32 ms·

Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

1006 points by uptown 8y ago

tahw 8y ago
Lmao, Slack and HipChat are the only two apps I've ever used that are worse than MS Teams so I'm sure this is gonna go great.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
lolsal 8y ago
I'm not a huge fan of Slack or Hipchat either way, but I can't help but lament that there is less competition for enterprise chat solutions now.
mehblahwhatevs 8y ago
> Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.” Strange quote.
- badbug 8y ago
  Yeah, a rare glimpse into how these execs actually think. I'm suprised the pr people let this through their filters.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    I agree completely, that's a terrible statement for an executive to make and PR should have stopped that. But on the other hand, I can almost see the logic in it. I'm making a huge leap here, but I remember back in the early 2000s, I had some friends who used AIM. I had some friends who used MSN. I had some friends who used ICQ. I had some friends who used Yahoo. These different chat services were really all exactly the same, the only difference is you can't chat between AIM and MSN. I don't care which chat service "wins", I just want all my friends using one so I don't have to sign into fifteen different services just to communicate. In that situation, Adium or Trillian or various third party clients were basically required if you had any sizable group of friends. Just standardizing on one chat platform would have been better than everyone making their own, since they weren't really competing to make anything better. They just existed, and all did exactly the same thing and were incompatible with each other. The question is, does Slack differ from Hipchat differ from Teams in any meaningful way, and does Hipchat disappearing actually make a difference when Slack exists? I honestly don't know the answer.
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      > I just want all my friends using one so I don't have to sign into fifteen different services just to communicate. If only the different services would be able to talk with each other, you wouldn’t have to get your friends to all switch to one of them. But, here we are, a decade or two later, and interoperability is still nonexistent.
      - bergie 8y ago
        > interoperability is still nonexistent. I'd say interoperability _again_ nonexistent. For a brief while it looked like XMPP federation was working.
- ggg9990 8y ago
  Could also be a reporter misquoting. Reporter says, “how do you respond to someone who says this creates fewer choices for people?” CEO: “There’s fewer choices for people, but they are better than choices.” Boom, first half is the money quote.
  - joenathanone 8y ago
    Is that the real quote?
    - ggg9990 8y ago
      No, it’s a hypothetical situation where a reporter can create the conditions for a money quote.
- jmalicki 8y ago
  Why is that strange? It's very well established that people hate choices (regardless of what they may say) when you actually measure it: https://sheenaiyengar.com/the-art-of-choosing/ https://sheenaiyengar.com/the-art-of-choosing/ And it's very good for the company, as they don't need to do as much competition with HipChat so they can slow down innovation and raise prices. Win, win.
  - SamWhited 8y ago
    It's true that individually most people are happier without a choice, but when you take them away you end up cutting out whole chunks of people. What if the thing that went away was accessible to people with certain types of disabilities and the new thing isn't? What if the old one wasn't a public company but the new thing is and now they have to comply with U.S. export laws and you were perfectly okay using it in Iran before but now can't? etc. There are a number of cases where most people won't want a choice, but by giving them what they want and removing one you hurt a lot of other people.
slivym 8y ago
Am I the only one who sees this as anti-competitive? This is basically collusion - Atlassian agreeing not to compete in chat in return for a payment from Slack. It almost seems like we're intent on making literally every mistake we made with traditional businesses, but with electronic products.
- thebooglebooski 8y ago
  I imagine there's some observation bias here, but aren't there other enterprise chat apps out there in the market? Like if my neighbors and coworkers and friends use Slack, I'm not sure if they're a proxy of the entire market. The reason I say that is because there are other apps that do similar things that hail from Microsoft, Google and Facebook. Then the retort goes: well they don't do integrations and aren't as developer focused as Slack and Hipchat. Then, naturally, wouldn't that incentivize those other apps already in the market to build out those features, and do it better?
- jedberg 8y ago
  "Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.”"
  - ggg9990 8y ago
    Really surprised that a CEO would make a comment like that on the record.
    - booleandilemma 8y ago
      Well it’s not anti-competitive to be competitive...
    - csallen 8y ago
      "There’s fewer choices for people," is such a short quote that I would avoid judging it on its face without seeing the full context.
    - smt88 8y ago
optimusclimb 8y ago
Hipchat took standard IRC, and added some interface fluff, youtube links, and emojis. They achieved great market footprint. Then Slack starts up later - makes literally the same exact product, and manages to surpass, and eventually subsume Hipchat. Crazy.
- mdeeks 8y ago
  HipChat had some major uptime issues. I have friends who experienced whole day outages at their companies. I hear a lot of people on HN say it was "Just IRC" and I'm always surprised by that. If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off? Why did Slack have a meteoric rise? It can't be for no good reason. I think the answer is that the interface fluff they added is actually extremely important and valuable. They made it dead simple, and fun to use for EVERYONE. My limited experience with IRC was honestly not great (please don't kill me, I'm sorry). Where is the mobile app? How do I get notified when I'm not online? What is EFNet/Freenode/etc? I use a slash command and paste my password in plain text to login? I can't just paste an image? Social apps are extremely difficult to get right. People seem to discount "silly" things like Emoji reactions. Honestly it DOES sound silly to say this, but it really is a great way to express and communicate. This is especially true for our large and diverse team. It also cuts down a TON of message spam ("Congrats!", "Yay!" etc)
  - hiccuphippo 8y ago
    My Linux user group used to hangout in IRC until 3 or 4 years ago when little by little we stopped joining the channel. Some of us tried IRC clients for smartphone and it was a lousy experience. Until one day someone created a Telegram group. Now we are all there, the conversation might not be as fluid as IRC, each is in their own timezone, but it is there.
    - phil21 8y ago
      Yes, IRC I think finally "failed" once persistence went from "nice to have" to "need to have" feature. Yes, you can work around this if you are a top 20% techie who enjoys that stuff, but most don't. Mobile basically made the "all clients synced from anywhere" a necessity, and then lack of IRC client development for things like rich media hurt to boot.
fl0wenol 8y ago
And whoosh there goes another option for non-cloud-based enterprise chat.
- paxy 8y ago
  Would be cool if they re-released Hipchat as an on-prem Slack
  - spilk 8y ago
    there's Mattermost for that, which is open-source to boot.
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      Unless you need most of the features that Hipchat onprem has - then you get to pay $39/user/year.
- horsecaptin 8y ago
  Weren't both Slack's and Atlassian's offerings cloud-based?
  - elithrar 8y ago
    HipChat had an on-prem (self-hosted) release, but it's been near-abandoned for quite some time.
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      ? It just had a release back in April.
  - compuguy 8y ago
    They offered a version of Hipchat that could be hosted on perm (Hipchat Server/Data Center). Slack has never had a on perm product.
  - 8y ago
thedangler 8y ago
We were using hipchat, worked fine with our custom integrations and workflow. Stopped working when they switched to stride ( had to do with version of jira we are on) Now that my integrations are all most working again I have to probably look at using mattermost. We don't want to use slack.
- gms 8y ago
  Why not?
  - Deimorz 8y ago
    Probably because they don't want to (or can't) have a huge portion of their company's internal communication stored forever on a third-party server. I still find it hard to believe that so many companies are okay with doing that.
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      And yet most large companies are using AWS and the like. This obsession with "MUST be behind OUR firewall!" is very arrogant, penny-wise pound-foolish thinking - and it tends to wither in the face of a frank, honest cost/benefit analysis. Amazon probably has more, if not better, security and engineers than most of the companies we're talking about.
      - Grue3 8y ago
        >Amazon probably has more, if not better, security and engineers than most of the companies we're talking about. And Slack has...? A bunch of VC money and a hastily thrown together chat app?
  - thedangler 8y ago
    Pricing mostly Can't host it ourselves, not really an issue now that we have a new boss and he doesn't care as much about hosting everything ourselves. Thats why moving to stride was in the works. I tried testing slack with a sub section of our team and they didn't like it at all. I've been toying switching to mattermost for a year now though. See how it goes.
arjun27 8y ago
This reminds me of Aaron Levie’s recent take on Kara Swisher’s podcast - on how enterprise software is going to be either about Microsoft (jack of trades) or about a collection of smaller companies (specialists in their fields) integrated with one and other. Slack and Atlassian focusing on what makes them great and working together makes a lot of sense
- adventured 8y ago
  Levie is wrong. His personal bias is showing: an over optimism that Box can survive as an independent long-term. It's going to be Microsoft and other giants. There's no scenario where Slack remains an independent company, for the exact same reason there was never a scenario where Github remained an independent company. It'll be surprising if Slack is still independent three years from now. It's perpetual consolidation in enterprise, nothing has changed about that in decades. Microsoft eats Github. Atlassian eats Slack (or some other company does). Maybe Atlassian is the next Oracle, or maybe Oracle or Salesforce or SAP or Microsoft eats Atlassian. The one thing every scenario has in common: the little fish don't stick around and cooperate, they all get eaten and merged into ever larger companies. Nothing can stop that process, all the little fish have shareholders more than willing to sell when the big price comes in from the giants. PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun, MySQL, Great Plains, Sybase, Business Objects, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, RightNow, Taleo, MuleSoft, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc etc It's the same thing going on over and over again. The little fish never stick around. Box will end up in someone's stomach just the same as the rest.
  - ngrilly 8y ago
    Alas, I mostly agree... But what about Basecamp or Mailchimp for example?
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      What big corp wants to own the liability of Mailchimp? The minute you crack down harder on customers using spammy email lists, the revenue picture changes dramatically.
schappim 8y ago
>> We are purchasing the IP for Hipchat Cloud and Stride It would be nice if Slack took a leaf out of the Hipchat play book and made a native (non-electron) Mac app.
- Kiro 8y ago
  What's wrong with the electron app?
  - kidfiji 8y ago
    I personally don't have a problem with it, but a lot of people have a problem with it taking up a bit of system resources, primarily ram.
    - Kiro 8y ago
      Thanks! The only Electron app I use is Visual Studio Code and it works great so was curious. (Crazy btw that I get downvoted to oblivion within seconds for asking an honest question.)
      - fernandotakai 8y ago
        an example -- i currently have 3 workspaces on my slack client (on linux) and it's currently using 500mb of RAM, which is insane for a chat client. the only thing using more ram is firefox with literally 25 tabs, including gmail's inbox and pocketcasts playing a podcast (~1gb).
    - rikkus 8y ago
      You can reduce this a huge amount by simply using it in a tab in a browser. When I'm travelling I use it this way, as it eats much less battery - I just pin a tab.
  - corndoge 8y ago
    It reduces the available resources for my dev vms (read: actual work) by a disproportionate amount
monocasa 8y ago
Can you use self host slack?
- compuguy 8y ago
  To my knowledge no. That is going to be an issue for current users of Hipchat Server/Data Center.
  - Jach 8y ago
    Maybe it'll be a good opportunity to push for a self-hosted Matrix homeserver...
  - mnkypete 8y ago
    I've seen a private Slack instance at SAP, so it seems to be possible for big corps..
- wmblaettler 8y ago
  There is an open source alternative to Slack that can be self hosted called Rocket Chat: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/
- tshannon 8y ago
  You can self host mattermost, which has been working well for us so far. https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
thogenhaven 8y ago
Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft. And based on the numbers in the article, it seems like Atlassian had less than 4% marketshare (Slack expects single digit growth - and assuming they have around 50% of the market) This deals seems like the last step before a full - and in competitive terms logical - merger between Slack and Atlassian.
