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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 t

by 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).
  - geofft 10y ago
    I don't see those people in this thread? Certainly I don't see 'Mc_Big_G or myself saying that (and 'Mc_Big_G says basically the opposite). Would it help if I also said I don't hope Microsoft will kill Slack? More precisely, I hope that if Microsoft builds a vastly better product, that they kill Slack, and if Slack builds a vastly better product, that they kill Teams, and if someone else builds a vastly better product (maybe Ryver stops arguing on Twitter and focuses on product? maybe everyone realizes that Zulip has been awesome all along? maybe Mattermost builds great mobile apps?), they kill both Slack and Teams. And I hope Slack does not get complacent about the product they have built and how hard it is to build a vastly better one, because I am currently using Slack and invested in it. I hope this because competition is a good thing. Is that wrong?
blakeyrat 10y ago
It's from the same set of people who don't understand why Microsoft's Active Directory is more popular than the cluster of hard-to-configured, barely-related Linux utilities needed to reproduce some of its functions on a Linux server.

by Latty 10y ago

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).
- geofft 10y ago
  I don't see those people in this thread? Certainly I don't see 'Mc_Big_G or myself saying that (and 'Mc_Big_G says basically the opposite). Would it help if I also said I don't hope Microsoft will kill Slack? More precisely, I hope that if Microsoft builds a vastly better product, that they kill Slack, and if Slack builds a vastly better product, that they kill Teams, and if someone else builds a vastly better product (maybe Ryver stops arguing on Twitter and focuses on product? maybe everyone realizes that Zulip has been awesome all along? maybe Mattermost builds great mobile apps?), they kill both Slack and Teams. And I hope Slack does not get complacent about the product they have built and how hard it is to build a vastly better one, because I am currently using Slack and invested in it. I hope this because competition is a good thing. Is that wrong?

blakeyrat 10y ago

It's from the same set of people who don't understand why Microsoft's Active Directory is more popular than the cluster of hard-to-configured, barely-related Linux utilities needed to reproduce some of its functions on a Linux server.