16 ms·

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 c

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.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      This was my feeling as well.
    - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
      But MS already operated a widely used webchat, profile, and community network, before social networks were a thing. As usual, MS did a meh implementation ahead of the market, got scooped by a bunch of slick implementations, and will come back a few years later with a relatively solid enterprise offering. MS is going to bundle LinkedIn with a Slack-clone tied to their CMS and AI chat systems, and provide an easy-to-scale-in-private-cloud platform to enterprise. Part of their Azure smart services. That's all people mean: Slack did a pretty good job, but it's very similar to stuff MS has done before, and there's not really a secret sauce trench. So MS will probably be able to win a lot of the enterprise market.
      - GFischer 10y ago
        Well, isn't what you're describing the Teams software that prompted Slack's letter? Only tied to Office365, not Azure and LinkedIn. https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat...
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    >> 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. Thanks, it was just an attempt to not talk down to anyone even if I disagree.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
- mercer 10y ago
  I have the feeling doing Dropbox right is a lot more difficult than doing Slack right. I still use Dropbox because somehow Drive and iCloud still don't work quite as nicely as Dropbox does. But I might be wrong; I've never built chat or file-sync apps.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  It's not about what can be done, it's about prior art. I've used xmpp chats with a couple of clients since well before slack and I'd struggle to think of a feature in slack that I hadn't used before.
  - scaryclam 10y ago
    We're actually investigating switching over to an XMPP server and completely ditching slack. No-one in the company uses it, no-one likes using it and XMPP just seems to work.
    - croon 10y ago
      I wasn't a pro about it, but I set up and ran our XMPP at a previous company. What I saw as a real problem was a split between clients, servers, modules over the protocol, so it definitely wasn't painless in what functionality worked between one server, modules, a client and inevitably someone choosing a different client. You might do it better than me and it ends up working great for you, or it's gotten better in the last few years since I tried it, but if my experiences are any indication I wouldn't recommend that route. YMMV. But if you don't like Slack, I'm guessing Mattermost is out of the question as well. I'm still using IRC in a lot of places which "just works", but obviously that is missing a lot of features and fluff of newer technologies, even if some can be retrofitted in. Please et me know what you decide and your success since it's still relevant for me in a couple of places.
- jpalomaki 10y ago
  Both Slack and Dropbox are simple ideas, executed extremely well. I see that for both of them the challenge is there's quite many customers who don't demand the best execution, but can settle for not-so-good-but-a-bit-cheaper alternative. Both companies can probably make well enough money to survive and achieve growth, but maybe not such an exponential growth the investors where expecting.
mercer 10y ago
Plus, Microsoft can throw engineering power at integrating their 'clone' with all their other tools. While I can't seem myself buying into their ecosystem anytime soon, that's a huge advantage that will be hard for Slack to compete with.
- Latty 10y ago
  I'd imaginethe developers of the products integrating their own things into Slack would give more and better thingts than Microsoft integrating other products into their things. We'll have to see if people start shifting where they integrate.
  - mercer 10y ago
    Good point. I'm too far away from Moft's ecosystem to be able to tell how well they can execute such integrations...
  - doingmyting 10y ago
    Integrating things outside the MS stack yes. But if Slack ever decides to target the enterprise in a big way there is simply no way they'll out-compete MS with the offering they have at the moment and no way they'll integrate enterprise grade tools with the level of security and scalability that MS would be able to provide.
Latty 10y ago
It sounds a lot like all the people that bash StackOverflow - "It's just posts and a voting system, I could write that in a week!", ignoring all the complexity and design behind it, operating at scale and cultivating the environment. If people need something to be 'amazing' not to put it down, and 'amazing' doesn't include doing the right things to be highly successful... If no one else did it, was it really so obvious?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Microsoft has a well regarded developer network and Q&A system regarding Microsoft technologies, at least in my (limited to primarily Azure) experience. Similarly, Microsoft has already operated a widely used integrated chat, profile, and community system at scale. Given their recent pushes, it wouldn't be entirely surprising for them to bring back similar platforms for business users integrated with LinkedIn. That would eat a lot of Slack's potential big clients, because MS has a history of enterprise grade support on products like that, and Slack has scale issues for large orgs.
  - irodoramatic 10y ago
    For enterprise companies that already use a lot of MS services, and which have tight security policies on what software can be used/licensed/installed, an MS Slack clone could be a wonderful thing for employees.
    - ganset 10y ago
      Having worked for a company with security concerns and tightly coupled to Microsoft, Lynx fucking sucks and a MS Slack alternative would have made my short time there much more bearable.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    Does Slack even allow on-premise installs yet? That instantly disqualified them from the last 3 jobs I've had. (All of which had data protection issues that prevented them from using off-premises IM systems, mostly HIPAA regulations.) Microsoft's got that market already sewn-up, right out of the gate.
intoverflow2 10y ago
>What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I don't think they even do that well, it's a complete nightmare finding anything on slack beyond the last 24 hours. What Slack did well was branding and marketing.
- vehementi 10y ago
  Marketing yeah. They weren't the first to do the obvious "make IRC in the cloud with persistent storage and notifications/app/etc." I had been waiting for, just the first I heard of. Do you have any other issues, just curious or is their search algorithm enough to make the Slack platform a net bad UX?
- kzisme 10y ago
  I haven't met a single person (unless they were ~really~ non technical) that enjoyed using slack. It never works the way I expect it to work, and very simple things that you can do within IRC takes multiple steps in Slack.
  - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
    i enjoy the built in gifs and emojis but thats about it
    - kzisme 10y ago
      When I used it at a previous job emojis/gifs were quite fun, but after awhile I stopped using them. I feel like they get in the way more than anything - and other platforms can still implement those just as easily.
  - hosh 10y ago
    I enjoy using Slack. There were a lot of nuances that together adds up into substantial improvements over Hipchat or IRC. I am also a remote software engineer who have been working on distributed teams for the past 8 years. I've tried a bunch of different things to collaborate remotely, including IRC. Your mileage may vary.
swasheck 10y ago
"Hate" no longer means "hate." It means "disagree with another at any level."
- Latty 10y ago
  People were saying they hope Microsoft would put Slack out of business. That's not disagreeing, that's actively disliking them.
  - swasheck 10y ago
    But even dislike != hate.
yoz-y 10y ago
After having read http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding-innovation/ http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding... I think that people often misuse the term innovation. From my understanding Slack is innovative, precisely because it is useful. Its novelty is not in features but in the delivery. Yes IRC had all the features but it is hardly something one can recommend. Slack made the long process of setting up a server, shell/bouncer, dcc a matter of a few clicks. On top of that they provide a unique client for everybody which means that everybody sees the same thing. Throw in the integrations and you have a very compelling package. The features one by one are not new or revolutionary, but they were the first to push the whole deal out.
dingaling 10y ago
> Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I wouldn't even credit them with that. 20 minutes ago I yet again pressed up-arrow to scroll up one line to see a message off the top of the page and yet again it dropped me into an editing prompt for my last message. What? And then there's the click-click-click of jumping between channels to see the latest messages, instead of having some form of summary. In my experience people tolerate the UI of Slack, they don't praise it.
- leesalminen 10y ago
  I've long thought that an aggregated screen holding all unread message (with a button to expand +/- 5 lines) was sorely missing from Slack.
  - Fishkins 10y ago
    This is a newish feature that's at least close to what you want https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/226410907-View-all-your-unread-messages https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/226410907-View-all-...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - solublebear 10y ago
    Sounds like an email inbox
mamcx 10y ago
Is like to say cooking is just about mix ingredients.