- sithadmin 8y ago
  >Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft. That's pretty dependent on which way Slack decides to go in terms of facilitating large Enterprises' needs for absolute control of and visibility into communications platforms. Monitoring and governance of Slack is, at present, a goddamned nightmare. The third party tools that currently exist are, in my experience, somewhat unreliable, and all of them are crippled by the fact that Slack's API drastically limits visibility into the platform. I've worked with more than one very large Enterprise customer with special compliance needs whose Slack instance(s) are one foul-up away from having a regulator rain down fines/sanctions, and in every case Slack is pretending like the issues don't exist while my customers shove their head in the sand. And compliance aside: the Slack API doesn't even have methods in place to deal with things like emoji-react trolling on read-only announcement channels, and a plethora of other little features required to control toxic and obnoxious behaviors. I love Slack to death, but it's not an Enterprise product yet.
Fzzr 8y ago
Woah, this is huge. Atlassian is really going for the "everything a tech shop needs" gold.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
  The exact opposite, Atlassian is selling and retreating.
  - Fzzr 8y ago
    I see it as a step towards integrating more (or in this case better IMO) things into their ecosystem. Consolidating Hipchat with Slack is a step toward that.
    - zackkitzmiller 8y ago
      Atlassian is selling the defunct Hipchat to Slack.
- castis 8y ago
  If thats what was happening, Slack would be migrating over to Hipchat.
strictnein 8y ago
> "and are providing a migration path to Slack for all our customers." Well, not all of your customers. Unless Slack is introducing a self-hosted version? They've already nuked the page on the self-hosted hipchat offering, which now redirects to https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack Which is a complete bummer. Slack isn't an option for us.
- crysin 8y ago
  I haven't looked at them in a while but I believe Mattermost is still offering self-hosted options and I believe they still market themselves as a slack alternative.
- core-questions 8y ago
  It is possible to get a confidentiality agreement with Slack over and above the normal terms if you negotiate with them.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
sc00ty 8y ago
What options are left for self-hosted chat systems with comparable features? We've been using self-hosted Hipchat at our company and there is zero chance we will ever use a cloud solution.
- thedangler 8y ago
  https://www.mattermost.org/ https://www.mattermost.org/
- jamesfmilne 8y ago
  We moved to RocketChat, which is gradually getting there.
- derefr 8y ago
  A Matrix.org server?
  - nine_k 8y ago
    How easy it is to administer channels on Matrix? Like making team-private channels that can't be joined without approval?
    - snerbles 8y ago
      Channels default to unlisted and invite-only, and the per-channel permissions system is fine-grained. It's pretty simple to adjust permissions using Riot - I haven't tried it with the other clients, though.
- zokier 8y ago
  * Zulip https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/ * Rocket.chat https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ * Mattermost https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/ * Riot/Matrix https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/ And XMPP is not completely dead, depends on what you mean "comparable features".
- qabqabaca 8y ago
  Out of interest, why would you guys never use a cloud solution? Sensitive conversations? Server reliability?
joeblau 8y ago
I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.
- qabqabaca 8y ago
  What would you recommend instead of Jira?
  - joeblau 8y ago
    What is the problem you're trying to solve?
    - lotyrin 8y ago
      An opinionated workflow of collecting from a development team and its customers potential future efforts, estimates of the cost and value of those efforts, prioritizing based on those estimates (maximize expected value, minimize expected cost), scheduling & forecasting efforts based on a sound statistical model (e.g. estimation error).
      - joeblau 8y ago
        You can accomplish most of that with Phabricator[1], except for the forecasting efforts. As for the forecasting; I worked at Amazon which had a dedicated JIRA engineer and that was the best I've ever seen JIRA being run and used. In my time there, I never saw any manager predict anything consistently accurate over the course of a long project with it without actually talking to engineering. JIRA promises armchair management, but I've yet to see those tools actually work. That being said, you may be a better JIRA user than anyone I know. JIRA has always be promoted as a tool from the top down, never from the bottom up. [1] - https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/
zokier 8y ago
Stride was launched last year. I guess it didn't get much traction then if they gave up on it in less than a year. For consumer it is of course bit sad to see the 800lb gorilla just keep growing and eating up competition, but I can see how this makes sense to at least Atlassian; they are getting better Slack integrations, and possibly other partnership benefits for what seems like essentially free. Not sure how much this move will benefit Slack (the company, not the product), but maybe they'll absorb few more customers this way. Although I imagine many Hipchat/Stride admins will be reevaluating their choices instead of just jumping blindly to Slack.
- cothomps 8y ago
  I was curious whether or not the Sride project was failing. We were about to do a migration once some key integration things were done; doesn't look like they'll finish those.
joshstrange 8y ago
Even those less competition normally isn't good I'm hopefully optimistic about this. It seems by and large slack has won the chat wars for open projects/podcast live chat/business. My company uses HipChat (due to being in the Atlassian suite) and so I'm not going to have both Slack and HipChat open but if we move to Slack it means I can participant in some other open Slack channels.
CGamesPlay 8y ago
As someone who uses both Slack and HipChat on a daily basis, I am very happy to see that HipChat is the one shutting down. The "cute" features that Slack adds aren't worth much individually, but the overall user experience is much better on Slack than HipChat.
PedroBatista 8y ago
It's a smart move from Atlassian, Slack is a superior product with an huge mind-share. Most of the time companies stick with their own products as if they were a sacred cow no matter the costs.
- dbbk 8y ago
  Well, I wouldn't say Slack is a superior product necessarily. Stride had some really great ideas, like focus management and designating decisions out of discussions.
arenaninja 8y ago
I hope this means Slack will invest in improving their core desktop offering; it is a notorious resource hog
- coldacid 8y ago
  I'd love that too, but it won't happen.
  - arenaninja 8y ago
    Well in that case I hope MS gets a second wind like it does for VSCode. I use IntelliJ daily since I use a lot of the bells and whistles, but VSCode is great and also runs on Electron. It seems that there's a lot of things MS is doing right with the tool that Slack can't or won't. Maybe WASM to Electron is in the horizon? :)
    - coldacid 8y ago
      Microsoft is the only company I've seen that can actually get any performance out of Electron, and even then it's still a resource hog. In their favour, though, VSCode is written exclusively for Electron, unlike many of these apps which are essentially SPAs lightly reworked for a non-browser.
makecheck 8y ago
Of course, in an ideal world, the obvious technical flaws in chat products would easily enable competitors to “take on” the broken ones. Why does it seem so hard to get chat right? Heck, Yahoo Messenger had lots of features in about year 2000 that we still lack or struggle with in newer products?
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  Hi there, I'm currently building out some chat-based groupware and also feel like we've gone backwards since 2000. Can you humor me with some nostalgia and tell me what features of Yahoo Messenger you used?
nine_k 8y ago
tl;dr: Atlassian discontinues HipChat, sells some important HipChat's IP to Slack, and is concentrating on a better Slack integration.
chadlavi 8y ago
* slack gets paid to take hipchat off atlassian's hands
- jedberg 8y ago
  Actually Slack is paying Atlassian.
  - VonGuard 8y ago
    HipChat was orders of magnitude cheaper. This is like Coke buying RC cola to eliminate a cheaper alternative.
  - paxy 8y ago
    But Atlassian is investing in Slack
dbg31415 8y ago
What's the point of Stride again?
pmontra 8y ago
Well, thanks to this today I learned that Microsoft had a product called Teams. I didn't see anybody using it but I saw plenty of people using Slack. Maybe is Team addressed to big companies? My customers are all medium or small. Does anyone here have some experience using Teams? Is it really in competition with Slack?
- megaman22 8y ago
  Teams is bundled into Office365, so if you use that for email or Office software, you've got it for free. It's exactly the same product as Slack, almost carbon copy.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Teams at the moment is mostly used by massive companies, as Slack is really built for smaller teams. I like Slack, but it is very unreliable. I am constantly disconnected, have messages never sent. This is not on the free version, it's almost inexcusable in the amount of times it happens.
  - duderific 8y ago
    > I am constantly disconnected, have messages never sent. Weird, I have never had those issues, and have been using Slack heavily on a daily basis for a couple of years.
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      I used it in two different jobs, both with paid plans (and obviously different internet services) and both have had the same disconnection problems. Maybe it's a regional issue? I'm around Nashville/Atlanta. I have had multiple instances of someone asking me why I haven't replied only to see a message marked as "failed to send" because of a disconnection. This is multiple team members too, not just myself.
- tibu 8y ago
  The huge advance of Teams is that you get it in a package if you buy Office365. Otherwise it is a chat app similar to Slack with less ready made integrations.
jokoon 8y ago
I'm really hopeless about chat applications. So many apps and platforms, so little inter operability. All that users need, most of the time, is a web app and a smartphone app for private messages. Channels and voice are special cases. Voice is hard to achieve, and channels are usually covered by private servers.
hateful 8y ago
It's really easy, the first one to support multiple chat windows will win. That and ctrl+enter to send message.
hiccuphippo 8y ago
Tangentially related, recently Google pushed an ad for chat.google.com my way (in a Gmail popup no less). It seems they made a Slack competitor, it sort of uses Hangouts for one-on-one chats but its own thing for groups (and groups from Hangouts don't show up there) and broke Hangouts in Gmail since then (some conversation where the other person wrote the last message shows as unread the next time I open gmail).
- arkitaip 8y ago
  Of course they released another IM product. Their IM teams are at war with each other.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  I tried it. It's garbage. Worse than every other option listed here. You can't even search for rooms.
janlukacs 8y ago
This is an incredibly good move by Slack, even more so after the recent announcement from MS with the Teams free version.
dawhizkid 8y ago
Interesting. I worked at a healthcare tech startup last year and the reason why we had to use Hipchat is because the self-hosted Hipchat Server was HIPAA-compliant and Slack does not have a HIPAA-compliant self-hosted option. Have no idea what they're going to do (or anyone who needs to comply with stricter regulatory guidelines that prevents use of cloud-based messaging apps).
- arjun27 8y ago
  They seem to be HIPAA compliant now. (No self-hosting yet) https://slack.com/security https://slack.com/security
  - anderiv 8y ago
    HIPAA compliance doesn't mean anything unless they're willing to sign a BAA with their customers' organizations. Perhaps they're signing BAAs now, but in the recent past (~6 months ago), I asked and they weren't signing them.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      Even if they sign BAAs, that doesn't mean that every health organization is willing to go off-prem. On-prem is popular for a reason.
      - anderiv 8y ago
        Yes, absolutely. Good point.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ceruleanscott 8y ago
  Shameless self-promotion: We (Trillian) just received HITRUST certification, provide a BAA, and offer both a SaaS variant and the self-hosted Trillian Server product, both of which run over our own open IM protocol. We're not exactly a Slack/Hipchat clone (having been around for 18+ years, we're more of a traditional IM and group chat solution with some modern stuff like an API, chat bots, and federation capabilities) but have been getting great feedback in the healthcare space with our business offering. More: https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/ https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/
brightball 8y ago
Would be interesting to see Discord make an entry into the space. They're killing it on the gaming side already.
andrewla 8y ago
They changed the headline to "Slack Is Buying HipChat" from "Slack and Atlassian Team Up to Take on Microsoft in Chat Software". The latter still survives in the URL. The "team up" makes it sound ridiculous, like some sort of cabal is being formed -- the team up here is like when I team up with a cheeseburger to take on hunger.
- anant90 8y ago
  +1 for the cheeseburger analogy. I'll be using it. Thanks!
