it, pay for it and recommend it. I used Dropbox too. I don't think anyone here is claiming Slack isn't a massive success. Nor that the product is any less great because it's not innovative. A comment like: > This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-] seems to suggest "we" are somehow wrong.. but i'm not sure where. Is my above statement somehow wrong? Or are you simply linking success and innovation where as i am not?
    - Latty 10y ago
      The general response in the thread was hoping that Slack would get gutted and dismissing it as trivial. Not being 'innovative' isn't a sin. Thinking there is nothing to learn from slack sounds like a mistaking to me.
Eridrus 10y ago
Slack is undoubtedly better than IRC, but so is Flowdock or HipChat and the other players that existed in this space before. Slack's innovation was getting a huge funding round, blowing it on advertising to mainstream non-tech markets and trying to build a competitive moat with 3rd party integrations that other developers are incentivized to make on their own due to Slack's large user base.
- KevanM 10y ago
  I only heard of Slack through people showing off their ridiculous bots on Twitter. I think the first was the bot that told you off for using gendered pronouns. The evangelism it has fostered has been a great promoter, however now I think if our company (non-tech) adopted it - it would be a massive distraction.
- dleslie 10y ago
  I prefer IRC because I can grep the logs. Slack's search is next to useless.
wang_li 10y ago
You've just described iMessage.
threatofrain 10y ago
I didn't read Mc_Big_G's post as negating the value of Slack, but rather the technological innovativeness of Slack, and when I look at HipChat, Kato, or any of the various competitors in that space when Slack was born, I don't see why Slack's victory was so obvious. That's why I put a little more weight on the luck theory.
- Latty 10y ago
  They provided a ton of value by bringing things together, by making everything easy and work intuatively. I guess my point is I think too many people are indeed dismissing slack as being lucky, or just pushing with heavy marketing, when I think they actually did something of value we can learn from.
  - threatofrain 10y ago
    But what would you say about HipChat or other competitors? Why didn't HipChat win? Was there a critical feature they missed or botched? Providing value is not the whole story. That's why I begin looking for alternative factors -- like luck and circumstance.
    - yarou 10y ago
      Ultimately, the deal breaker for me is that Slack is not on-prem. Microsoft's solution will be, and that will be the true end for Slack.
    - BoorishBears 10y ago
      Marketing
    - blakeyrat 10y ago
      HipChat hasn't botched anything, but they also haven't done anything really well. HipChat is merely... ok I guess? The thing keeping HipChat going in the face of Slack is that Slack can't be used on-premises, which is HUGE for an extremely large percentage of business. HipChat hasn't improved as fast as Slack because they haven't needed to-- since no HIPAA-compliant business (to give just one example) can use Slack at all, the two products don't really compete with each other currently. That doesn't apply to this new Microsoft solution, which will probably kill-off HipChat long before it kills off Slack. Unless Atlassian really gets their butt moving and starts improving their product.
empath75 10y ago
I work at the company that popularized internet messaging in the 90s. We used our own product exclusively for interoffice communication, until slack came out, and slack totally replaced it within the course of a couple of months, totally organically. Literally nobody at the company uses our own product any more.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  Yahoo Messenger, right?
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    Personally, my money would would be on AOL (by a large margin), followed closely by ICQ. MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, although relatively popular, were latecomers.
serge2k 10y ago
> 'Adding a pretty UI' isn't a zero-effort or skill thing. It's not a huge barrier to entry though. I think the hate comes from the ridiculous letter.
EpicEng 10y ago
MS has already added enough value for us to switch over. I work in life sciences and the fact that they are HIPAA compliant makes this a no trainer for us. I don't think people are hating on slack here, it's just that what they do isn't nearly as hard to u.plement as they seem to think it is, so a letter like this just comes off as pompous.
forgetsusername 10y ago
>Having your messages stored while you are offline is hugely valuable. Sure. Nice feature. hardly game-changing or innovative. Our company is just getting on the Slack train. I'm honestly underwhelmed with the experience. I suppose I expected a lot given the hype and valuation. My main gripe is the lack of UI customization.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wahern 10y ago
XMPP/Jabber has always supported offline message storage. I don't hate Slack; heck, I've never even used it. But like _many_ people I'm disappointed that we still don't have a non-proprietary, federated IM system. That leaves most of us ambivalent, and some of us bitter. IRC is still around, but IRC isn't a substitute for IM. IRC can't be truly federated because there's no global directory or routing the way there is for SMS or XMPP. XMPP is still around. I can even chat with a few GTalk stragglers, and quite a few tech-savvy people still run their own XMPP servers. But it seems to be on the decline. For a brief period it was gaining corporate momentum, but that stopped years ago. My company still uses XMPP for corporate IM. Fortunately, nobody can agree whether to move to IRC, HipChat, or Slack. So for now I can actually instant message with co-workers from my personal XMPP server/account. That was actually useful when I was on contract and didn't have (or want to deal with) juggling and logging onto corporate accounts. Somebody else suggested Slack was like the iPhone, in that it offered features and usability previously unimagined. I don't think so. The iPhone wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a _phone_. It would have just been a fancy minicomputer if it didn't have the built-in capability to interoperate with any other phone, and participate in the global federated telephone and SMS network. For all of Slacks features, they pale in comparison to what _could_ be. They could still create a better IM client, with better searching, indexing, etc, etc. But if it supported global federation a la XMPP, the sky would be the limit. Instead of the Internet people are simply excited about an upgraded AOL experience.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  Just because you didn't mention it, Matrix https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ is another option. It supports federation, services (like IRC bridges), encryption, push notifications, offline storage and has some really nice clients for Android and iOS. I found it really cool that I could spend ~half an hour setting it up on my own server then just pop in on chats on another server.
lokedhs 10y ago
It's not zero effort, but it's low effort. Implementing the important features of Slack (specifically the ones you mention) is not hard. I know that because me and one other person did that as a weekend project over a few months[1]. It's not because we're the most amazing developers in the world, but (Sure, not as poslished but that would only take one more designer to fix.) What I'm saying here is that GP is correct, and you are significantly overestimating the value of what Slack provides. They have the mindshare right now, but that's really all. They don't even the benefits a company like Facebook has, since a Slack competitor is still useful if a small number of people use it, as opposed to social media companies who are not useful at all unless they have a large userbase. [1] https://github.com/cicakhq/potato https://github.com/cicakhq/potato
carterehsmith 10y ago
> 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. Perhaps you should also try using email. Or SMS. They can do that.
- flamedoge 10y ago
  Amazing!
quanticle 10y ago
>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. Move Slack into IRC's position, and Microsoft Teams into Slack's position, and you can see what Microsoft is trying to do. The problem with Slack is that right now, they're caught in the middle. They're not a consumer-facing company (at least, their profit model isn't consumer-facing), but, at the same time, they haven't invested in the boring schlep work (auditing, compliance, etc.) to make their product truly competitive to large enterprises. So they're stuck in this small-to-medium business space, while Microsoft is trying to vault ahead of them to capture the large enterprises. From what I've seen, this is pretty much Microsoft's cloud strategy in a nutshell: take other companies' products, do the boring schlep work to add auditing, compliance, Active Directory Integration, etc. and then sell it to enterprises as a cloud service. This appears to be Azure's strategy against AWS, Office 365's strategy against Google Docs, Visual Studio Team Services' strategy against Github, and now, Microsoft Teams' strategy against Slack. It's a brilliant strategy that plays to Microsoft's strengths - knowing the needs of enterprise customers - while relying on the broader market to fill in for its weaknesses in discovering new products and doing UI design.

