6 ms·

Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

40 points by ranvir 9y ago

shouldbworking 9y ago
Eh, I think they'll be fine. A solid product and existing userbase. They'll either get auctioned off for a few billion or showered with enough money that they can't possibly fail for at least five years.
sofaofthedamned 9y ago
800 employees?! How?!
- tribby 9y ago
  how: they've raised over half a billion dollars. my own question is "why." slack is by no means a trivial business to run but 800 does seem awfully high.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Is Whatsapp a good comparison in terms of product? I remember reading the engineering team there before they got purchased was less than 50 members.
- partycoder 9y ago
  Finance, marketing, HR, recruiting... Slack claims to not have a sales team.
  - bdavisx 9y ago
    If they want to get enterprise level customers, they better think about getting one.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- altern8tif 9y ago
  Too many startups go the easy route once they get significant funding – go on a hiring spree. In my opinion, per-employee metrics (ie. revenue/profit per employee) are a great way to make sure that you don't overhire [1]. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple-facebook-google-others-2016-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple...
- tjpnz 9y ago
  Makes the argument some were making for their use of Electron seem less relevant.
- untilHellbanned 9y ago
  My exact thought. Good thing I Control + F'd "800" before duplicating your comment. 800 employees is especially insane for a serial entrepreneur like Stuart Butterfield who should know better. Then again, the Twitter guys including Ev Williams were serial entrepreneurs and yet the overhired too. It seems an interesting coincidence in the technology sector that viral user growth often can lead to viral hiring.
OliverJones 9y ago
I'm a member of a team that pays for Slack. Don't forget, if you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I am sick, sick, sick, of being somebody's product. And with Slack, I don't have to be somebody's product. I don't have to already use Lookout xxx Outlook. I don't have to cope with messages from recruiters sending spam. Any fake nuz that shows up was faked by somebody I know. Go Slack. Please figure out how to make your business sustainable: you're helping make our business sustainable.
- Sir_Substance 9y ago
  So the problem slack has is that chat is so foundational to the web that it's one of those things that doesn't really make sense to farm it out to third parties. It's not hard or expensive to run yourself, and it's not difficult to securely expose on the web. That's why Lync has such a head start and why Atlassian's on premises option is gaining traction. Ultimately I suspect Mattermost is going to end up the main winner here. Slack, Teams and Hipchat will all have their userbases, but they'll have been in a three-way bar fight to get them, which is expensive. Meanwhile, all those 12 person offices that farm their IT out to third party support companies? They're gonna start getting given Mattermost servers, because that's easy for the IT shops to license and install, yet also still under their direct control, which is important because IT support companies don't have a tonne of bandwidth to educate all 100 client companies if slack suddenly changes something.
  - empath75 9y ago
    I'm going to tell you how hard it is to get chat right. I work at the company that more or less popularized internet chat. We use slack internally pretty much exclusively, and have for years.
    - inopinatus 9y ago
      Goodness me. I had no idea that Mirabilis still existed. What is is doing these days?
- joelrunyon 9y ago
throwanem 9y ago
> “We’re trying to build empathy at scale,” Mr. Butterfield said. > “There are people who will die, get divorced, have children with cancer,” Mr. Butterfield said. “You really have to put yourself in their frames of mind. If we preoccupy these people for a minute longer than we have to, we’ll lose them.”
- stagbeetle 9y ago
  It's definitely not the most eloquent way to put it, but I think it gets the point across. "People are in a rush these days, let's not get in their way."
bshimmin 9y ago
Looking at that office makes me feel so glad that I work from home - look at all those people hovering about and interrupting!
- notamy 9y ago
  Not only that; just imagine the noise level!
- afandian 9y ago
  It is interesting. It might go some way to explain the culture that the app embodies. Lots of 'cutesy' things like MOTD on the loading screen, emoticons everywhere, application messages that include the word "yay", integration with Giphy which seems to be a random Gif roulette. It all feels rather unprofessional sometimes. And like they're trying to crowbar the Slack culture into my own office culture. When tools are straightforward in their utility they can empower, but when they have so much baggage, they can also influence culture. Of course being able to communicate more fluidly can change the culture of a workplace to be more open. But it sometimes feels like an extension of flippant social media, except you can't escape because there's critical stuff on it. I used to work in a place that used XMPP, and before that Microsoft Communicator. They didn't bring as much benefit as Slack does, but sometimes I wish for something a bit more unobtrusive. I don't want a tool to try and make friends with me.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    I've been trying to figure out what it would take to make SMTP the last business IM protocol. Today's fancy email applications are basically laid out like IMs anyway. It just seems like a matter of getting delivery latency down, and demanding some level of compliance with modern email standards (STARTTLS only, must have spf and dkim, must have FCrDNS). If we're playing by IM rules, we can even have people establish contacts, which should make spam filtering a lot lower latency. The other sundry things would be video transcoding, and reference-type attachments (for stupid nonsense like attaching a giphy to your message, or possibly-useful things like embedding google docs info).
rrggrr 9y ago
Slack's UI and desktop footprint makes me nuts, but we are already on it and forced our vendors to join. I miss the tiny IM clients of old.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cmahler7 9y ago
I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.
- hdhzy 9y ago
  > They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. Well, if the only advantage is being first that's a big problem. The same goes for other startups: they can observe what works and deliver a better solution faster. I see Slack innovating a little (custom menus etc.) but maybe it's just the market shifting - the chat alone is not interesting anymore as a standalone product but rather as part of a bigger solution.
- wheelerwj 9y ago
  I had this thought the other day, even though I doubt it's original, and it seems like income inequality is growing to be so massive that its impossible, or at least much harder, to build a business anymore. If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants. Even bigger, more established companies like slack or NYT find themselves between a rock and hard place. Look at whats happening with journalism, it's geting wrecked by social, how can they possibly compete? All of the services used by the majority of people have been consolidated by just a few companies. This is terrible for both quality and personal provacy, not to mention pricing. The world is in a weird place these days.
  - chrischen 9y ago
    How is journalism wrecked by social? By social you mean social (aka fake) news?
    - wheelerwj 9y ago
      did you read the article? journalist aren't making money because they cant run ads.that means professional journalist won't be able to survive anymore.
code4tee 9y ago
750 employees? I don't get it. Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company. That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueless about the situation they are now in. UPDATE: Some saying it's not super easy to copy Slack. I see what you are saying but the truth is that it's easily to copy Slack to a "good enough" state. If you think the "best" and "most brilliant" software wins the enterprise market then you don't understand the enterprise market. Wish it wasn't like that, but it is and that's Slack's challenge (and what the article is saying).
- superquest 9y ago
  > incredibly easy to copy I feel obliged to post this tweet https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218 https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218
  - stagbeetle 9y ago
    If that's all Slack does, then it is incredibly simple (I realize this is only one part). It has saved me the time of figuring out what pieces make the whole and how they interact with each other (i.e the skeleton). Now, I just I need to slap the nervous system (code) onto it and call it alive. Do it in a weekend? A codemonkey could do it in a day. This argument would be different if it were for something like Dropbox, where the internals are really "something else." But, I agree, with what I believe you're implying, that HN users throw around "I could code it in a weekend," even if it doesn't apply here.
- sumedh 9y ago
  > but it's also incredibly easy to copy. I used to have same attitude but what I have learned over the years is that sometimes the big Co just does not get it. Just look at Google with its 100 chat applications, it's like watching Titanic hitting an iceberg in slow motion.