actualanswer 8y ago
Seems like a move to take on Microsoft Teams. This is something that these independent software vendors will need to do in order to take on Microsoft: integrate and enable a best of breed world. Its not really a great experience if I buy Slack, Okta, Box/Dropbox, GSuite if I don't have a seamless and integrated and experience throughout. The only way is to build a integrated ecosystem and enable these horizontal use-cases.
solatic 8y ago
Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thing to sell off Stride, it isn't doing well, work with Slack to have some kind of automated migration made available and let customers flip the switch. Maybe if Slack were to keep supporting Hipchat on-prem, or provide a migration path to a new Slack on-prem product, that'd be fine. But to leave HipChat on-prem customers out in the cold? What's the next Atlassian on-prem product to get thrown under the bus? Bamboo for sure, it's been unpopular relative to Jenkins almost since its beginning. It's definitely surprising that Fisheye/Crucible get any support any more, or Crowd for that matter. But why not Confluence on-prem too? Do we have to worry that Atlassian will stop supporting Confluence on-prem in eight months because Office 365 keeps gaining marketshare? Atlassian's continued long-term support for minor on-prem products was one of the signals that said, if you pay up for HipChat on-prem, we'll support you long-term, you'll be fine. Atlassian completely shattered that with this announcement and eroded a lot of trust that enterprises were putting in them. Big shot in the foot here.
- merlincorey 8y ago
  > Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Mattermost[1], with a clear migration path from Slack, at least. [1] https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
  - apple4ever 8y ago
    We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already). We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.
    - jawilson2 8y ago
janwh 8y ago
Gosh, I hope there will be a #MovingToMattermost movement coming. This feels like a dangerous move to me, and bad for the market, competitiveness, and users. One more thing the tech world does not need right now, is even further increasing its reliance on a single service (and even more so one with a mediocre track record of uptime).
stuff4ben 8y ago
There's always Cisco Webex Teams. I actually kinda like it, although I do work for Cisco. Unfortunately I have to keep it, Slack, and Jabber open on my laptop so I can communicate with anyone anytime (/sarcasm). On my phone I only have Webex Teams which is great when I'm away from my computer.
cup-of-tea 8y ago
Shame all three are terrible products. How hard can text chat be?
orliesaurus 8y ago
I wonder what all these folks who have worked and are still working on Stride will end up doing? If I am not mistaken most of the devs who worked on Stride are located in Austin, TX. I wonder how they feel about this whole change...it must feel yucky!
- pram 8y ago
  Having worked on that team, it always felt yucky. The product has been a train-wreck for years.
  - orliesaurus 8y ago
    I wonder then, this "partnership" means that whoever is on the Stride team is now going to somewhat work really close to Slack's team? Or is Slack acqui-hiring the Stride team? or ... ?
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
News of chat companies buying and selling your chat should strike fear into the hearts of their users. Use open protocols.
ulfw 8y ago
Wow. Atlassian is really on the way down, giving up on such an important and strategic part of the business. They've given Stride not even a year to try to compete. Guess they'll always be the JIRA company. Congrats to Slack to winning the Enterprise Market!
eric_b 8y ago
HipChat was a great tool 3 years ago. Atlassian left it to wither on the vine. Really too bad, as I enjoyed its simplicity. Also, data export is great, sure, but what I really want is someone to re-setup all our build and monitoring notifications in Slack :P
lev99 8y ago
Great! How many cooperate chat applications does the world actually need?
ironjunkie 8y ago
When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. It fosters a "Always on" culture, where irrelevant chats are exchanged publicly to advertise how much work is being done. If you shut down Slack and appear as Offline people assume you are not working. It also seems to me that now that Slack became the norm for communication, I almost don't receive well written emails with well-argued technical discussions anymore. Everything is now a "Chat" that dilutes the technical discussion because it needs to be responded "directly". I would expect 2018 to be the year where people start questioning the utility of "Slack everywhere" and not blindly jump on the Slack bandwagon because that's what great startups do.
- slededit 8y ago
  A few months ago slack's early plan was posted here. From day one this was the goal - they knew it was just a chat app so they had to make it feel like something different. Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off.
  - ironjunkie 8y ago
    It also see it as a hugely successful marketing coup. As an early employee of a startup, I remember the day we had to setup the initial infrastructure. For the majority in the room, Slack was an absolute requirement. They didn't wanted to have the ability to chat, they wanted to specifically use Slack, like a badge of honor.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    I was involved in the early days of IRC, and personally, I'm amazed at how great Slack is. I parachuted into an org which had a not-great email culture and took up Slack as a replacement. It was amazingly great.
stockkid 8y ago
As a Hipchat user, I welcome this decision. I was not happy with using Hipchat at work for a number of reasons including * No inline syntax highlight * No edit of message (apparently I've seen some do this but I never figured it out) * can only attach one image at a time * Message fails to send then after some retries, sends multiple times It's great that I won't have to use it again. However I'm a bit surprised that atlassian is discontinuing Stride given that they have launched it relatively recently.
- forty 8y ago
  Last time I used hipchat, you could edit your last message with s/search/replace à la sed
ulfw 8y ago
Wow. Atlassian is really on the way down, giving up on such an important and strategic part of the business. They've given Stride not even a year to try to compete. Guess they'll always be the JIRA company. Congrats to Slack to winning the Enterprise Market!
ryandrake 8y ago
It hurts to think about how much brainpower is being spent worldwide, over and over for decades, by busines customers and competing developers, on...... sending text.... from one computer to others. I have this nightmare where I wake up in the year 2045 and am still reading about yet another chat app being released that’s incompatible with the hundreds of others out there.
captain_perl 8y ago
Just for the record, I surveyed a dozen Hipchat users who used it all day in late 2016 for software development. They had zero complaints about using Hipchat. My opinion of the Hipchat web client at the time was that it worked fine (no complaints from me.) I believe we were on the free tier, so that was a great deal. A new Eng. VP wanted to seem hip, so he switched us to Slack "to ensure we were using the best tools possible." Nobody said that Slack was better or added any features that were worth mentioning.
- mi100hael 8y ago
  Slack offers quite a few features over HipChat that make it a nicer platform to communicate on, particularly for discussions of a technical nature. Things like easy message editing & markdown formatting make it easier to paste scripts, log messages, console outputs, etc. HipChat was fine as a bare-bones text chat. Slack is a pretty clear winner when it comes to a collaboration platform.
- aaronharnly 8y ago
  Mid-to-late 2016 was the peak of periodic outages in HipChat (like, several hours per week, which is a lot for a core messaging platform), which was when we threw in the towel and switched to Slack. At the time, Slack had the feature of "you can log in", which teams really liked :) https://status.hipchat.com/uptime?page=10 https://status.hipchat.com/uptime?page=10
knodi 8y ago
Rev must be good, save on tax buy a useless company.
AndrewBissell 8y ago
I feel like the outages and backend infrastructure issues at HipChat were a major factor in its being overtaken by Slack. Don't know how open Slack is to discussing this, but I'd be very interested in a side-by-side comparison of the two architectures.
lcfcjs 8y ago
Queue all the miserable Java programmers that hate javascript because its more popular than their shit language! :)
ge0rg 8y ago
Customers with HipChat installed on their own servers will be able to use it for an extra few months or as long as two years, depending on the version. Slack and Atlassian will make it easy for customers to move, but they won’t be forced to switch, Butterfield said. So they are not forced to switch, but if they don't then their chat will cease to work?
bachmeier 8y ago
I don't know if Stride was losing out to Slack, or if it was losing out to the FOSS competitors like Rocket, Mattermost, and Zulip. I've found Rocket and Mattermost to work well for small teams (no experience with medium or big deployments). With the FOSS alternatives plus the more fringe competitors like Ryver, Glip, and Twist, plus related tools from Dropbox, Basecamp, etc., it's hard to see there being a market for Stride.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
LinuxBender 8y ago
Are they also going to buy Discord?
AzzieElbab 8y ago
I hope they buy Skype and every other corporate chat app too. So, I do not have to run all this crap at the same time
- eddieh 8y ago
  Microsoft owns Skype. I doubt they'd sell it to Slack.
  - AzzieElbab 8y ago
    One can dream...
stemuk 8y ago
It seems really weird to me that a CEO of a big company like Slack comes forward and comments "There’s fewer choices for people.” as if this is supposed to be a good thing. I get that this is true on paper, most CEOs however would rather hide this effect of a merger in order to avoid government regulation.
a13n 8y ago
It's crazy to me that so many people here think IRC is a valid alternative to Slack in 2018. With the recent trend of consumerizing business apps, IRC is an awful experience compared to so many modern chat apps. It's much harder to set up, looks way uglier, and lacks useful features. Not to mention IRC has a somewhat technical setup, which makes any non-engineering team reluctant to buy in. Software companies have sales, marketing, design, product, support, leadership teams... use a tool that works great for everyone. Personally we use Twist. I enjoy that it's lightweight and performant compared to Slack, which feels clunky (just take a look at your activity monitor).
zenethian 8y ago
I really hope that this results in a combination of the two's best features. Slack is so nice and polished and runs well as a standalone app, and Hipchat has some really nice features (like channel re-ordering in the sidebar) that I'd love to see brought into Slack.
7ewis 8y ago
We've been waiting a long time to move to Slack, and recently started migrating over ~2,000 users from HipChat. Everyone is desperate for the migration to be complete, and to get rid of HipChat. A large majority had already moved their own team over. Can't say I'll be sad to say goodbye to HipChat, it worked well for the 6 years we had it, but Slack is superior in many ways (other than price...).
phyzome 8y ago
I'm not thrilled to see further consolidation, but frankly I'm not surprised in the least -- Hipchat is an utter dumpster fire.
visualphoenix 8y ago
This both sucks and is great. Sucks for me. Hopefully will be great for Mattermost and Matrix. For HIPAA compliant shops Slack is a non-starter. Mattermost will hopefully get a lot of corporate $ now. I wish Matrix's dendrite[0] golang replacement homeserver was finished and in better shape. I'd much prefer to go the Riot/Matrix route, but it doesn't feel ready for prime time yet. HipChat Server was SPOF but could be made to be HIPAA compliant by hoisting their AMI out and encrypting the base image. I literally was at the tail end of hacking Hipchat Data Center to be fully HIPAA compliant and HA using Vault, Consul (+locks), Terraform, scaling groups and friends. I was so excited about getting to blog about it. sigh Looks like I'll be re-engaging Mattermost. Last time I looked their E20 pricing was like 4x more expensive per user than it was costing for HipChat DC. Hopefully they finished their HipChat importing option. [0] https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
- adrianpike 8y ago
  Hey, can you elaborate a touch on the lack of HIPAA compliance with Slack? Some folks on my team seem to think it's compliant - and I'm not finding true hard answers either way (ignoring the BAA side of things)
  - ceruleanscott 8y ago
    Slack showcases the HIPAA logo on their security page, but upon closer inspection - https://slack.com/terms-of-service/supplement#healthcare https://slack.com/terms-of-service/supplement#healthcare - you'll see that unless you've signed a separate agreement with them, you acknowledge that Slack is not HIPAA compliant and that you are not to send them any PHI. My guess: they are signing BAAs for grid customers only (so the logo isn't a lie) and making them pay handsomely for the pleasure. As I shamelessly disclosed upthread, we (Trillian) offer a HITRUST certified, BAA-backed solution for healthcare organizations that comes in SaaS and on-prem variants. More: https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/ https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
ddtaylor 8y ago
Has Slack fixed the problem with bots spamming people yet? I used to be a member of a lot of channels for various projects but then a wave of bots started hitting all of them spamming various scams or trying to impersonate accounts so I had to leave because I couldn't have my inbox flooded with nonsense and the signal-to-noise ratio was too high.
