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Slack has a staying power that the author didn't catch: once you've got all kinds of apps reporting data directly into Slack, and all kinds of rooms set up for

Slack has a staying power that the author didn't catch: once you've got all kinds of apps reporting data directly into Slack, and all kinds of rooms set up for specific data purposes, it's even more sticky than email. Before a Slack-using company would switch, the competitor would need to support many/most/all of the integrations that the company is using. You've really only got two chances to win Slack's customers: the point before they seriously adopt Slack, and the point in the future where Slack does something stupid like jack prices way up or suffer a serious breach.

gopher2 7y ago
Not that it'd be easy but I imagine that you can steal their customers by adding chat rooms and integrations slowly to some other type of software, rather than a more direct angle where you have to win at one of those two moments.
- closeparen 7y ago
  My employer ran several pilots of alternative chat systems alongside our primary. It sucked. Having both clients open, remembering which rooms are actually in active in which systems, etc. was obnoxious. Might work for a single closed-loop team but even then.
- lloydde 7y ago
  Microsoft Teams with their decent video conferencing might have an angle plus being “free” part of 365.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    That's the discussion we're actively having now. My only concern is how to move the knowledge and context that's currently in Slack somewhere else. Also, who knows if Teams will actually catch on - though with Microsoft threatening to get rid of Skype, it'll end up being the more official looking meeting app anyways, so why not bring the rest along?
    - addicted 7y ago
      I’m pretty sure Teams is here to stay. It’s growing. MS is investing a lot of resources and it’s improving rapidly. But I think your point about MS getting rid of Skype for Business in favor of Teams is the most important one. Once that happens, which MS has stated publicly, Teams will become a necessary app for MS to support, since enterprises won’t tolerate MS not having s chat service in O365.
  - depressedpanda 7y ago
    The company I worked at previously tried to force MS Teams on everyone. Problem was that most developers there ran Linux and the client was far inferior to Slack on that platform. Unsurprisingly very few developers used Teams and it failed horribly as a decent communication replacement. It became yet another communication channel devs may, or may not, respond in. End result: email still reigns supreme, complemented by xmpp for the non-devs with the technical know how to understand how to connect to the internally hosted server. So my view is that until Microsoft get their act together, Teams is not a serious contender to Slack. Companies can get it "free" together with their Office subscription, but most developers won't use it until it works decently on their development platform of choice.
dpandya 7y ago
You could make this same argument to argue that Slack would fail against email. Something like: there are all kinds of email integrations, user-specific and group-specific setups, etc. at companies. How can Slack ever compete? The answer was that Slack was so much better for many companies that it made sense to suffer the pain of switching. The company that beats Slack will likely be 10x better communication software or something very similar but distributed much more effectively (maybe Microsoft Teams in the enterprise).
- swsieber 7y ago
  Well, and email integrations are easy to replace - it's a single, uniform interface.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Chat is a complement to email, not a replacement. Over time some people may take their formerly-email activities to chat, but no cutover is required. Running two chat systems side by side, on the other hand, is a huge pain. There really is a pressure to get everything migrated and the old one turned off.
  - taurath 7y ago
    Email is for outside the boundaries (outside-of-company, outside-of-division in a silo'd company), chat is for inside - there's still people who do prefer email especially in partner facing roles, but I think its fair to say that most prefer using chat if they had a choice.
    - u02sgb 7y ago
      Not necessarily true. For example the enterprise I work in doesn't allow saving chat history. This makes email better for technical discussion that needs recorded.
      - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
        What's the rationale behind that?
taurath 7y ago
Those integrations are slack's moat, but I think many of those useful integrations are already multi-tenant (having to support hipchat for large corps), or through a proxied service that can add a new output integration. For smaller businesses who just use the slack connector store that might be more difficult.
derrickreimer 7y ago
Author here. Slack is undoubtedly sticky, although I challenge the assumption that all integrations need to be replicated in a niche play. Those who did adopt Level were willing to give up a number of integrations that were low-value to them or were just causing noise that proved unnecessary.
- boudewijnrempt 7y ago
  I was struck with " They recognize that Slack is not suitable for meaningful conversations, so they automatically delete chat messages older than a few weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival." in your article. It's something I feel quite strongly about: chat should not be archived. There should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Chat messages have no value beyond the moment. Any chat implementation that assigns importance to messages beyond the current conversation is wrong. For the rest... It was like peeking into an alien world. I've been maintaining an open source application since 2004, and I've had various day jobs, but managed to build it out into my day job the past couple of years. I've never had the startup itch :-) Just let me build up my userbase, my income stream and my contributor team, and I'm happy.
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    > being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Persistent chat is one of the biggest values of Slack or Discord or Mattermost, and one of the big reasons I'll take it over IRC any day. Persistent chat that you can join and read the backlog of is incredibly valuable. It becomes an asynchronous communication medium, rather than a synchronous one. And it's much richer and lower-friction than email.
    - AdrianB1 7y ago
      With people having the expectation of chat to be instantly replied, like a chat in a real life (someone walking to your desk and saying something) it is not asynchronous in any way.
Someone 7y ago
I think you could provide a compatible API, or a wrapper around your API that makes it (mostly) compatible, claiming that you do it for interoperability. If you think that’s too risky, legally, an alternative could be to provide example code showing “to do X in Slack, do this on our API”. If your tool gets some traction, a third party wrapper might show up.
perlgeek 7y ago
Couldn't you offer an integration API that's compatible with Slack? Maybe not in the US, where APIs are under copyright, but outside it could work...
donnfelker 7y ago
This.
SI_Rob 7y ago
What's stopping potential competitors from making slack-compatible APIs?
inopinatus 7y ago
There's a lesson in there, viz. that an ISV ecosystem around your product is a major retention factor. Nothing new here of course, tech shops have been doing it for decades. Centuries even maybe. See also: certification programs.
joncrane 7y ago
Isn't Mattermost pretty close? When I moved to a company with Slack, I recognized a lot of stuff from my previous job where some of the devs used Mattermost.
- stock_toaster 7y ago
  zulip has quite a few integrations too apparently. I've been thinking about giving zulip a whirl with one of our smaller teams at work, and see how it compares to slack. Quite a few items on the "why zulip?" page really resonate with me.