40 points by ranvir 9y ago

Eh, I think they'll be fine. A solid product and existing userbase. They'll either get auctioned off for a few billion or showered with enough money that they can't possibly fail for at least five years.

sofaofthedamned 9y ago

800 employees?! How?!

tribby 9y ago
how: they've raised over half a billion dollars. my own question is "why." slack is by no means a trivial business to run but 800 does seem awfully high.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Is Whatsapp a good comparison in terms of product? I remember reading the engineering team there before they got purchased was less than 50 members.
partycoder 9y ago
Finance, marketing, HR, recruiting... Slack claims to not have a sales team.
- bdavisx 9y ago
  If they want to get enterprise level customers, they better think about getting one.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
altern8tif 9y ago
Too many startups go the easy route once they get significant funding – go on a hiring spree. In my opinion, per-employee metrics (ie. revenue/profit per employee) are a great way to make sure that you don't overhire [1]. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple-facebook-google-others-2016-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-at-apple...
tjpnz 9y ago
Makes the argument some were making for their use of Electron seem less relevant.
untilHellbanned 9y ago
My exact thought. Good thing I Control + F'd "800" before duplicating your comment. 800 employees is especially insane for a serial entrepreneur like Stuart Butterfield who should know better. Then again, the Twitter guys including Ev Williams were serial entrepreneurs and yet the overhired too. It seems an interesting coincidence in the technology sector that viral user growth often can lead to viral hiring.

OliverJones 9y ago

I'm a member of a team that pays for Slack. Don't forget, if you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I am sick, sick, sick, of being somebody's product. And with Slack, I don't have to be somebody's product. I don't have to already use Lookout xxx Outlook. I don't have to cope with messages from recruiters sending spam. Any fake nuz that shows up was faked by somebody I know. Go Slack. Please figure out how to make your business sustainable: you're helping make our business sustainable.