filereaper 8y ago
What bothered us the most with HipChat was their lax security model. Any file uploads in HipChat would be uploaded to an S3 bucket and opts for security via obscurity [1] as opposed to proper authentication. This forced us to send sensitive material via email as opposed to directly via HipChat. [1] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/Security-of-HipChat-file-uploads/qaq-p/385492 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/Securit...
cylinder 8y ago
Atlassian wins again.
dmode 8y ago
Our Corp IT requested engineering to Pilot Google Hangout Chats as we already have GSuite. Turns out that Slack is the most expensive enterprise application that IT owns. It is more expensive that GSuite, although it provides a specific utility, while GSuite has emails, spreadsheets, docs etc. etc. That doesn't really sounds sustainable.
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 8y ago
  Any feedback on Google Hangouts Chat?
snaily 8y ago
For being the business chat darling, Slack is just not that great at being an amazing chat platform. I'm comparing to WhatsApp, because in my org that's what everyone defaults to, as the basic chat functionality in Slack is a subpar experience: * No delivery notices, even in private chat * Can't upload multiple attachments/images in one go, but instead defaults to N single uploads * No option not to download large images * Logs in slow, needs to be "connected" and thus struggles to send messages on intermittent connections Maybe the HipChat infusion of people with a different viewpoint will help?
jaimex2 8y ago
I really didn't like Stride but couldn't put my finger on why not. A lot of shortcuts from Hipchat didn't migrate across but I could live with that, something just felt off...
resalisbury 8y ago
"Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, There’s fewer choices for people.” - Stewart Butterfield in the above article. When are tech CEO's going to realize it's bad to sound like a monopolist b/c anti-trust? I tend to agree with Ben Thompson of Stratechery that one of the best ways to thwart emerging monopolies and preserve choice for consumers it to prevent companies from acquiring competitors. Although today Microsoft is the goliath and Slack is the david, in today's world David's grow up very very fast...
WesleyJohnson 8y ago
I haven't used Stride, but some of the features it was touting that Slack doesn't have seemed nice. I liked the idea of marking something as a "decision". Not sure how that played out in practice, but I know I'm constantly searching our Slack conversations at work to try to find decision points. Would be cool if they integrated that, and other features from Stride.
prawn 8y ago
Spotted on Twitter: "Imagine winning a market so dramatically that your competitor shuts down their competing services, hands you their IP, and gives you money for the trouble."
KamBha 8y ago
We have been using Stride for a few months and are baffled by how bad it can be and how it seems to miss key features that was in Hipchat (such as a call indicator). I used to always say "this is not the hard part of your job, stride " because it would fail to do basic things such as display images. A colleague of mine found a security issue but had a hard time logging it and had to make it public. Basically, I got the impression that the stride team in Atlassian was a bit of a mess. All that said, it is sad to see it go because it was an alternative to the near monopoly of Slack. The only other alternative is rocket chat and MS teams now.
crb002 8y ago
Github merger has sent the vultures to pick apart Atlassian before they lose all enterprise market share to Microsoft.
archildress 8y ago
Microsoft Teams isn't successful because it's a great product, it's because their sales team goes into corporate environments where they're already using Office 365 and offer Teams for free as an integrated extension to the rest of the suite. Big companies aren't choosing between Teams and Slack, they're choosing between Teams and email.
bergheim 8y ago
Non-tech people like Facebook (et al). Understandable. Hell, tech people like Facebook. Because of the social graph, understandably, I get it. You can't fight the compartmentalization of our previously open Internet, I guess. Or maybe, at least developers know better.. ? Turns out no. What annoys me to no end is when developers willingly crash right into this "electron react"-whatever hipster bullshit cause its "cool". We had IRC _thirty_ years ago. Slack is not cool. Sure, upgrades are in order for IRC. But it works. Slacks evaluation is so laughable. Obviously it is because of its data - that it won't share. Anyway. We should know better. We should not willingly put everything into slack or hipchat or whatever. Why would we? Ease of X, I guess. Give me an api where I can sync all my stuff locally and, you know what, fair enough, go nuts, but these guys build their businesses based on holding on to their data like vultures (no surprises there) . Understandably. I just thought tech savvy people would know/do better. Anyway, that's my two cents. I feel like a minority.. Now get of my lawn.
daveheq 8y ago
Ugh, so how do Jira tickets related Bitbucket commits get automatically hyperlinked by ID? I guess they don't. Slack is unfortunately thought by some people I work with as a replacement for email... When it's almost impossible to discuss certain things in a chat app, and it's search is just not as good, and it's organizing messages almost non-existent.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
rbosinger 8y ago
"hip", "slack", "chat", "buying" - makes you wonder...
Karishma1234 8y ago
One of the things that have surprised me is the lack of a good slack alternative from one of the large companies like Microsoft or Google. Now, before someone tells me about Teams and Hangouts, they need to realise that Slack/Teams/Hangouts all are glorified Yahoo! messengers but slack is the only one that seems to have a sweet spot where people are comfortable using it.
brodock 8y ago
huge opportunity for Mattermost and Rocket.Chat folks
sandGorgon 8y ago
For those considering an alternative, there's an alternative made by an Indian startup (https://flock.com https://flock.com) that's pretty popular out here. It's much cheaper than slack.
sidcool 8y ago
Seems like they are shutting down HipChat...What about existing customers?
omnimus 8y ago
People are talking about secure alternative matrix/riot, mattermost, zullip... not that i have anything to do with them but Wire https://wire.com https://wire.com is pretty impressive (you can geek out on haskell backend). In small org we have been using riot/matrix and it is great. Works well but it is more like modern IRC. It doesnt have too much ui sugar. Mattermost on the other hand looks cool but had slow clients and there was some bullshit with push notifications requireing some enterprise server license. Hope its no longer the case - i mean why would you want chat without notifications?
hdi 8y ago
Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.” What a statement! This is why I dislike Slack as a company and as much as I hate Teams (have to use it at work), I have no problem with it if the choice is Slack or Teams.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  I love it. Finally a CEO being direct and honest instead of "synergy blablabla" when the reality is "we're taking out a competitor".
drcursor 8y ago
What bothers me the most with the current on-premises chat solutions is the lack of a true alternative for jabber/xmpp with OTR (or equivalent e2e encryption) support. I honestly hate that in 2018 there is no way to move away from Pidgin/Adium if you want to keep this functionality. - RocketChat - OTR breaks very easily, and https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/10094 https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/10094 has been open for months - Matrix / Riot - Last I tried it had the most complex and unusable interface - Mattermost - At first glance seems to include E2E, but when reading a little bit more...not really, just at rest encryption - https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-669 https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-669 - Zulip - nop - https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096 - Movim - nop - https://github.com/movim/movim/issues/63 https://github.com/movim/movim/issues/63 ...
- lucideer 8y ago
  Matrix / Riot is not there yet, but is improving UX-wise. The flipside is that the popularity of the Matrix.org homeserver has caused scaling/performance issues lately (having a distributed/federated protocol is only easy to scale if you actively encourage users to diversify their homeserver choice). Still though, despite three teething issues, I genuinely think it's the most promising. E2E is working better than it was anyway.
- ge0rg 8y ago
  OTR hasn't aged very well (it doesn't support asynchronous communication, multiple parties or multiple clients per party). For XMPP there is OMEMO, which is gaining traction (and is based on the Signal ratchet), but like with OTR, the forward secrecy it provides might be unwanted or even forbidden in corporate environments where you have retention policies in place. E2EE is great for private chats over an untrusted cloud provider, but really not a priority in enterprise environments.
maxehmookau 8y ago
This is a curious quote: "Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.”" I know most tech CEOs might think it, but you don't say it out loud!
nyconyco 8y ago
Hey all here, So I observe that lots of team chat users seem lost and don't what to do anymore. The problem with alternative Open Source team chats attempts is that they are just another silo, or walled garden. Instances do not talk to each other. A private island cannot join continent. Even within the same organisations plenty of incompatible team chats are used competitively, fragmenting the workforces. We propose to fix all that with Nayego: https://nayego.net/ https://nayego.net/ Nayego is an open source team chat under development, that has a world-class UX, and that is federated/decentralised/federated like email. Nayego wishes to address the organisations that are open and extended, where teams are working together with other internal teams, and with partners, customers, providers, but also freelancers, and remote and home office workers. Nayego is and will remain free/open source and open standard (XMPP, SIP, WebRTC). If you wish to register to the preview, please go to: https://nayego.net/ https://nayego.net/ We will do our best.
- Promarged 8y ago
  Sounds nice, too bad there are no screenshots so I can't see what does it look like without giving my e-mail. Does it run on an open protocol? (Maybe HTTP or XMPP based?)
  - nyconyco 8y ago
    That is right, I "exchange" screenshots against feedback, on a live interaction... Yes, it runs on XMPP and SIP and WebRTC, and obviously HTTPS (because what does not?).
- LiquidFlux 8y ago
  Echoing Promarged, the world class UX claim had me searching for screenshots, not having any was a major turn-off.
  - nyconyco 8y ago
    I understand. A complete and comprehensive UX is not seen in a few screenshots...
Tharkun 8y ago
Time to set up an IRC server again then. Sigh.
auslander 8y ago
Slack is best of the breed - all history search, easy code blocks that i cannot yet figure out how to in Hipchat, pictures, files. Electron is big and bad, is it phoning back to Google? but I can understand the savings. Hipchat have an UI, that looks like a joke, after using Slack, but on-premises, offline installs are very important for company security. I guess Slack bought it just to kill it. No offline stuff in 2018, folks.
Brosper 8y ago
Slack is still to expensive :/ this merge will not help. What we need is self hosted app like Rocket Chat, which is not the best software on the market but it's the best solution for new companies to start with something inexpensive.
jlebrech 8y ago
RIP hipchat, piece of crap
time0ut 8y ago
This is disappointing. Our compliance department requires an on prem solution. I don't necessarily agree, but convincing them is a challenge. We've been using RocketChat. The experience has been great, but it's becoming more critical to our business and harder to manage. We were starting to look at HipChat as a replacement as we already have a large Atlassian deployment. Maybe Mattermost is worth a look?
bradt 8y ago
Keep an eye on https://level.app/ https://level.app/ if you're interested in self-hosted chat and/or are tired of the interruptive nature of Slack.
wolfi1 8y ago
used both, hipchat and slack. both underwhelmed me. I still don't understand the hype around them, both provide their full functionality only in the browser, their clients having quite a few deficits. zulip. mentioned in another thread, looks promising, don't know if it can keep its promises
partiallypro 8y ago
Are they really this scared of Teams? I don't even really see them as true competitors, they are going after different customers. It's kind of odd to me. Maybe they believe Google is going too enter the space soon, that would change things if it were bundled with GSuite and then Teams is bundled with O365.
acd 8y ago
How is that legal from a competition law point? Slack is the dominating actor in office chat how can they buy Hipchat? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
tjadams 8y ago
I remember working at a company several years ago where they used HipChat. Slack was just up-and-coming and I remember wondering why it even bothered to compete since HipChat did a fine enough job. Interesting to see how Slack has evolved and that Slack is absorbing HipChat.
KAMSPioneer 8y ago
The CEO of Slack really said that the acquisition was good because "there's [sic] fewer choices for people"??? Imagine the CEO of any non-tech startup company saying this in a Bloomberg interview.
throwaway180118 8y ago
What's out there in the way of white-label or integrated slack alternatives? My non-tech staff are very confused by these modern UIs and ideally I'd like something I can embed into our intranet laravel site.

