5 ms·

Apps like Slack make millions of dollars every day. What's their excuse to not hire platform-oriented devs to build native apps that run smoother?

• sotojuan 9y ago
  Because the amount of users who don't care or notice performance or memory usage issues is immensely greater than the amount who cares.
  • ch4s3 9y ago
    IMO that's a poor excuse, and leaves open a lot of room for competition. There's a lot of hubris in assuming their position as a market leader is unassailable.
    • DanHulton 9y ago
      There's also a fair amount of hubris in assuming that assuming that you know the market better than the market leader. They're killing it for a reason, and it just may be that the market they're targeting cares more about the app Just Working than about the RAM consumption.
      • throwawaymaroon 9y ago
        The status quo justifies the status quo, said every market leader ever.
        • AckSyn 9y ago
          A valid point. I don't know why it was downvoted since it counterpoints the argument he was responding to.
      • namelost 9y ago
        Slack is merely the latest contender in a very long succession of group chat technologies. They will be usurped one day, but they are substantially accelerating their demise by making their product so infuriatingly slow.
        • megaman22 9y ago
          Microsoft is gunning for them hard with Teams. It's not really a very good product, but it might win traction just by being bundled into their Office 365 subscriptions. Microsoft does have people on staff that know how to make an Electron app not suck really horribly, though whether any of that expertise from the DevTools branch makes its way to Office and the red-haired stepchild UC teams...
      • ch4s3 9y ago
        > assuming that you know the market better than the market leader. I never made that claim. > They're killing it for a reason Sure, but who knows what that reason really is. I've gone through numerous cycles of "best chat app ever", and they're pretty much all in the dustbin now. I just don't see anything about Slack that makes it any better than several alternatives other than the number of users. In fact it's objectively worse than alternatives in several ways. The video and regular calling for example is pretty terrible on anything less than a high speed internet connection. In general the app often fails to load on weak WIFI. I can still use Skype, Discord, Gittr, Facebook Messenger, Signal, et.al. on coffeeshop wifi, but not Slack. You don't need to be a genius to see that this is a problem.
    • jlg23 9y ago
      > There's a lot of hubris in assuming their position as a market leader is unassailable. This is only your very free interpretation of the comment you responded to. I personally only encounter slack in companies I freelance for - if it does not perform, I file a ticket with whoever does office supplies and demand a bigger computer.
      • ch4s3 9y ago
        Well yeah, of course it's just my opinion. I think my experience with Slack is pretty different, as I use it in my 9-5, and we often have to find work arounds for places where it's just plain broken. Specifically, the screen sharing and video calls often just don't work.
    • Spivak 9y ago
      Sure, but who buys into a messaging platform because the client makes more efficient use of resources? Don't get me wrong, it's on the list of priorities somewhere but the decision to go one platform over another will be made miles above.
      • ch4s3 9y ago
        My criticism isn't just about RAM use. Slack is plain unusable on weak WIFI or slow connections. It also tolerates interruptions in connectivity very poorly. Video calling is more often than not terrible, and it has about the worst screen sharing experience I'm aware of at the moment. If I were starting a new company, I wouldn't use Slack again.
    • rockostrich 9y ago
      Hipchat, Facebook's Workplace, and whatever Microsoft's service is are all competitors but I don't think any of them are serious. Hipchat is probably the biggest competitor, but that's because it was around before Slack. When there's a serious competitor in the space, then I'm sure they'll start caring. For now, I don't think anything else is close.
      • rekoros 9y ago
        https://hipchat.com https://hipchat.com
        • rockostrich 9y ago
          Hipchat was the first one that I mentioned...
          • rekoros 9y ago
            I know! I’m inviting you to navigate to its website, to see what happens there :-)
• randomsofr 9y ago
  Where did you got that number?
• therealmarv 9y ago
  It was always a website in nice packaging. Actually I don't want slack engineers to build a semi web browser, it's already crappy enough with the good foundations. A rebuild only increases one thing: bugs. Although Slack runs slow and GIFs in background are like CPU stress tests it does not have major bugs in functionality. Never touch a running system... it's easy to rebuild a simple chatroom experience but Slack is far from simple... it has a vast amount of features on closer look.