5 ms·

Amazing how they are a $7b company with hundreds of employees and the issue of it still taking minutes to upload an image from the mobile app is happening years

by pentae 8y ago

Amazing how they are a $7b company with hundreds of employees and the issue of it still taking minutes to upload an image from the mobile app is happening years after they acknowledged it for the Asia region. We pay hundreds a month for Slack and they are worth 7b but with all their money and hundreds of employees they just can't figure out how to get a photo to upload in a reasonable time. Just can't figure out how to do it!

lukeqsee 8y ago
> for the Asia region. Depending on where you are in Asia, this is a hard one. I run a company with geo-distributed systems, and even having a few Asian-base servers it is still difficult to reach the whole region. You almost need to have datacenters in every country to make it work effectively. Not saying it's an excuse…it is $7B after all. That buys a few servers in many different regions. :) Edit: To continue my thought. Here are a few of the issues you're facing: - China has the GFW. - South Korea has very subpar links to anything outside South Korea. - SE Asia is tons of undersea cables with limited capacity. This issue is very likely to be somewhat outside their control, since it sounds very much like a bandwidth issue they may not have the ability to rectify.
- pentae 8y ago
  Its strange, we have a solid fibre connection in Thailand and have ~20mbit upstream to Singapore. It's not like we are in a shack on a mountain in Peru on a dialup modem. Slack is the only service we use thats ridiculously slow for us and we use a lot of US based services.
  - scruffyherder 8y ago
    I can deathmatch fine in Quake 2 on a US server. but slack? Yeah no.
    - doyoulikeworms 8y ago
      Have you considered Discord? Kidding...
- pvg 8y ago
  it is $7B after all. There's no actual $7B involved here. At least, not in the 'buy the Angkor Wat and turn it into a data center' sense.
  - lukeqsee 8y ago
    > There's no actual $7B involved here. Valid point. Thankfully buying a few regional servers is manageable with $437m. :)
    - IMTDb 8y ago
      Not sure the investor said anything remotely looking like : "Here is nearly $500m, please use this money to install tons of servers in a region that generates a small percentage of your revenues because their infrastructure is subpar."
- scruffyherder 8y ago
  Which is nonsense I get 50mbit sec to a server I host in Chicago from Hong Kong. 165ms latency.
scruffyherder 8y ago
Is that what the deal is? It's so terrible I just make people Skype me.
beager 8y ago
It's a reasonable case to be made that the wide adoption of Slack despite its issues contributes to their perceived valuation. This tells me that: 1. Slack has tapped into an energetic market 2. People will use the product even if it sucks, or can be compelled to use it by their company's management and IT. 3. There's money on the table for anyone who can build Slack-like services at a better level of quality. There's also a spiritual similarity in this gripe to the gripe about Apple being a $1T company despite their descent into software and dongle hell—people are buying it despite its flaws because the marketing and the appeal is overwhelming.

by pentae 8y ago

lukeqsee 8y ago

> for the Asia region. Depending on where you are in Asia, this is a hard one. I run a company with geo-distributed systems, and even having a few Asian-base servers it is still difficult to reach the whole region. You almost need to have datacenters in every country to make it work effectively. Not saying it's an excuse…it is $7B after all. That buys a few servers in many different regions. :) Edit: To continue my thought. Here are a few of the issues you're facing: - China has the GFW. - South Korea has very subpar links to anything outside South Korea. - SE Asia is tons of undersea cables with limited capacity. This issue is very likely to be somewhat outside their control, since it sounds very much like a bandwidth issue they may not have the ability to rectify.

pentae 8y ago
Its strange, we have a solid fibre connection in Thailand and have ~20mbit upstream to Singapore. It's not like we are in a shack on a mountain in Peru on a dialup modem. Slack is the only service we use thats ridiculously slow for us and we use a lot of US based services.
- scruffyherder 8y ago
  I can deathmatch fine in Quake 2 on a US server. but slack? Yeah no.
  - doyoulikeworms 8y ago
    Have you considered Discord? Kidding...
pvg 8y ago
it is $7B after all. There's no actual $7B involved here. At least, not in the 'buy the Angkor Wat and turn it into a data center' sense.
- lukeqsee 8y ago
  > There's no actual $7B involved here. Valid point. Thankfully buying a few regional servers is manageable with $437m. :)
  - IMTDb 8y ago
    Not sure the investor said anything remotely looking like : "Here is nearly $500m, please use this money to install tons of servers in a region that generates a small percentage of your revenues because their infrastructure is subpar."
scruffyherder 8y ago
Which is nonsense I get 50mbit sec to a server I host in Chicago from Hong Kong. 165ms latency.

scruffyherder 8y ago

Is that what the deal is? It's so terrible I just make people Skype me.

beager 8y ago

It's a reasonable case to be made that the wide adoption of Slack despite its issues contributes to their perceived valuation. This tells me that: 1. Slack has tapped into an energetic market 2. People will use the product even if it sucks, or can be compelled to use it by their company's management and IT. 3. There's money on the table for anyone who can build Slack-like services at a better level of quality. There's also a spiritual similarity in this gripe to the gripe about Apple being a $1T company despite their descent into software and dongle hell—people are buying it despite its flaws because the marketing and the appeal is overwhelming.