1006 points by uptown 8y ago

tahw 8y ago

Lmao, Slack and HipChat are the only two apps I've ever used that are worse than MS Teams so I'm sure this is gonna go great.

dang 8y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

lolsal 8y ago

I'm not a huge fan of Slack or Hipchat either way, but I can't help but lament that there is less competition for enterprise chat solutions now.

mehblahwhatevs 8y ago

> Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.” Strange quote.

badbug 8y ago
Yeah, a rare glimpse into how these execs actually think. I'm suprised the pr people let this through their filters.
- freehunter 8y ago
  I agree completely, that's a terrible statement for an executive to make and PR should have stopped that. But on the other hand, I can almost see the logic in it. I'm making a huge leap here, but I remember back in the early 2000s, I had some friends who used AIM. I had some friends who used MSN. I had some friends who used ICQ. I had some friends who used Yahoo. These different chat services were really all exactly the same, the only difference is you can't chat between AIM and MSN. I don't care which chat service "wins", I just want all my friends using one so I don't have to sign into fifteen different services just to communicate. In that situation, Adium or Trillian or various third party clients were basically required if you had any sizable group of friends. Just standardizing on one chat platform would have been better than everyone making their own, since they weren't really competing to make anything better. They just existed, and all did exactly the same thing and were incompatible with each other. The question is, does Slack differ from Hipchat differ from Teams in any meaningful way, and does Hipchat disappearing actually make a difference when Slack exists? I honestly don't know the answer.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    > I just want all my friends using one so I don't have to sign into fifteen different services just to communicate. If only the different services would be able to talk with each other, you wouldn’t have to get your friends to all switch to one of them. But, here we are, a decade or two later, and interoperability is still nonexistent.
    - bergie 8y ago
      > interoperability is still nonexistent. I'd say interoperability _again_ nonexistent. For a brief while it looked like XMPP federation was working.
ggg9990 8y ago
Could also be a reporter misquoting. Reporter says, “how do you respond to someone who says this creates fewer choices for people?” CEO: “There’s fewer choices for people, but they are better than choices.” Boom, first half is the money quote.
- joenathanone 8y ago
  Is that the real quote?
  - ggg9990 8y ago
    No, it’s a hypothetical situation where a reporter can create the conditions for a money quote.
jmalicki 8y ago
Why is that strange? It's very well established that people hate choices (regardless of what they may say) when you actually measure it: https://sheenaiyengar.com/the-art-of-choosing/ https://sheenaiyengar.com/the-art-of-choosing/ And it's very good for the company, as they don't need to do as much competition with HipChat so they can slow down innovation and raise prices. Win, win.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  It's true that individually most people are happier without a choice, but when you take them away you end up cutting out whole chunks of people. What if the thing that went away was accessible to people with certain types of disabilities and the new thing isn't? What if the old one wasn't a public company but the new thing is and now they have to comply with U.S. export laws and you were perfectly okay using it in Iran before but now can't? etc. There are a number of cases where most people won't want a choice, but by giving them what they want and removing one you hurt a lot of other people.

slivym 8y ago

Am I the only one who sees this as anti-competitive? This is basically collusion - Atlassian agreeing not to compete in chat in return for a payment from Slack. It almost seems like we're intent on making literally every mistake we made with traditional businesses, but with electronic products.

thebooglebooski 8y ago
I imagine there's some observation bias here, but aren't there other enterprise chat apps out there in the market? Like if my neighbors and coworkers and friends use Slack, I'm not sure if they're a proxy of the entire market. The reason I say that is because there are other apps that do similar things that hail from Microsoft, Google and Facebook. Then the retort goes: well they don't do integrations and aren't as developer focused as Slack and Hipchat. Then, naturally, wouldn't that incentivize those other apps already in the market to build out those features, and do it better?
jedberg 8y ago
"Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.”"
- ggg9990 8y ago
  Really surprised that a CEO would make a comment like that on the record.
  - booleandilemma 8y ago
    Well it’s not anti-competitive to be competitive...
  - csallen 8y ago
    "There’s fewer choices for people," is such a short quote that I would avoid judging it on its face without seeing the full context.
  - smt88 8y ago

optimusclimb 8y ago

Hipchat took standard IRC, and added some interface fluff, youtube links, and emojis. They achieved great market footprint. Then Slack starts up later - makes literally the same exact product, and manages to surpass, and eventually subsume Hipchat. Crazy.

mdeeks 8y ago
HipChat had some major uptime issues. I have friends who experienced whole day outages at their companies. I hear a lot of people on HN say it was "Just IRC" and I'm always surprised by that. If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off? Why did Slack have a meteoric rise? It can't be for no good reason. I think the answer is that the interface fluff they added is actually extremely important and valuable. They made it dead simple, and fun to use for EVERYONE. My limited experience with IRC was honestly not great (please don't kill me, I'm sorry). Where is the mobile app? How do I get notified when I'm not online? What is EFNet/Freenode/etc? I use a slash command and paste my password in plain text to login? I can't just paste an image? Social apps are extremely difficult to get right. People seem to discount "silly" things like Emoji reactions. Honestly it DOES sound silly to say this, but it really is a great way to express and communicate. This is especially true for our large and diverse team. It also cuts down a TON of message spam ("Congrats!", "Yay!" etc)
- hiccuphippo 8y ago
  My Linux user group used to hangout in IRC until 3 or 4 years ago when little by little we stopped joining the channel. Some of us tried IRC clients for smartphone and it was a lousy experience. Until one day someone created a Telegram group. Now we are all there, the conversation might not be as fluid as IRC, each is in their own timezone, but it is there.
  - phil21 8y ago
    Yes, IRC I think finally "failed" once persistence went from "nice to have" to "need to have" feature. Yes, you can work around this if you are a top 20% techie who enjoys that stuff, but most don't. Mobile basically made the "all clients synced from anywhere" a necessity, and then lack of IRC client development for things like rich media hurt to boot.

fl0wenol 8y ago

And whoosh there goes another option for non-cloud-based enterprise chat.

paxy 8y ago
Would be cool if they re-released Hipchat as an on-prem Slack
- spilk 8y ago
  there's Mattermost for that, which is open-source to boot.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    Unless you need most of the features that Hipchat onprem has - then you get to pay $39/user/year.
horsecaptin 8y ago
Weren't both Slack's and Atlassian's offerings cloud-based?
- elithrar 8y ago
  HipChat had an on-prem (self-hosted) release, but it's been near-abandoned for quite some time.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    ? It just had a release back in April.
- compuguy 8y ago
  They offered a version of Hipchat that could be hosted on perm (Hipchat Server/Data Center). Slack has never had a on perm product.
- 8y ago

thedangler 8y ago

We were using hipchat, worked fine with our custom integrations and workflow. Stopped working when they switched to stride ( had to do with version of jira we are on) Now that my integrations are all most working again I have to probably look at using mattermost. We don't want to use slack.

gms 8y ago
Why not?
- Deimorz 8y ago
  Probably because they don't want to (or can't) have a huge portion of their company's internal communication stored forever on a third-party server. I still find it hard to believe that so many companies are okay with doing that.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    And yet most large companies are using AWS and the like. This obsession with "MUST be behind OUR firewall!" is very arrogant, penny-wise pound-foolish thinking - and it tends to wither in the face of a frank, honest cost/benefit analysis. Amazon probably has more, if not better, security and engineers than most of the companies we're talking about.
    - Grue3 8y ago
      >Amazon probably has more, if not better, security and engineers than most of the companies we're talking about. And Slack has...? A bunch of VC money and a hastily thrown together chat app?
- thedangler 8y ago
  Pricing mostly Can't host it ourselves, not really an issue now that we have a new boss and he doesn't care as much about hosting everything ourselves. Thats why moving to stride was in the works. I tried testing slack with a sub section of our team and they didn't like it at all. I've been toying switching to mattermost for a year now though. See how it goes.

arjun27 8y ago

This reminds me of Aaron Levie’s recent take on Kara Swisher’s podcast - on how enterprise software is going to be either about Microsoft (jack of trades) or about a collection of smaller companies (specialists in their fields) integrated with one and other. Slack and Atlassian focusing on what makes them great and working together makes a lot of sense

adventured 8y ago
Levie is wrong. His personal bias is showing: an over optimism that Box can survive as an independent long-term. It's going to be Microsoft and other giants. There's no scenario where Slack remains an independent company, for the exact same reason there was never a scenario where Github remained an independent company. It'll be surprising if Slack is still independent three years from now. It's perpetual consolidation in enterprise, nothing has changed about that in decades. Microsoft eats Github. Atlassian eats Slack (or some other company does). Maybe Atlassian is the next Oracle, or maybe Oracle or Salesforce or SAP or Microsoft eats Atlassian. The one thing every scenario has in common: the little fish don't stick around and cooperate, they all get eaten and merged into ever larger companies. Nothing can stop that process, all the little fish have shareholders more than willing to sell when the big price comes in from the giants. PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun, MySQL, Great Plains, Sybase, Business Objects, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, RightNow, Taleo, MuleSoft, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc etc It's the same thing going on over and over again. The little fish never stick around. Box will end up in someone's stomach just the same as the rest.
- ngrilly 8y ago
  Alas, I mostly agree... But what about Basecamp or Mailchimp for example?
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    What big corp wants to own the liability of Mailchimp? The minute you crack down harder on customers using spammy email lists, the revenue picture changes dramatically.

schappim 8y ago

>> We are purchasing the IP for Hipchat Cloud and Stride It would be nice if Slack took a leaf out of the Hipchat play book and made a native (non-electron) Mac app.

Kiro 8y ago
What's wrong with the electron app?
- kidfiji 8y ago
  I personally don't have a problem with it, but a lot of people have a problem with it taking up a bit of system resources, primarily ram.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    Thanks! The only Electron app I use is Visual Studio Code and it works great so was curious. (Crazy btw that I get downvoted to oblivion within seconds for asking an honest question.)
    - fernandotakai 8y ago
      an example -- i currently have 3 workspaces on my slack client (on linux) and it's currently using 500mb of RAM, which is insane for a chat client. the only thing using more ram is firefox with literally 25 tabs, including gmail's inbox and pocketcasts playing a podcast (~1gb).
  - rikkus 8y ago
    You can reduce this a huge amount by simply using it in a tab in a browser. When I'm travelling I use it this way, as it eats much less battery - I just pin a tab.
- corndoge 8y ago
  It reduces the available resources for my dev vms (read: actual work) by a disproportionate amount

monocasa 8y ago

Can you use self host slack?

compuguy 8y ago
To my knowledge no. That is going to be an issue for current users of Hipchat Server/Data Center.
- Jach 8y ago
  Maybe it'll be a good opportunity to push for a self-hosted Matrix homeserver...
- mnkypete 8y ago
  I've seen a private Slack instance at SAP, so it seems to be possible for big corps..
wmblaettler 8y ago
There is an open source alternative to Slack that can be self hosted called Rocket Chat: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/
tshannon 8y ago
You can self host mattermost, which has been working well for us so far. https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/

thogenhaven 8y ago

Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft. And based on the numbers in the article, it seems like Atlassian had less than 4% marketshare (Slack expects single digit growth - and assuming they have around 50% of the market) This deals seems like the last step before a full - and in competitive terms logical - merger between Slack and Atlassian.

sithadmin 8y ago
>Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft. That's pretty dependent on which way Slack decides to go in terms of facilitating large Enterprises' needs for absolute control of and visibility into communications platforms. Monitoring and governance of Slack is, at present, a goddamned nightmare. The third party tools that currently exist are, in my experience, somewhat unreliable, and all of them are crippled by the fact that Slack's API drastically limits visibility into the platform. I've worked with more than one very large Enterprise customer with special compliance needs whose Slack instance(s) are one foul-up away from having a regulator rain down fines/sanctions, and in every case Slack is pretending like the issues don't exist while my customers shove their head in the sand. And compliance aside: the Slack API doesn't even have methods in place to deal with things like emoji-react trolling on read-only announcement channels, and a plethora of other little features required to control toxic and obnoxious behaviors. I love Slack to death, but it's not an Enterprise product yet.