gopher2 7y ago

Not that it'd be easy but I imagine that you can steal their customers by adding chat rooms and integrations slowly to some other type of software, rather than a more direct angle where you have to win at one of those two moments.

closeparen 7y ago
My employer ran several pilots of alternative chat systems alongside our primary. It sucked. Having both clients open, remembering which rooms are actually in active in which systems, etc. was obnoxious. Might work for a single closed-loop team but even then.
lloydde 7y ago
Microsoft Teams with their decent video conferencing might have an angle plus being “free” part of 365.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  That's the discussion we're actively having now. My only concern is how to move the knowledge and context that's currently in Slack somewhere else. Also, who knows if Teams will actually catch on - though with Microsoft threatening to get rid of Skype, it'll end up being the more official looking meeting app anyways, so why not bring the rest along?
  - addicted 7y ago
    I’m pretty sure Teams is here to stay. It’s growing. MS is investing a lot of resources and it’s improving rapidly. But I think your point about MS getting rid of Skype for Business in favor of Teams is the most important one. Once that happens, which MS has stated publicly, Teams will become a necessary app for MS to support, since enterprises won’t tolerate MS not having s chat service in O365.
- depressedpanda 7y ago
  The company I worked at previously tried to force MS Teams on everyone. Problem was that most developers there ran Linux and the client was far inferior to Slack on that platform. Unsurprisingly very few developers used Teams and it failed horribly as a decent communication replacement. It became yet another communication channel devs may, or may not, respond in. End result: email still reigns supreme, complemented by xmpp for the non-devs with the technical know how to understand how to connect to the internally hosted server. So my view is that until Microsoft get their act together, Teams is not a serious contender to Slack. Companies can get it "free" together with their Office subscription, but most developers won't use it until it works decently on their development platform of choice.