Sir_Substance 9y ago
So the problem slack has is that chat is so foundational to the web that it's one of those things that doesn't really make sense to farm it out to third parties. It's not hard or expensive to run yourself, and it's not difficult to securely expose on the web. That's why Lync has such a head start and why Atlassian's on premises option is gaining traction. Ultimately I suspect Mattermost is going to end up the main winner here. Slack, Teams and Hipchat will all have their userbases, but they'll have been in a three-way bar fight to get them, which is expensive. Meanwhile, all those 12 person offices that farm their IT out to third party support companies? They're gonna start getting given Mattermost servers, because that's easy for the IT shops to license and install, yet also still under their direct control, which is important because IT support companies don't have a tonne of bandwidth to educate all 100 client companies if slack suddenly changes something.
- empath75 9y ago
  I'm going to tell you how hard it is to get chat right. I work at the company that more or less popularized internet chat. We use slack internally pretty much exclusively, and have for years.
  - inopinatus 9y ago
    Goodness me. I had no idea that Mirabilis still existed. What is is doing these days?
joelrunyon 9y ago

throwanem 9y ago

> “We’re trying to build empathy at scale,” Mr. Butterfield said. > “There are people who will die, get divorced, have children with cancer,” Mr. Butterfield said. “You really have to put yourself in their frames of mind. If we preoccupy these people for a minute longer than we have to, we’ll lose them.”

stagbeetle 9y ago
It's definitely not the most eloquent way to put it, but I think it gets the point across. "People are in a rush these days, let's not get in their way."

bshimmin 9y ago

Looking at that office makes me feel so glad that I work from home - look at all those people hovering about and interrupting!

notamy 9y ago
Not only that; just imagine the noise level!
afandian 9y ago
It is interesting. It might go some way to explain the culture that the app embodies. Lots of 'cutesy' things like MOTD on the loading screen, emoticons everywhere, application messages that include the word "yay", integration with Giphy which seems to be a random Gif roulette. It all feels rather unprofessional sometimes. And like they're trying to crowbar the Slack culture into my own office culture. When tools are straightforward in their utility they can empower, but when they have so much baggage, they can also influence culture. Of course being able to communicate more fluidly can change the culture of a workplace to be more open. But it sometimes feels like an extension of flippant social media, except you can't escape because there's critical stuff on it. I used to work in a place that used XMPP, and before that Microsoft Communicator. They didn't bring as much benefit as Slack does, but sometimes I wish for something a bit more unobtrusive. I don't want a tool to try and make friends with me.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  I've been trying to figure out what it would take to make SMTP the last business IM protocol. Today's fancy email applications are basically laid out like IMs anyway. It just seems like a matter of getting delivery latency down, and demanding some level of compliance with modern email standards (STARTTLS only, must have spf and dkim, must have FCrDNS). If we're playing by IM rules, we can even have people establish contacts, which should make spam filtering a lot lower latency. The other sundry things would be video transcoding, and reference-type attachments (for stupid nonsense like attaching a giphy to your message, or possibly-useful things like embedding google docs info).

rrggrr 9y ago

Slack's UI and desktop footprint makes me nuts, but we are already on it and forced our vendors to join. I miss the tiny IM clients of old.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

cmahler7 9y ago

I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.

hdhzy 9y ago
> They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. Well, if the only advantage is being first that's a big problem. The same goes for other startups: they can observe what works and deliver a better solution faster. I see Slack innovating a little (custom menus etc.) but maybe it's just the market shifting - the chat alone is not interesting anymore as a standalone product but rather as part of a bigger solution.
wheelerwj 9y ago
I had this thought the other day, even though I doubt it's original, and it seems like income inequality is growing to be so massive that its impossible, or at least much harder, to build a business anymore. If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants. Even bigger, more established companies like slack or NYT find themselves between a rock and hard place. Look at whats happening with journalism, it's geting wrecked by social, how can they possibly compete? All of the services used by the majority of people have been consolidated by just a few companies. This is terrible for both quality and personal provacy, not to mention pricing. The world is in a weird place these days.
- chrischen 9y ago
  How is journalism wrecked by social? By social you mean social (aka fake) news?
  - wheelerwj 9y ago
    did you read the article? journalist aren't making money because they cant run ads.that means professional journalist won't be able to survive anymore.

code4tee 9y ago

750 employees? I don't get it. Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company. That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueless about the situation they are now in. UPDATE: Some saying it's not super easy to copy Slack. I see what you are saying but the truth is that it's easily to copy Slack to a "good enough" state. If you think the "best" and "most brilliant" software wins the enterprise market then you don't understand the enterprise market. Wish it wasn't like that, but it is and that's Slack's challenge (and what the article is saying).

superquest 9y ago
> incredibly easy to copy I feel obliged to post this tweet https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218 https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218
- stagbeetle 9y ago
  If that's all Slack does, then it is incredibly simple (I realize this is only one part). It has saved me the time of figuring out what pieces make the whole and how they interact with each other (i.e the skeleton). Now, I just I need to slap the nervous system (code) onto it and call it alive. Do it in a weekend? A codemonkey could do it in a day. This argument would be different if it were for something like Dropbox, where the internals are really "something else." But, I agree, with what I believe you're implying, that HN users throw around "I could code it in a weekend," even if it doesn't apply here.
sumedh 9y ago
> but it's also incredibly easy to copy. I used to have same attitude but what I have learned over the years is that sometimes the big Co just does not get it. Just look at Google with its 100 chat applications, it's like watching Titanic hitting an iceberg in slow motion.