Fzzr 8y ago

Woah, this is huge. Atlassian is really going for the "everything a tech shop needs" gold.

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
The exact opposite, Atlassian is selling and retreating.
- Fzzr 8y ago
  I see it as a step towards integrating more (or in this case better IMO) things into their ecosystem. Consolidating Hipchat with Slack is a step toward that.
  - zackkitzmiller 8y ago
    Atlassian is selling the defunct Hipchat to Slack.
castis 8y ago
If thats what was happening, Slack would be migrating over to Hipchat.

strictnein 8y ago

> "and are providing a migration path to Slack for all our customers." Well, not all of your customers. Unless Slack is introducing a self-hosted version? They've already nuked the page on the self-hosted hipchat offering, which now redirects to https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack Which is a complete bummer. Slack isn't an option for us.

crysin 8y ago
I haven't looked at them in a while but I believe Mattermost is still offering self-hosted options and I believe they still market themselves as a slack alternative.
core-questions 8y ago
It is possible to get a confidentiality agreement with Slack over and above the normal terms if you negotiate with them.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

sc00ty 8y ago

What options are left for self-hosted chat systems with comparable features? We've been using self-hosted Hipchat at our company and there is zero chance we will ever use a cloud solution.

thedangler 8y ago
https://www.mattermost.org/ https://www.mattermost.org/
jamesfmilne 8y ago
We moved to RocketChat, which is gradually getting there.
derefr 8y ago
A Matrix.org server?
- nine_k 8y ago
  How easy it is to administer channels on Matrix? Like making team-private channels that can't be joined without approval?
  - snerbles 8y ago
    Channels default to unlisted and invite-only, and the per-channel permissions system is fine-grained. It's pretty simple to adjust permissions using Riot - I haven't tried it with the other clients, though.
zokier 8y ago
* Zulip https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/ * Rocket.chat https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ * Mattermost https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/ * Riot/Matrix https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/ And XMPP is not completely dead, depends on what you mean "comparable features".
qabqabaca 8y ago
Out of interest, why would you guys never use a cloud solution? Sensitive conversations? Server reliability?

joeblau 8y ago

I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.

qabqabaca 8y ago
What would you recommend instead of Jira?
- joeblau 8y ago
  What is the problem you're trying to solve?
  - lotyrin 8y ago
    An opinionated workflow of collecting from a development team and its customers potential future efforts, estimates of the cost and value of those efforts, prioritizing based on those estimates (maximize expected value, minimize expected cost), scheduling & forecasting efforts based on a sound statistical model (e.g. estimation error).
    - joeblau 8y ago
      You can accomplish most of that with Phabricator[1], except for the forecasting efforts. As for the forecasting; I worked at Amazon which had a dedicated JIRA engineer and that was the best I've ever seen JIRA being run and used. In my time there, I never saw any manager predict anything consistently accurate over the course of a long project with it without actually talking to engineering. JIRA promises armchair management, but I've yet to see those tools actually work. That being said, you may be a better JIRA user than anyone I know. JIRA has always be promoted as a tool from the top down, never from the bottom up. [1] - https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

zokier 8y ago

Stride was launched last year. I guess it didn't get much traction then if they gave up on it in less than a year. For consumer it is of course bit sad to see the 800lb gorilla just keep growing and eating up competition, but I can see how this makes sense to at least Atlassian; they are getting better Slack integrations, and possibly other partnership benefits for what seems like essentially free. Not sure how much this move will benefit Slack (the company, not the product), but maybe they'll absorb few more customers this way. Although I imagine many Hipchat/Stride admins will be reevaluating their choices instead of just jumping blindly to Slack.

cothomps 8y ago
I was curious whether or not the Sride project was failing. We were about to do a migration once some key integration things were done; doesn't look like they'll finish those.

joshstrange 8y ago

Even those less competition normally isn't good I'm hopefully optimistic about this. It seems by and large slack has won the chat wars for open projects/podcast live chat/business. My company uses HipChat (due to being in the Atlassian suite) and so I'm not going to have both Slack and HipChat open but if we move to Slack it means I can participant in some other open Slack channels.

CGamesPlay 8y ago

As someone who uses both Slack and HipChat on a daily basis, I am very happy to see that HipChat is the one shutting down. The "cute" features that Slack adds aren't worth much individually, but the overall user experience is much better on Slack than HipChat.

PedroBatista 8y ago

It's a smart move from Atlassian, Slack is a superior product with an huge mind-share. Most of the time companies stick with their own products as if they were a sacred cow no matter the costs.

dbbk 8y ago
Well, I wouldn't say Slack is a superior product necessarily. Stride had some really great ideas, like focus management and designating decisions out of discussions.

arenaninja 8y ago

I hope this means Slack will invest in improving their core desktop offering; it is a notorious resource hog

coldacid 8y ago
I'd love that too, but it won't happen.
- arenaninja 8y ago
  Well in that case I hope MS gets a second wind like it does for VSCode. I use IntelliJ daily since I use a lot of the bells and whistles, but VSCode is great and also runs on Electron. It seems that there's a lot of things MS is doing right with the tool that Slack can't or won't. Maybe WASM to Electron is in the horizon? :)
  - coldacid 8y ago
    Microsoft is the only company I've seen that can actually get any performance out of Electron, and even then it's still a resource hog. In their favour, though, VSCode is written exclusively for Electron, unlike many of these apps which are essentially SPAs lightly reworked for a non-browser.

makecheck 8y ago

Of course, in an ideal world, the obvious technical flaws in chat products would easily enable competitors to “take on” the broken ones. Why does it seem so hard to get chat right? Heck, Yahoo Messenger had lots of features in about year 2000 that we still lack or struggle with in newer products?

jazzyjackson 8y ago
Hi there, I'm currently building out some chat-based groupware and also feel like we've gone backwards since 2000. Can you humor me with some nostalgia and tell me what features of Yahoo Messenger you used?

nine_k 8y ago

tl;dr: Atlassian discontinues HipChat, sells some important HipChat's IP to Slack, and is concentrating on a better Slack integration.

chadlavi 8y ago

* slack gets paid to take hipchat off atlassian's hands

jedberg 8y ago
Actually Slack is paying Atlassian.
- VonGuard 8y ago
  HipChat was orders of magnitude cheaper. This is like Coke buying RC cola to eliminate a cheaper alternative.
- paxy 8y ago
  But Atlassian is investing in Slack

dbg31415 8y ago

What's the point of Stride again?

pmontra 8y ago

Well, thanks to this today I learned that Microsoft had a product called Teams. I didn't see anybody using it but I saw plenty of people using Slack. Maybe is Team addressed to big companies? My customers are all medium or small. Does anyone here have some experience using Teams? Is it really in competition with Slack?

megaman22 8y ago
Teams is bundled into Office365, so if you use that for email or Office software, you've got it for free. It's exactly the same product as Slack, almost carbon copy.
partiallypro 8y ago
Teams at the moment is mostly used by massive companies, as Slack is really built for smaller teams. I like Slack, but it is very unreliable. I am constantly disconnected, have messages never sent. This is not on the free version, it's almost inexcusable in the amount of times it happens.
- duderific 8y ago
  > I am constantly disconnected, have messages never sent. Weird, I have never had those issues, and have been using Slack heavily on a daily basis for a couple of years.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    I used it in two different jobs, both with paid plans (and obviously different internet services) and both have had the same disconnection problems. Maybe it's a regional issue? I'm around Nashville/Atlanta. I have had multiple instances of someone asking me why I haven't replied only to see a message marked as "failed to send" because of a disconnection. This is multiple team members too, not just myself.
tibu 8y ago
The huge advance of Teams is that you get it in a package if you buy Office365. Otherwise it is a chat app similar to Slack with less ready made integrations.

jokoon 8y ago

I'm really hopeless about chat applications. So many apps and platforms, so little inter operability. All that users need, most of the time, is a web app and a smartphone app for private messages. Channels and voice are special cases. Voice is hard to achieve, and channels are usually covered by private servers.

hateful 8y ago

It's really easy, the first one to support multiple chat windows will win. That and ctrl+enter to send message.

hiccuphippo 8y ago

Tangentially related, recently Google pushed an ad for chat.google.com my way (in a Gmail popup no less). It seems they made a Slack competitor, it sort of uses Hangouts for one-on-one chats but its own thing for groups (and groups from Hangouts don't show up there) and broke Hangouts in Gmail since then (some conversation where the other person wrote the last message shows as unread the next time I open gmail).

arkitaip 8y ago
Of course they released another IM product. Their IM teams are at war with each other.
lern_too_spel 8y ago
I tried it. It's garbage. Worse than every other option listed here. You can't even search for rooms.

janlukacs 8y ago

This is an incredibly good move by Slack, even more so after the recent announcement from MS with the Teams free version.

dawhizkid 8y ago

Interesting. I worked at a healthcare tech startup last year and the reason why we had to use Hipchat is because the self-hosted Hipchat Server was HIPAA-compliant and Slack does not have a HIPAA-compliant self-hosted option. Have no idea what they're going to do (or anyone who needs to comply with stricter regulatory guidelines that prevents use of cloud-based messaging apps).

arjun27 8y ago
They seem to be HIPAA compliant now. (No self-hosting yet) https://slack.com/security https://slack.com/security
- anderiv 8y ago
  HIPAA compliance doesn't mean anything unless they're willing to sign a BAA with their customers' organizations. Perhaps they're signing BAAs now, but in the recent past (~6 months ago), I asked and they weren't signing them.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Even if they sign BAAs, that doesn't mean that every health organization is willing to go off-prem. On-prem is popular for a reason.
    - anderiv 8y ago
      Yes, absolutely. Good point.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ceruleanscott 8y ago
Shameless self-promotion: We (Trillian) just received HITRUST certification, provide a BAA, and offer both a SaaS variant and the self-hosted Trillian Server product, both of which run over our own open IM protocol. We're not exactly a Slack/Hipchat clone (having been around for 18+ years, we're more of a traditional IM and group chat solution with some modern stuff like an API, chat bots, and federation capabilities) but have been getting great feedback in the healthcare space with our business offering. More: https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/ https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/

brightball 8y ago

Would be interesting to see Discord make an entry into the space. They're killing it on the gaming side already.

andrewla 8y ago

They changed the headline to "Slack Is Buying HipChat" from "Slack and Atlassian Team Up to Take on Microsoft in Chat Software". The latter still survives in the URL. The "team up" makes it sound ridiculous, like some sort of cabal is being formed -- the team up here is like when I team up with a cheeseburger to take on hunger.

anant90 8y ago
+1 for the cheeseburger analogy. I'll be using it. Thanks!