by Latty 10y ago

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.
  - fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
    Depends upon age. Anyone in the UK under 30-35 grew up using MSN messenger so even the least technical of non-technical people are happy using something that as far as they can see is basically the same as MSN.

geofft 10y ago

Email does the stored-history thing. So does every other mobile IM app I have (the built-in SMS app, Google Hangouts, BBM, etc.). Furthermore, in the IRC world that's not uncommon either; Quasseldroid does this. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembilen.quasseldroid&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembile...

Latty 10y ago
Email sucks for real-time communcation. Most of the other IM applications you list suck for multi-person communication. Quassel looks good, but clearly harder to set up than Slack. People always point at everything and go 'this stuff existed!' - even if all Slack did was pull everything together into a single cohesive environment, that's useful to people, it provides value. I'm shocked people are shocked by that idea.
- geofft 10y ago
  It absolutely provides value! But I don't think the commenter above is claiming that it doesn't provide value. They're claiming it's not innovative. Some of the most important work in the tech industry is highly valuable and not one bit innovative. CRUD apps that bridge data from two different parts of an organization are amazingly valuable and amazingly important, but have no innovation. There's nothing wrong with that CRUD app—but there's nothing making that app better from another CRUD app that also bridges those two departments. None of this thread is saying that Slack is bad. It's not criticizing Slack. It's not saying people are wrong to use it. It's just saying that people can jump ship very easily because there's nothing innovative. Slack is great. I use it daily and love it. But the things I like about it aren't tied to Slack the company in any way, and it would be easy for me to love Microsoft Teams (or some hypothetical open-source, competent-at-UX, mobile-enabled version of IRC) every bit as much. Slack doesn't seem to realize that.
  - Latty 10y ago
    Yeah, except people were saying they were hoping Microsoft would kill Slack, as though it's some cardinal sin to not be innovative. (And I contest that, Slack definitely bought things together that other people didn't. It's obvious in hindsight, but so was Dropbox, for example).

dleslie 10y ago

Adding a backlog to IRC is something that has been around almost as long as IRC. Bots to sit in channels to passively log; bots which act to send messages to people who are presently offline, at the time at which they come online again; and so on. Adding a log to IRC isn't particularly innovative. Slack's value is almost entirely in its user engagement, not its technology.

