7 ms·

I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long term viabil

I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long term viability. It’s just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a company once the old one gets too noisy. Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before something shinier comes along.

Roritharr 7y ago
Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded. They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
- hackerbabz 7y ago
  Well they might as well acquire Flickr.
  - hug 7y ago
    Flickr were acquired by SmugMug around a year ago, now.
- caust1c 7y ago
  Their moat is sticky? They were simply the first company to do hosted chat well enough that it didn't constantly piss people off. I wouldn't call that a sticky moat.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Wouldn't the Slack bot integration provide a better moat. If they can get orgs using a lot of bots for CI reporting, etc switching gets more difficult at least. Not sure how many teams get that tightly integrated with bots though.
    - aeternus 7y ago
      Notifications are easy, do many companies really use more advanced bots?
      - dmitriid 7y ago
        Notifications are easy if the integrations exist.
        notatoad 7y ago
        Building the integrations is easy, if all the integration is is a notification. I've got half a dozen custom slack integrations that i've written for my team, it's no more than a day of work sunk in so far, including the infrastructure in our product to figure out who, what and when to notify. If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.
        dmitriid 7y ago
        Building an integration is having someone: - deal with the target platform's API - deal with APIs of the many platforms that are being integrated - maintenance and SLAs I honestly doubt you can create half a dozen good integrations that require more than just notifications in a channel (for example, PagerDuty notifications and the like).
      - rtkwe 7y ago
        I don't really know I've been at the same company for a while and we've only used Skype for Business and before that Sametime for our chat infrastructure. I've seen a couple articles written about making them but not sure how many people actually use similar bots with the ability to kick things off or change things.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark. There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.
    - pnathan 7y ago
      > They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark. well put - and - even more so: hosted business chat. all they have to do is keep on keeping on.
    - dillonmckay 7y ago
      ICQ was quite impressive in 1997.
      - crummy 7y ago
        ICQ offered offline delivery, which was missing from many chat apps for a long time, too.
- treis 7y ago
  >Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Why do you make it sound like some shady back-door deal? Our grey-beard entirely Linux using ops staff would drop Slack for MS teams at the drop of a hat to get that money back in the budget. You can only waste so much money when the entire office demands Office. Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will always come out cheaper than Office + $other_thing.
    - ndarwincorn 7y ago
      Can confirm. Desktop Linux-using ops staff here, we're moving from dropbox to onedrive in the next ~month, and I'd switch from Slack to Teams if it didn't suffer from the same problem all MS IM products (UWP/Chromium Skype- & Lync-based alike) seem to face: intermittent failures to push notifications. We route alerts through IM primarily, and are remote-first. I get that some folks here complain about their inability to ignore chat notifications, but there's a decent chunk of us that need to find our uninterrupted time where we can, not when we want.
    - vmurthy 7y ago
      > Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. A few weeks ago the startup I work for started using NextCloud as a stop-gap till we get O365 and OneDrive. It is ridiculously simple for us at-least to just copy over our entire Dropbox folder to the NextCloud one.
      - Spivak 7y ago
        I hear that. I wish I could deploy Nextcloud at my company. We have plenty of resources and storage. Not paying per user per month would be so so so nice.
- Spivak 7y ago
  I'm not sure they'll be able to compete against a worse but integrated solution like MS teams long term. No doubt it's worse but the bundle is cheaper with when you're already paying for Windows and Office. Same story with G Suite. MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.
  - ColinWielga 7y ago
    My company just switched from Slack to Teams. I think it is hard for cost conscious organizations with o365 to justify slack.
    - CameronBanga 7y ago
      I use Teams in a very large org. Sometimes, the lack of integration and capability is a benefit. People don’t message me unless they actually need something.
  - tjr225 7y ago
    I have _never_ used teams. I have seen it creep up in enterprise focused orgs but I have still never used it. As a remote worker Slack is my office, essentially, and I think it's done an amazing job at being an office for remote first companies. I can't speak for Teams.
  - wastedhours 7y ago
    Agree - there was a lot of talk about Slack in our org, until everyone realised we had Teams already as part of O365 and it delivers on most of the use cases you set up from Day One. It's actually pretty good for managing discreet work streams, and even for organising personal work (kind of against the "Team" ethos, but having a channel for myself keeps my work visible and tabs keep important things to hand easily).
- khazhou 7y ago
  My very-large project switched chat apps in one weekend (backed by a few weeks of prep by IT team). We had JIRA integration on day one, and one or two missing things within a week. It wasn't that big a deal. I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.
  - gpm 7y ago
    Chat history seems like the issue to me. My company has tons of institutional knowledge locked away in slack channels.
    - dillonmckay 7y ago
      They really need to make the search better.
    - bjoernw 7y ago
      You could always just export all your company's slack data to preserve it and make it queryable https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-your-workspace-data https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...
      - gpm 7y ago
        Huh, good to know that exists.
    - sciurus 7y ago
      That might not be an issue at many big companies, which likely have data retention policies that disallow storing chat history longer than N days.
    - Jare 7y ago
      > My company has tons of institutional knowledge locked away I think your company should start working on that problem ASAP.
- scarface74 7y ago
  The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options. Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.
  - CameronBanga 7y ago
    Teams shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s pretty great, and comes with a lot of great tools that no unicorn has found a way to replace.
    - neumann 7y ago
      It is currently abhorrent. They do appear to be updating regularly, but so much of the UX should have been fixed at the beginning. - Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobody uses teams but chats, which are only recently pinnable (!?!?) - the pages, plugins and sharepoint files is great, but too restrictive. Compared to Slack or Zulip, it is still very behind. However, once our 70k organisation moved to office 365 and started using teams, we sheepled and didn't want the team to use a fragmented tool and bit the bullet. So yeah. Watch out for teams.
      - cush 7y ago
        You're describing 12 months ago Teams. It's come a long way.
        kjaftaedi 7y ago
        Some of my co-workers switched to Teams. They show up as offline on Skype for Business. I haven't moved to it yet because I require a chat application that works and allows people to contact me.
kemiller 7y ago
They are stickier than you think. Especially with shared channels.
- Spivak 7y ago
  Slacks biggest paying customers are enterprises using it for internal chat. Not very sticky overall since enterprise customers are used to vendors constantly raising prices.
sjg007 7y ago
Messaging apps are cyclical. I remember icq! Slack should become part of Google.. that would help Google widen its user base and perhaps a robust video conferencing system can piggy back on top of it.
- Falkon1313 7y ago
  Google might already have a messaging app and might still have video chat.
  - sjg007 7y ago
    You missed the part about “expanding their user base”
colechristensen 7y ago
Companies switched to slack because hipchat didn't work very well. Slack works pretty well. It would be much harder for there to be internal political motivation to change unless someone does something significantly better which I cannot imagine.
Spooky23 7y ago
What backlash? The product is compelling enough that Microsoft is trying to position their clone as the lynchpin of everything in O365 that isn’t mail. It’s a platform that is attractive to all sorts of players. Apple has a huge enterprise business that they completely ignore. Google, Cisco, other enterprise plays are easily imaginable.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
While messaging apps have tended to be cyclical, I'd argue Slack has become much more than a simple messaging app at many large companies with their integrations and bots, and they are intrinsic to many teams' workflows (e.g. "ChatOps" is a real thing). I see Slack as more akin to something like Excel, where people who really depend on it (in a way much more than person-to-person chat) go beserk if it's taken away.
pierlu 7y ago
Basically M$ is pushing hard to switch off Skype For Business (SFB) in favor of Teams, especially when still on-premise. The new features are being developed only for Microsoft Teams and the user base is a click away from a decent Slackish app. Another killer feature of Teams (inherited from Lync and SFB) is the trunking possibility with a legacy SIP PBX (so called Microsoft Team Direct Routing, or some form of similar creative name from Redmond market intelligence). So, I think that the future of Slack is probably the same as the future of Spotify, both like the article says incidentally direct-listed at the NYSE (and not via a formal IPO). Both will have a trusted user base, a better interface, but motivated tech giants competing into the same market.
Kiro 7y ago
I haven't seen any backlash outside this tiny circle. HN is not a good yardstick.