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.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    This was my feeling as well.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    But MS already operated a widely used webchat, profile, and community network, before social networks were a thing. As usual, MS did a meh implementation ahead of the market, got scooped by a bunch of slick implementations, and will come back a few years later with a relatively solid enterprise offering. MS is going to bundle LinkedIn with a Slack-clone tied to their CMS and AI chat systems, and provide an easy-to-scale-in-private-cloud platform to enterprise. Part of their Azure smart services. That's all people mean: Slack did a pretty good job, but it's very similar to stuff MS has done before, and there's not really a secret sauce trench. So MS will probably be able to win a lot of the enterprise market.
    - GFischer 10y ago
      Well, isn't what you're describing the Teams software that prompted Slack's letter? Only tied to Office365, not Azure and LinkedIn. https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat...
- reitanqild 10y ago
  >> 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. Thanks, it was just an attempt to not talk down to anyone even if I disagree.
- reitanqild 10y ago
mercer 10y ago
I have the feeling doing Dropbox right is a lot more difficult than doing Slack right. I still use Dropbox because somehow Drive and iCloud still don't work quite as nicely as Dropbox does. But I might be wrong; I've never built chat or file-sync apps.
Ntrails 10y ago
It's not about what can be done, it's about prior art. I've used xmpp chats with a couple of clients since well before slack and I'd struggle to think of a feature in slack that I hadn't used before.
- scaryclam 10y ago
  We're actually investigating switching over to an XMPP server and completely ditching slack. No-one in the company uses it, no-one likes using it and XMPP just seems to work.
  - croon 10y ago
    I wasn't a pro about it, but I set up and ran our XMPP at a previous company. What I saw as a real problem was a split between clients, servers, modules over the protocol, so it definitely wasn't painless in what functionality worked between one server, modules, a client and inevitably someone choosing a different client. You might do it better than me and it ends up working great for you, or it's gotten better in the last few years since I tried it, but if my experiences are any indication I wouldn't recommend that route. YMMV. But if you don't like Slack, I'm guessing Mattermost is out of the question as well. I'm still using IRC in a lot of places which "just works", but obviously that is missing a lot of features and fluff of newer technologies, even if some can be retrofitted in. Please et me know what you decide and your success since it's still relevant for me in a couple of places.
jpalomaki 10y ago
Both Slack and Dropbox are simple ideas, executed extremely well. I see that for both of them the challenge is there's quite many customers who don't demand the best execution, but can settle for not-so-good-but-a-bit-cheaper alternative. Both companies can probably make well enough money to survive and achieve growth, but maybe not such an exponential growth the investors where expecting.

mercer 10y ago

Plus, Microsoft can throw engineering power at integrating their 'clone' with all their other tools. While I can't seem myself buying into their ecosystem anytime soon, that's a huge advantage that will be hard for Slack to compete with.