Latty 10y ago
Bots? It's awkward. In Slack, you scroll up. No bot is going to be as simple to use and obvious as that. If you do manage to integrate it that well, you will need to set up the bot, which is a separate service, get your clients to understand the bot, etc... It's like suggesting a tin can with strings to solve a communication problem. A rough, imperfect solution. Who gives a damn about innovative? It may have been obvious and simple, but if no one else is doing it well, and they do, sneering at it seems dumb. They made a good call, and are profiting from it.
- kzisme 10y ago
  I'm sure OP was using bots as an example - IRC bouncers exist ,and if that's too technical for you then there are multiple other solutions.
  - Latty 10y ago
    Sure, and none of those solutions are as good as 'scroll up' after clicking five buttons to make a slack team. By quite a way.
    - donum 10y ago
      When I used a Bouncer, all messages that I missed just were there after logging in. I could just scroll up. Easy!
      - kzisme 10y ago

fizzbatter 10y ago

Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. There's no hate coming from me - i'm just a realist. Slack didn't do anything amazing. It just did things right. Which is unfortunate for all of us users, as it took so many years to do things right. Unfortunately for slack though, they showed what is a good UX.. how hard do you think it is to copy that UX? Not easy, sure, but the template is there. Spend some time copying Slack, and i think you can manage to make Slack.Clone.

reitanqild 10y ago
> I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. This reminds me a lot of HN dismissing Dropbox on the original show HN or something: "We have git, rsync, FTP. We can hack something like this together in an afternoon." Except that was before Dropbox went ahead to become a huge success. This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]
- fizzbatter 10y ago
  So what? you don't have to innovate to be a success, that's where a lot of HNers get stuck imo. Sure, i'm not calling Slack amazing - but i very clearly said i use slack, love it, pay for it and recommend it. I used Dropbox too. I don't think anyone here is claiming Slack isn't a massive success. Nor that the product is any less great because it's not innovative. A comment like: > This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-] seems to suggest "we" are somehow wrong.. but i'm not sure where. Is my above statement somehow wrong? Or are you simply linking success and innovation where as i am not?
  - Latty 10y ago
    The general response in the thread was hoping that Slack would get gutted and dismissing it as trivial. Not being 'innovative' isn't a sin. Thinking there is nothing to learn from slack sounds like a mistaking to me.

Eridrus 10y ago

Slack is undoubtedly better than IRC, but so is Flowdock or HipChat and the other players that existed in this space before. Slack's innovation was getting a huge funding round, blowing it on advertising to mainstream non-tech markets and trying to build a competitive moat with 3rd party integrations that other developers are incentivized to make on their own due to Slack's large user base.

KevanM 10y ago
I only heard of Slack through people showing off their ridiculous bots on Twitter. I think the first was the bot that told you off for using gendered pronouns. The evangelism it has fostered has been a great promoter, however now I think if our company (non-tech) adopted it - it would be a massive distraction.
dleslie 10y ago
I prefer IRC because I can grep the logs. Slack's search is next to useless.

wang_li 10y ago

You've just described iMessage.

threatofrain 10y ago

I didn't read Mc_Big_G's post as negating the value of Slack, but rather the technological innovativeness of Slack, and when I look at HipChat, Kato, or any of the various competitors in that space when Slack was born, I don't see why Slack's victory was so obvious. That's why I put a little more weight on the luck theory.

Latty 10y ago
They provided a ton of value by bringing things together, by making everything easy and work intuatively. I guess my point is I think too many people are indeed dismissing slack as being lucky, or just pushing with heavy marketing, when I think they actually did something of value we can learn from.
- threatofrain 10y ago
  But what would you say about HipChat or other competitors? Why didn't HipChat win? Was there a critical feature they missed or botched? Providing value is not the whole story. That's why I begin looking for alternative factors -- like luck and circumstance.
  - yarou 10y ago
    Ultimately, the deal breaker for me is that Slack is not on-prem. Microsoft's solution will be, and that will be the true end for Slack.
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    Marketing
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    HipChat hasn't botched anything, but they also haven't done anything really well. HipChat is merely... ok I guess? The thing keeping HipChat going in the face of Slack is that Slack can't be used on-premises, which is HUGE for an extremely large percentage of business. HipChat hasn't improved as fast as Slack because they haven't needed to-- since no HIPAA-compliant business (to give just one example) can use Slack at all, the two products don't really compete with each other currently. That doesn't apply to this new Microsoft solution, which will probably kill-off HipChat long before it kills off Slack. Unless Atlassian really gets their butt moving and starts improving their product.

empath75 10y ago

I work at the company that popularized internet messaging in the 90s. We used our own product exclusively for interoffice communication, until slack came out, and slack totally replaced it within the course of a couple of months, totally organically. Literally nobody at the company uses our own product any more.

beamatronic 10y ago
Yahoo Messenger, right?
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  Personally, my money would would be on AOL (by a large margin), followed closely by ICQ. MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, although relatively popular, were latecomers.

serge2k 10y ago

> 'Adding a pretty UI' isn't a zero-effort or skill thing. It's not a huge barrier to entry though. I think the hate comes from the ridiculous letter.