actualanswer 8y ago

Seems like a move to take on Microsoft Teams. This is something that these independent software vendors will need to do in order to take on Microsoft: integrate and enable a best of breed world. Its not really a great experience if I buy Slack, Okta, Box/Dropbox, GSuite if I don't have a seamless and integrated and experience throughout. The only way is to build a integrated ecosystem and enable these horizontal use-cases.

solatic 8y ago

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thing to sell off Stride, it isn't doing well, work with Slack to have some kind of automated migration made available and let customers flip the switch. Maybe if Slack were to keep supporting Hipchat on-prem, or provide a migration path to a new Slack on-prem product, that'd be fine. But to leave HipChat on-prem customers out in the cold? What's the next Atlassian on-prem product to get thrown under the bus? Bamboo for sure, it's been unpopular relative to Jenkins almost since its beginning. It's definitely surprising that Fisheye/Crucible get any support any more, or Crowd for that matter. But why not Confluence on-prem too? Do we have to worry that Atlassian will stop supporting Confluence on-prem in eight months because Office 365 keeps gaining marketshare? Atlassian's continued long-term support for minor on-prem products was one of the signals that said, if you pay up for HipChat on-prem, we'll support you long-term, you'll be fine. Atlassian completely shattered that with this announcement and eroded a lot of trust that enterprises were putting in them. Big shot in the foot here.

merlincorey 8y ago
> Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Mattermost[1], with a clear migration path from Slack, at least. [1] https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
- apple4ever 8y ago
  We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already). We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.
  - jawilson2 8y ago

janwh 8y ago

Gosh, I hope there will be a #MovingToMattermost movement coming. This feels like a dangerous move to me, and bad for the market, competitiveness, and users. One more thing the tech world does not need right now, is even further increasing its reliance on a single service (and even more so one with a mediocre track record of uptime).

stuff4ben 8y ago

There's always Cisco Webex Teams. I actually kinda like it, although I do work for Cisco. Unfortunately I have to keep it, Slack, and Jabber open on my laptop so I can communicate with anyone anytime (/sarcasm). On my phone I only have Webex Teams which is great when I'm away from my computer.

cup-of-tea 8y ago

Shame all three are terrible products. How hard can text chat be?

orliesaurus 8y ago

I wonder what all these folks who have worked and are still working on Stride will end up doing? If I am not mistaken most of the devs who worked on Stride are located in Austin, TX. I wonder how they feel about this whole change...it must feel yucky!

pram 8y ago
Having worked on that team, it always felt yucky. The product has been a train-wreck for years.
- orliesaurus 8y ago
  I wonder then, this "partnership" means that whoever is on the Stride team is now going to somewhat work really close to Slack's team? Or is Slack acqui-hiring the Stride team? or ... ?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

News of chat companies buying and selling your chat should strike fear into the hearts of their users. Use open protocols.

ulfw 8y ago

Wow. Atlassian is really on the way down, giving up on such an important and strategic part of the business. They've given Stride not even a year to try to compete. Guess they'll always be the JIRA company. Congrats to Slack to winning the Enterprise Market!

eric_b 8y ago

HipChat was a great tool 3 years ago. Atlassian left it to wither on the vine. Really too bad, as I enjoyed its simplicity. Also, data export is great, sure, but what I really want is someone to re-setup all our build and monitoring notifications in Slack :P

lev99 8y ago

Great! How many cooperate chat applications does the world actually need?

ironjunkie 8y ago

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. It fosters a "Always on" culture, where irrelevant chats are exchanged publicly to advertise how much work is being done. If you shut down Slack and appear as Offline people assume you are not working. It also seems to me that now that Slack became the norm for communication, I almost don't receive well written emails with well-argued technical discussions anymore. Everything is now a "Chat" that dilutes the technical discussion because it needs to be responded "directly". I would expect 2018 to be the year where people start questioning the utility of "Slack everywhere" and not blindly jump on the Slack bandwagon because that's what great startups do.

slededit 8y ago
A few months ago slack's early plan was posted here. From day one this was the goal - they knew it was just a chat app so they had to make it feel like something different. Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off.
- ironjunkie 8y ago
  It also see it as a hugely successful marketing coup. As an early employee of a startup, I remember the day we had to setup the initial infrastructure. For the majority in the room, Slack was an absolute requirement. They didn't wanted to have the ability to chat, they wanted to specifically use Slack, like a badge of honor.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  I was involved in the early days of IRC, and personally, I'm amazed at how great Slack is. I parachuted into an org which had a not-great email culture and took up Slack as a replacement. It was amazingly great.

stockkid 8y ago

As a Hipchat user, I welcome this decision. I was not happy with using Hipchat at work for a number of reasons including * No inline syntax highlight * No edit of message (apparently I've seen some do this but I never figured it out) * can only attach one image at a time * Message fails to send then after some retries, sends multiple times It's great that I won't have to use it again. However I'm a bit surprised that atlassian is discontinuing Stride given that they have launched it relatively recently.

forty 8y ago
Last time I used hipchat, you could edit your last message with s/search/replace à la sed

ulfw 8y ago

ryandrake 8y ago

It hurts to think about how much brainpower is being spent worldwide, over and over for decades, by busines customers and competing developers, on...... sending text.... from one computer to others. I have this nightmare where I wake up in the year 2045 and am still reading about yet another chat app being released that’s incompatible with the hundreds of others out there.

captain_perl 8y ago

Just for the record, I surveyed a dozen Hipchat users who used it all day in late 2016 for software development. They had zero complaints about using Hipchat. My opinion of the Hipchat web client at the time was that it worked fine (no complaints from me.) I believe we were on the free tier, so that was a great deal. A new Eng. VP wanted to seem hip, so he switched us to Slack "to ensure we were using the best tools possible." Nobody said that Slack was better or added any features that were worth mentioning.

mi100hael 8y ago
Slack offers quite a few features over HipChat that make it a nicer platform to communicate on, particularly for discussions of a technical nature. Things like easy message editing & markdown formatting make it easier to paste scripts, log messages, console outputs, etc. HipChat was fine as a bare-bones text chat. Slack is a pretty clear winner when it comes to a collaboration platform.
aaronharnly 8y ago
Mid-to-late 2016 was the peak of periodic outages in HipChat (like, several hours per week, which is a lot for a core messaging platform), which was when we threw in the towel and switched to Slack. At the time, Slack had the feature of "you can log in", which teams really liked :) https://status.hipchat.com/uptime?page=10 https://status.hipchat.com/uptime?page=10

knodi 8y ago

Rev must be good, save on tax buy a useless company.

AndrewBissell 8y ago

I feel like the outages and backend infrastructure issues at HipChat were a major factor in its being overtaken by Slack. Don't know how open Slack is to discussing this, but I'd be very interested in a side-by-side comparison of the two architectures.

lcfcjs 8y ago

Queue all the miserable Java programmers that hate javascript because its more popular than their shit language! :)

ge0rg 8y ago

Customers with HipChat installed on their own servers will be able to use it for an extra few months or as long as two years, depending on the version. Slack and Atlassian will make it easy for customers to move, but they won’t be forced to switch, Butterfield said. So they are not forced to switch, but if they don't then their chat will cease to work?

bachmeier 8y ago

I don't know if Stride was losing out to Slack, or if it was losing out to the FOSS competitors like Rocket, Mattermost, and Zulip. I've found Rocket and Mattermost to work well for small teams (no experience with medium or big deployments). With the FOSS alternatives plus the more fringe competitors like Ryver, Glip, and Twist, plus related tools from Dropbox, Basecamp, etc., it's hard to see there being a market for Stride.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

LinuxBender 8y ago

Are they also going to buy Discord?

AzzieElbab 8y ago

I hope they buy Skype and every other corporate chat app too. So, I do not have to run all this crap at the same time

eddieh 8y ago
Microsoft owns Skype. I doubt they'd sell it to Slack.
- AzzieElbab 8y ago
  One can dream...

stemuk 8y ago

It seems really weird to me that a CEO of a big company like Slack comes forward and comments "There’s fewer choices for people.” as if this is supposed to be a good thing. I get that this is true on paper, most CEOs however would rather hide this effect of a merger in order to avoid government regulation.

a13n 8y ago

It's crazy to me that so many people here think IRC is a valid alternative to Slack in 2018. With the recent trend of consumerizing business apps, IRC is an awful experience compared to so many modern chat apps. It's much harder to set up, looks way uglier, and lacks useful features. Not to mention IRC has a somewhat technical setup, which makes any non-engineering team reluctant to buy in. Software companies have sales, marketing, design, product, support, leadership teams... use a tool that works great for everyone. Personally we use Twist. I enjoy that it's lightweight and performant compared to Slack, which feels clunky (just take a look at your activity monitor).

zenethian 8y ago

I really hope that this results in a combination of the two's best features. Slack is so nice and polished and runs well as a standalone app, and Hipchat has some really nice features (like channel re-ordering in the sidebar) that I'd love to see brought into Slack.

7ewis 8y ago

We've been waiting a long time to move to Slack, and recently started migrating over ~2,000 users from HipChat. Everyone is desperate for the migration to be complete, and to get rid of HipChat. A large majority had already moved their own team over. Can't say I'll be sad to say goodbye to HipChat, it worked well for the 6 years we had it, but Slack is superior in many ways (other than price...).

phyzome 8y ago

I'm not thrilled to see further consolidation, but frankly I'm not surprised in the least -- Hipchat is an utter dumpster fire.

visualphoenix 8y ago

This both sucks and is great. Sucks for me. Hopefully will be great for Mattermost and Matrix. For HIPAA compliant shops Slack is a non-starter. Mattermost will hopefully get a lot of corporate $ now. I wish Matrix's dendrite[0] golang replacement homeserver was finished and in better shape. I'd much prefer to go the Riot/Matrix route, but it doesn't feel ready for prime time yet. HipChat Server was SPOF but could be made to be HIPAA compliant by hoisting their AMI out and encrypting the base image. I literally was at the tail end of hacking Hipchat Data Center to be fully HIPAA compliant and HA using Vault, Consul (+locks), Terraform, scaling groups and friends. I was so excited about getting to blog about it. sigh Looks like I'll be re-engaging Mattermost. Last time I looked their E20 pricing was like 4x more expensive per user than it was costing for HipChat DC. Hopefully they finished their HipChat importing option. [0] https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite

adrianpike 8y ago
Hey, can you elaborate a touch on the lack of HIPAA compliance with Slack? Some folks on my team seem to think it's compliant - and I'm not finding true hard answers either way (ignoring the BAA side of things)
- ceruleanscott 8y ago
  Slack showcases the HIPAA logo on their security page, but upon closer inspection - https://slack.com/terms-of-service/supplement#healthcare https://slack.com/terms-of-service/supplement#healthcare - you'll see that unless you've signed a separate agreement with them, you acknowledge that Slack is not HIPAA compliant and that you are not to send them any PHI. My guess: they are signing BAAs for grid customers only (so the logo isn't a lie) and making them pay handsomely for the pleasure. As I shamelessly disclosed upthread, we (Trillian) offer a HITRUST certified, BAA-backed solution for healthcare organizations that comes in SaaS and on-prem variants. More: https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/ https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

ddtaylor 8y ago

Has Slack fixed the problem with bots spamming people yet? I used to be a member of a lot of channels for various projects but then a wave of bots started hitting all of them spamming various scams or trying to impersonate accounts so I had to leave because I couldn't have my inbox flooded with nonsense and the signal-to-noise ratio was too high.

filereaper 8y ago

What bothered us the most with HipChat was their lax security model. Any file uploads in HipChat would be uploaded to an S3 bucket and opts for security via obscurity [1] as opposed to proper authentication. This forced us to send sensitive material via email as opposed to directly via HipChat. [1] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/Security-of-HipChat-file-uploads/qaq-p/385492 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/Securit...

cylinder 8y ago

Atlassian wins again.

dmode 8y ago

Our Corp IT requested engineering to Pilot Google Hangout Chats as we already have GSuite. Turns out that Slack is the most expensive enterprise application that IT owns. It is more expensive that GSuite, although it provides a specific utility, while GSuite has emails, spreadsheets, docs etc. etc. That doesn't really sounds sustainable.