Latty 10y ago
I'd imaginethe developers of the products integrating their own things into Slack would give more and better thingts than Microsoft integrating other products into their things. We'll have to see if people start shifting where they integrate.
- mercer 10y ago
  Good point. I'm too far away from Moft's ecosystem to be able to tell how well they can execute such integrations...
- doingmyting 10y ago
  Integrating things outside the MS stack yes. But if Slack ever decides to target the enterprise in a big way there is simply no way they'll out-compete MS with the offering they have at the moment and no way they'll integrate enterprise grade tools with the level of security and scalability that MS would be able to provide.

Latty 10y ago

It sounds a lot like all the people that bash StackOverflow - "It's just posts and a voting system, I could write that in a week!", ignoring all the complexity and design behind it, operating at scale and cultivating the environment. If people need something to be 'amazing' not to put it down, and 'amazing' doesn't include doing the right things to be highly successful... If no one else did it, was it really so obvious?

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Microsoft has a well regarded developer network and Q&A system regarding Microsoft technologies, at least in my (limited to primarily Azure) experience. Similarly, Microsoft has already operated a widely used integrated chat, profile, and community system at scale. Given their recent pushes, it wouldn't be entirely surprising for them to bring back similar platforms for business users integrated with LinkedIn. That would eat a lot of Slack's potential big clients, because MS has a history of enterprise grade support on products like that, and Slack has scale issues for large orgs.
- irodoramatic 10y ago
  For enterprise companies that already use a lot of MS services, and which have tight security policies on what software can be used/licensed/installed, an MS Slack clone could be a wonderful thing for employees.
  - ganset 10y ago
    Having worked for a company with security concerns and tightly coupled to Microsoft, Lynx fucking sucks and a MS Slack alternative would have made my short time there much more bearable.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  Does Slack even allow on-premise installs yet? That instantly disqualified them from the last 3 jobs I've had. (All of which had data protection issues that prevented them from using off-premises IM systems, mostly HIPAA regulations.) Microsoft's got that market already sewn-up, right out of the gate.

intoverflow2 10y ago

>What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I don't think they even do that well, it's a complete nightmare finding anything on slack beyond the last 24 hours. What Slack did well was branding and marketing.

vehementi 10y ago
Marketing yeah. They weren't the first to do the obvious "make IRC in the cloud with persistent storage and notifications/app/etc." I had been waiting for, just the first I heard of. Do you have any other issues, just curious or is their search algorithm enough to make the Slack platform a net bad UX?
kzisme 10y ago
I haven't met a single person (unless they were ~really~ non technical) that enjoyed using slack. It never works the way I expect it to work, and very simple things that you can do within IRC takes multiple steps in Slack.
- thesimpsons1022 10y ago
  i enjoy the built in gifs and emojis but thats about it
  - kzisme 10y ago
    When I used it at a previous job emojis/gifs were quite fun, but after awhile I stopped using them. I feel like they get in the way more than anything - and other platforms can still implement those just as easily.
- hosh 10y ago
  I enjoy using Slack. There were a lot of nuances that together adds up into substantial improvements over Hipchat or IRC. I am also a remote software engineer who have been working on distributed teams for the past 8 years. I've tried a bunch of different things to collaborate remotely, including IRC. Your mileage may vary.

swasheck 10y ago

"Hate" no longer means "hate." It means "disagree with another at any level."

Latty 10y ago
People were saying they hope Microsoft would put Slack out of business. That's not disagreeing, that's actively disliking them.
- swasheck 10y ago
  But even dislike != hate.

yoz-y 10y ago

After having read http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding-innovation/ http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding... I think that people often misuse the term innovation. From my understanding Slack is innovative, precisely because it is useful. Its novelty is not in features but in the delivery. Yes IRC had all the features but it is hardly something one can recommend. Slack made the long process of setting up a server, shell/bouncer, dcc a matter of a few clicks. On top of that they provide a unique client for everybody which means that everybody sees the same thing. Throw in the integrations and you have a very compelling package. The features one by one are not new or revolutionary, but they were the first to push the whole deal out.

dingaling 10y ago

> Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I wouldn't even credit them with that. 20 minutes ago I yet again pressed up-arrow to scroll up one line to see a message off the top of the page and yet again it dropped me into an editing prompt for my last message. What? And then there's the click-click-click of jumping between channels to see the latest messages, instead of having some form of summary. In my experience people tolerate the UI of Slack, they don't praise it.

leesalminen 10y ago
I've long thought that an aggregated screen holding all unread message (with a button to expand +/- 5 lines) was sorely missing from Slack.
- Fishkins 10y ago
  This is a newish feature that's at least close to what you want https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/226410907-View-all-your-unread-messages https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/226410907-View-all-...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- solublebear 10y ago
  Sounds like an email inbox

mamcx 10y ago

Is like to say cooking is just about mix ingredients.