EpicEng 10y ago

MS has already added enough value for us to switch over. I work in life sciences and the fact that they are HIPAA compliant makes this a no trainer for us. I don't think people are hating on slack here, it's just that what they do isn't nearly as hard to u.plement as they seem to think it is, so a letter like this just comes off as pompous.

forgetsusername 10y ago

>Having your messages stored while you are offline is hugely valuable. Sure. Nice feature. hardly game-changing or innovative. Our company is just getting on the Slack train. I'm honestly underwhelmed with the experience. I suppose I expected a lot given the hype and valuation. My main gripe is the lack of UI customization.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wahern 10y ago

XMPP/Jabber has always supported offline message storage. I don't hate Slack; heck, I've never even used it. But like _many_ people I'm disappointed that we still don't have a non-proprietary, federated IM system. That leaves most of us ambivalent, and some of us bitter. IRC is still around, but IRC isn't a substitute for IM. IRC can't be truly federated because there's no global directory or routing the way there is for SMS or XMPP. XMPP is still around. I can even chat with a few GTalk stragglers, and quite a few tech-savvy people still run their own XMPP servers. But it seems to be on the decline. For a brief period it was gaining corporate momentum, but that stopped years ago. My company still uses XMPP for corporate IM. Fortunately, nobody can agree whether to move to IRC, HipChat, or Slack. So for now I can actually instant message with co-workers from my personal XMPP server/account. That was actually useful when I was on contract and didn't have (or want to deal with) juggling and logging onto corporate accounts. Somebody else suggested Slack was like the iPhone, in that it offered features and usability previously unimagined. I don't think so. The iPhone wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a _phone_. It would have just been a fancy minicomputer if it didn't have the built-in capability to interoperate with any other phone, and participate in the global federated telephone and SMS network. For all of Slacks features, they pale in comparison to what _could_ be. They could still create a better IM client, with better searching, indexing, etc, etc. But if it supported global federation a la XMPP, the sky would be the limit. Instead of the Internet people are simply excited about an upgraded AOL experience.

Veratyr 10y ago
Just because you didn't mention it, Matrix https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ is another option. It supports federation, services (like IRC bridges), encryption, push notifications, offline storage and has some really nice clients for Android and iOS. I found it really cool that I could spend ~half an hour setting it up on my own server then just pop in on chats on another server.

lokedhs 10y ago

It's not zero effort, but it's low effort. Implementing the important features of Slack (specifically the ones you mention) is not hard. I know that because me and one other person did that as a weekend project over a few months[1]. It's not because we're the most amazing developers in the world, but (Sure, not as poslished but that would only take one more designer to fix.) What I'm saying here is that GP is correct, and you are significantly overestimating the value of what Slack provides. They have the mindshare right now, but that's really all. They don't even the benefits a company like Facebook has, since a Slack competitor is still useful if a small number of people use it, as opposed to social media companies who are not useful at all unless they have a large userbase. [1] https://github.com/cicakhq/potato https://github.com/cicakhq/potato

carterehsmith 10y ago

> 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. Perhaps you should also try using email. Or SMS. They can do that.

flamedoge 10y ago
Amazing!

quanticle 10y ago

>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. Move Slack into IRC's position, and Microsoft Teams into Slack's position, and you can see what Microsoft is trying to do. The problem with Slack is that right now, they're caught in the middle. They're not a consumer-facing company (at least, their profit model isn't consumer-facing), but, at the same time, they haven't invested in the boring schlep work (auditing, compliance, etc.) to make their product truly competitive to large enterprises. So they're stuck in this small-to-medium business space, while Microsoft is trying to vault ahead of them to capture the large enterprises. From what I've seen, this is pretty much Microsoft's cloud strategy in a nutshell: take other companies' products, do the boring schlep work to add auditing, compliance, Active Directory Integration, etc. and then sell it to enterprises as a cloud service. This appears to be Azure's strategy against AWS, Office 365's strategy against Google Docs, Visual Studio Team Services' strategy against Github, and now, Microsoft Teams' strategy against Slack. It's a brilliant strategy that plays to Microsoft's strengths - knowing the needs of enterprise customers - while relying on the broader market to fill in for its weaknesses in discovering new products and doing UI design.