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Integrations serve as a moat. Anything that sends notifications to your chat platform, anything that adds slash-commands which become part of people's daily wor

Integrations serve as a moat. Anything that sends notifications to your chat platform, anything that adds slash-commands which become part of people's daily workflow, all of those become requirements which need to be replicated in a migration. For companies with non-trivial numbers of integrations which do non-trivial things for their users, it becomes more and more expensive to contemplate a replacement. For products, in particular, with such wide-ranging use within a single enterprise, replacement requirements will be defined by committee, and will be so long as to de-facto prevent migration. And besides, the field of competitors is getting smaller, not bigger. See: Atlassian throwing in the towel on HipChat and Stride.

jerf 8y ago
"Integrations serve as a moat." The depth of those integrations serve as the depth of the moat. If your integration is basically "I send and receive textual messages", which from what I see the vast majority are, you've got an integration which could be ported to a competitor in less than a week. A lot of the integration work is in the thing being integrated rather than chat-system specific things. As you use more Slack-specific features the moat gets deeper, but you do have to stretch a bit before you're really "slack-specific". Rich text formatting, conference rooms at a basic level, etc. isn't "slack-specific". (Be sure to read that first sentence of mine a couple of times before replying. It does not say "integrations are always trivial to port and are thus irrelevant", for instance. If I wanted to say that, I would have.) "Atlassian throwing in the towel on HipChat and Stride." I strongly suspect that Atlassian threw in the towel not because it was hopeless, but because a highly profitable company has a business imperative to avoid things that will merely be sorta profitable to them, or where profit will be harder than their other highly profitable activities. It's why Google doesn't simply do everything; put over-simply, for something to be worth Google doing, it has to be more profitable than putting another engineer on AdWords. When a company is valued at $7.1B, it validates the market, and even if there was no competition today, there most assuredly will be in two years! (I work for a company not quite as high as Google in the "necessary profit per engineer" metric, but we've also divested "merely" profitable businesses because they were basically a drag on the rest of the company, and lacked sufficient strategic value to overcome that disadvantage.)
- grandmczeb 8y ago
  > Be sure to read that first sentence of mine a couple of times before replying. It does not say "integrations are always trivial to port and are thus irrelevant", for instance. If I wanted to say that, I would have. Off topic, but when you write something like this the message you’re sending is “I’d rather insult the reader than take the time to communicate in a way that can be properly understood.” Hopefully that’s not the intention.
  - jerf 8y ago
    What it actually communicates is "I've been communicating over text on the internet for 25+ years and I have a pretty decent idea exactly how someone is going to aggressively misinterpret me." There is no other way to communicate nuance that I've found. If you claim that "some types of X are Y", you'll get angry replies about how some X aren't Y, angry replies about how terrible it is to claim that all X are Y, and on more than one occasion, angry replies about how some types of X are Y. If you're insulted, well, then, it's not targeted at you. But abundant experience says it does have non-zero targets. And it's getting worse, not better, as more and more people are convinced(/programmed) to believe that reading people as harshly as possible and then being as angry and offended as possible is a virtue rather than a vice. As these people get more power, it's becoming simply self-defense to make sure you underline your point.

jerf 8y ago

"Integrations serve as a moat." The depth of those integrations serve as the depth of the moat. If your integration is basically "I send and receive textual messages", which from what I see the vast majority are, you've got an integration which could be ported to a competitor in less than a week. A lot of the integration work is in the thing being integrated rather than chat-system specific things. As you use more Slack-specific features the moat gets deeper, but you do have to stretch a bit before you're really "slack-specific". Rich text formatting, conference rooms at a basic level, etc. isn't "slack-specific". (Be sure to read that first sentence of mine a couple of times before replying. It does not say "integrations are always trivial to port and are thus irrelevant", for instance. If I wanted to say that, I would have.) "Atlassian throwing in the towel on HipChat and Stride." I strongly suspect that Atlassian threw in the towel not because it was hopeless, but because a highly profitable company has a business imperative to avoid things that will merely be sorta profitable to them, or where profit will be harder than their other highly profitable activities. It's why Google doesn't simply do everything; put over-simply, for something to be worth Google doing, it has to be more profitable than putting another engineer on AdWords. When a company is valued at $7.1B, it validates the market, and even if there was no competition today, there most assuredly will be in two years! (I work for a company not quite as high as Google in the "necessary profit per engineer" metric, but we've also divested "merely" profitable businesses because they were basically a drag on the rest of the company, and lacked sufficient strategic value to overcome that disadvantage.)

grandmczeb 8y ago
> Be sure to read that first sentence of mine a couple of times before replying. It does not say "integrations are always trivial to port and are thus irrelevant", for instance. If I wanted to say that, I would have. Off topic, but when you write something like this the message you’re sending is “I’d rather insult the reader than take the time to communicate in a way that can be properly understood.” Hopefully that’s not the intention.
- jerf 8y ago
  What it actually communicates is "I've been communicating over text on the internet for 25+ years and I have a pretty decent idea exactly how someone is going to aggressively misinterpret me." There is no other way to communicate nuance that I've found. If you claim that "some types of X are Y", you'll get angry replies about how some X aren't Y, angry replies about how terrible it is to claim that all X are Y, and on more than one occasion, angry replies about how some types of X are Y. If you're insulted, well, then, it's not targeted at you. But abundant experience says it does have non-zero targets. And it's getting worse, not better, as more and more people are convinced(/programmed) to believe that reading people as harshly as possible and then being as angry and offended as possible is a virtue rather than a vice. As these people get more power, it's becoming simply self-defense to make sure you underline your point.