2T1Qka0rEiPr 8y ago
Any feedback on Google Hangouts Chat?

snaily 8y ago

For being the business chat darling, Slack is just not that great at being an amazing chat platform. I'm comparing to WhatsApp, because in my org that's what everyone defaults to, as the basic chat functionality in Slack is a subpar experience: * No delivery notices, even in private chat * Can't upload multiple attachments/images in one go, but instead defaults to N single uploads * No option not to download large images * Logs in slow, needs to be "connected" and thus struggles to send messages on intermittent connections Maybe the HipChat infusion of people with a different viewpoint will help?

jaimex2 8y ago

I really didn't like Stride but couldn't put my finger on why not. A lot of shortcuts from Hipchat didn't migrate across but I could live with that, something just felt off...

resalisbury 8y ago

"Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, There’s fewer choices for people.” - Stewart Butterfield in the above article. When are tech CEO's going to realize it's bad to sound like a monopolist b/c anti-trust? I tend to agree with Ben Thompson of Stratechery that one of the best ways to thwart emerging monopolies and preserve choice for consumers it to prevent companies from acquiring competitors. Although today Microsoft is the goliath and Slack is the david, in today's world David's grow up very very fast...

WesleyJohnson 8y ago

I haven't used Stride, but some of the features it was touting that Slack doesn't have seemed nice. I liked the idea of marking something as a "decision". Not sure how that played out in practice, but I know I'm constantly searching our Slack conversations at work to try to find decision points. Would be cool if they integrated that, and other features from Stride.

prawn 8y ago

Spotted on Twitter: "Imagine winning a market so dramatically that your competitor shuts down their competing services, hands you their IP, and gives you money for the trouble."

KamBha 8y ago

We have been using Stride for a few months and are baffled by how bad it can be and how it seems to miss key features that was in Hipchat (such as a call indicator). I used to always say "this is not the hard part of your job, stride " because it would fail to do basic things such as display images. A colleague of mine found a security issue but had a hard time logging it and had to make it public. Basically, I got the impression that the stride team in Atlassian was a bit of a mess. All that said, it is sad to see it go because it was an alternative to the near monopoly of Slack. The only other alternative is rocket chat and MS teams now.

crb002 8y ago

Github merger has sent the vultures to pick apart Atlassian before they lose all enterprise market share to Microsoft.

archildress 8y ago

Microsoft Teams isn't successful because it's a great product, it's because their sales team goes into corporate environments where they're already using Office 365 and offer Teams for free as an integrated extension to the rest of the suite. Big companies aren't choosing between Teams and Slack, they're choosing between Teams and email.

bergheim 8y ago

Non-tech people like Facebook (et al). Understandable. Hell, tech people like Facebook. Because of the social graph, understandably, I get it. You can't fight the compartmentalization of our previously open Internet, I guess. Or maybe, at least developers know better.. ? Turns out no. What annoys me to no end is when developers willingly crash right into this "electron react"-whatever hipster bullshit cause its "cool". We had IRC _thirty_ years ago. Slack is not cool. Sure, upgrades are in order for IRC. But it works. Slacks evaluation is so laughable. Obviously it is because of its data - that it won't share. Anyway. We should know better. We should not willingly put everything into slack or hipchat or whatever. Why would we? Ease of X, I guess. Give me an api where I can sync all my stuff locally and, you know what, fair enough, go nuts, but these guys build their businesses based on holding on to their data like vultures (no surprises there) . Understandably. I just thought tech savvy people would know/do better. Anyway, that's my two cents. I feel like a minority.. Now get of my lawn.

daveheq 8y ago

Ugh, so how do Jira tickets related Bitbucket commits get automatically hyperlinked by ID? I guess they don't. Slack is unfortunately thought by some people I work with as a replacement for email... When it's almost impossible to discuss certain things in a chat app, and it's search is just not as good, and it's organizing messages almost non-existent.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

rbosinger 8y ago

"hip", "slack", "chat", "buying" - makes you wonder...

Karishma1234 8y ago

One of the things that have surprised me is the lack of a good slack alternative from one of the large companies like Microsoft or Google. Now, before someone tells me about Teams and Hangouts, they need to realise that Slack/Teams/Hangouts all are glorified Yahoo! messengers but slack is the only one that seems to have a sweet spot where people are comfortable using it.

brodock 8y ago

huge opportunity for Mattermost and Rocket.Chat folks

sandGorgon 8y ago

For those considering an alternative, there's an alternative made by an Indian startup (https://flock.com https://flock.com) that's pretty popular out here. It's much cheaper than slack.

sidcool 8y ago

Seems like they are shutting down HipChat...What about existing customers?

omnimus 8y ago

People are talking about secure alternative matrix/riot, mattermost, zullip... not that i have anything to do with them but Wire https://wire.com https://wire.com is pretty impressive (you can geek out on haskell backend). In small org we have been using riot/matrix and it is great. Works well but it is more like modern IRC. It doesnt have too much ui sugar. Mattermost on the other hand looks cool but had slow clients and there was some bullshit with push notifications requireing some enterprise server license. Hope its no longer the case - i mean why would you want chat without notifications?

hdi 8y ago

Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.” What a statement! This is why I dislike Slack as a company and as much as I hate Teams (have to use it at work), I have no problem with it if the choice is Slack or Teams.

skrebbel 8y ago
I love it. Finally a CEO being direct and honest instead of "synergy blablabla" when the reality is "we're taking out a competitor".

drcursor 8y ago

What bothers me the most with the current on-premises chat solutions is the lack of a true alternative for jabber/xmpp with OTR (or equivalent e2e encryption) support. I honestly hate that in 2018 there is no way to move away from Pidgin/Adium if you want to keep this functionality. - RocketChat - OTR breaks very easily, and https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/10094 https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/10094 has been open for months - Matrix / Riot - Last I tried it had the most complex and unusable interface - Mattermost - At first glance seems to include E2E, but when reading a little bit more...not really, just at rest encryption - https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-669 https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-669 - Zulip - nop - https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096 - Movim - nop - https://github.com/movim/movim/issues/63 https://github.com/movim/movim/issues/63 ...

lucideer 8y ago
Matrix / Riot is not there yet, but is improving UX-wise. The flipside is that the popularity of the Matrix.org homeserver has caused scaling/performance issues lately (having a distributed/federated protocol is only easy to scale if you actively encourage users to diversify their homeserver choice). Still though, despite three teething issues, I genuinely think it's the most promising. E2E is working better than it was anyway.
ge0rg 8y ago
OTR hasn't aged very well (it doesn't support asynchronous communication, multiple parties or multiple clients per party). For XMPP there is OMEMO, which is gaining traction (and is based on the Signal ratchet), but like with OTR, the forward secrecy it provides might be unwanted or even forbidden in corporate environments where you have retention policies in place. E2EE is great for private chats over an untrusted cloud provider, but really not a priority in enterprise environments.

maxehmookau 8y ago

This is a curious quote: "Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.”" I know most tech CEOs might think it, but you don't say it out loud!

nyconyco 8y ago

Hey all here, So I observe that lots of team chat users seem lost and don't what to do anymore. The problem with alternative Open Source team chats attempts is that they are just another silo, or walled garden. Instances do not talk to each other. A private island cannot join continent. Even within the same organisations plenty of incompatible team chats are used competitively, fragmenting the workforces. We propose to fix all that with Nayego: https://nayego.net/ https://nayego.net/ Nayego is an open source team chat under development, that has a world-class UX, and that is federated/decentralised/federated like email. Nayego wishes to address the organisations that are open and extended, where teams are working together with other internal teams, and with partners, customers, providers, but also freelancers, and remote and home office workers. Nayego is and will remain free/open source and open standard (XMPP, SIP, WebRTC). If you wish to register to the preview, please go to: https://nayego.net/ https://nayego.net/ We will do our best.

Promarged 8y ago
Sounds nice, too bad there are no screenshots so I can't see what does it look like without giving my e-mail. Does it run on an open protocol? (Maybe HTTP or XMPP based?)
- nyconyco 8y ago
  That is right, I "exchange" screenshots against feedback, on a live interaction... Yes, it runs on XMPP and SIP and WebRTC, and obviously HTTPS (because what does not?).
LiquidFlux 8y ago
Echoing Promarged, the world class UX claim had me searching for screenshots, not having any was a major turn-off.
- nyconyco 8y ago
  I understand. A complete and comprehensive UX is not seen in a few screenshots...

Tharkun 8y ago

Time to set up an IRC server again then. Sigh.

auslander 8y ago

Slack is best of the breed - all history search, easy code blocks that i cannot yet figure out how to in Hipchat, pictures, files. Electron is big and bad, is it phoning back to Google? but I can understand the savings. Hipchat have an UI, that looks like a joke, after using Slack, but on-premises, offline installs are very important for company security. I guess Slack bought it just to kill it. No offline stuff in 2018, folks.

Brosper 8y ago

Slack is still to expensive :/ this merge will not help. What we need is self hosted app like Rocket Chat, which is not the best software on the market but it's the best solution for new companies to start with something inexpensive.

jlebrech 8y ago

RIP hipchat, piece of crap

time0ut 8y ago

This is disappointing. Our compliance department requires an on prem solution. I don't necessarily agree, but convincing them is a challenge. We've been using RocketChat. The experience has been great, but it's becoming more critical to our business and harder to manage. We were starting to look at HipChat as a replacement as we already have a large Atlassian deployment. Maybe Mattermost is worth a look?

bradt 8y ago

Keep an eye on https://level.app/ https://level.app/ if you're interested in self-hosted chat and/or are tired of the interruptive nature of Slack.

wolfi1 8y ago

used both, hipchat and slack. both underwhelmed me. I still don't understand the hype around them, both provide their full functionality only in the browser, their clients having quite a few deficits. zulip. mentioned in another thread, looks promising, don't know if it can keep its promises

partiallypro 8y ago

Are they really this scared of Teams? I don't even really see them as true competitors, they are going after different customers. It's kind of odd to me. Maybe they believe Google is going too enter the space soon, that would change things if it were bundled with GSuite and then Teams is bundled with O365.

acd 8y ago

How is that legal from a competition law point? Slack is the dominating actor in office chat how can they buy Hipchat? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

tjadams 8y ago

I remember working at a company several years ago where they used HipChat. Slack was just up-and-coming and I remember wondering why it even bothered to compete since HipChat did a fine enough job. Interesting to see how Slack has evolved and that Slack is absorbing HipChat.

KAMSPioneer 8y ago

The CEO of Slack really said that the acquisition was good because "there's [sic] fewer choices for people"??? Imagine the CEO of any non-tech startup company saying this in a Bloomberg interview.

throwaway180118 8y ago

What's out there in the way of white-label or integrated slack alternatives? My non-tech staff are very confused by these modern UIs and ideally I'd like something I can embed into our intranet laravel site.