dpandya 7y ago

You could make this same argument to argue that Slack would fail against email. Something like: there are all kinds of email integrations, user-specific and group-specific setups, etc. at companies. How can Slack ever compete? The answer was that Slack was so much better for many companies that it made sense to suffer the pain of switching. The company that beats Slack will likely be 10x better communication software or something very similar but distributed much more effectively (maybe Microsoft Teams in the enterprise).

swsieber 7y ago
Well, and email integrations are easy to replace - it's a single, uniform interface.
closeparen 7y ago
Chat is a complement to email, not a replacement. Over time some people may take their formerly-email activities to chat, but no cutover is required. Running two chat systems side by side, on the other hand, is a huge pain. There really is a pressure to get everything migrated and the old one turned off.
- taurath 7y ago
  Email is for outside the boundaries (outside-of-company, outside-of-division in a silo'd company), chat is for inside - there's still people who do prefer email especially in partner facing roles, but I think its fair to say that most prefer using chat if they had a choice.
  - u02sgb 7y ago
    Not necessarily true. For example the enterprise I work in doesn't allow saving chat history. This makes email better for technical discussion that needs recorded.
    - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
      What's the rationale behind that?

taurath 7y ago

Those integrations are slack's moat, but I think many of those useful integrations are already multi-tenant (having to support hipchat for large corps), or through a proxied service that can add a new output integration. For smaller businesses who just use the slack connector store that might be more difficult.

derrickreimer 7y ago

Author here. Slack is undoubtedly sticky, although I challenge the assumption that all integrations need to be replicated in a niche play. Those who did adopt Level were willing to give up a number of integrations that were low-value to them or were just causing noise that proved unnecessary.

boudewijnrempt 7y ago
I was struck with " They recognize that Slack is not suitable for meaningful conversations, so they automatically delete chat messages older than a few weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival." in your article. It's something I feel quite strongly about: chat should not be archived. There should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Chat messages have no value beyond the moment. Any chat implementation that assigns importance to messages beyond the current conversation is wrong. For the rest... It was like peeking into an alien world. I've been maintaining an open source application since 2004, and I've had various day jobs, but managed to build it out into my day job the past couple of years. I've never had the startup itch :-) Just let me build up my userbase, my income stream and my contributor team, and I'm happy.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  > being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Persistent chat is one of the biggest values of Slack or Discord or Mattermost, and one of the big reasons I'll take it over IRC any day. Persistent chat that you can join and read the backlog of is incredibly valuable. It becomes an asynchronous communication medium, rather than a synchronous one. And it's much richer and lower-friction than email.
  - AdrianB1 7y ago
    With people having the expectation of chat to be instantly replied, like a chat in a real life (someone walking to your desk and saying something) it is not asynchronous in any way.

Someone 7y ago

I think you could provide a compatible API, or a wrapper around your API that makes it (mostly) compatible, claiming that you do it for interoperability. If you think that’s too risky, legally, an alternative could be to provide example code showing “to do X in Slack, do this on our API”. If your tool gets some traction, a third party wrapper might show up.

perlgeek 7y ago

Couldn't you offer an integration API that's compatible with Slack? Maybe not in the US, where APIs are under copyright, but outside it could work...

donnfelker 7y ago

This.

SI_Rob 7y ago

What's stopping potential competitors from making slack-compatible APIs?

inopinatus 7y ago

There's a lesson in there, viz. that an ISV ecosystem around your product is a major retention factor. Nothing new here of course, tech shops have been doing it for decades. Centuries even maybe. See also: certification programs.

joncrane 7y ago

Isn't Mattermost pretty close? When I moved to a company with Slack, I recognized a lot of stuff from my previous job where some of the devs used Mattermost.

stock_toaster 7y ago
zulip has quite a few integrations too apparently. I've been thinking about giving zulip a whirl with one of our smaller teams at work, and see how it compares to slack. Quite a few items on the "why zulip?" page really resonate with me.