Roritharr 7y ago

Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded. They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.

hackerbabz 7y ago
Well they might as well acquire Flickr.
- hug 7y ago
  Flickr were acquired by SmugMug around a year ago, now.
caust1c 7y ago
Their moat is sticky? They were simply the first company to do hosted chat well enough that it didn't constantly piss people off. I wouldn't call that a sticky moat.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  Wouldn't the Slack bot integration provide a better moat. If they can get orgs using a lot of bots for CI reporting, etc switching gets more difficult at least. Not sure how many teams get that tightly integrated with bots though.
  - aeternus 7y ago
    Notifications are easy, do many companies really use more advanced bots?
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      Notifications are easy if the integrations exist.
      - notatoad 7y ago
        Building the integrations is easy, if all the integration is is a notification. I've got half a dozen custom slack integrations that i've written for my team, it's no more than a day of work sunk in so far, including the infrastructure in our product to figure out who, what and when to notify. If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.
        dmitriid 7y ago
        Building an integration is having someone: - deal with the target platform's API - deal with APIs of the many platforms that are being integrated - maintenance and SLAs I honestly doubt you can create half a dozen good integrations that require more than just notifications in a channel (for example, PagerDuty notifications and the like).
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      I don't really know I've been at the same company for a while and we've only used Skype for Business and before that Sametime for our chat infrastructure. I've seen a couple articles written about making them but not sure how many people actually use similar bots with the ability to kick things off or change things.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark. There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.
  - pnathan 7y ago
    > They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark. well put - and - even more so: hosted business chat. all they have to do is keep on keeping on.
  - dillonmckay 7y ago
    ICQ was quite impressive in 1997.
    - crummy 7y ago
      ICQ offered offline delivery, which was missing from many chat apps for a long time, too.
treis 7y ago
>Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
- Spivak 7y ago
  Why do you make it sound like some shady back-door deal? Our grey-beard entirely Linux using ops staff would drop Slack for MS teams at the drop of a hat to get that money back in the budget. You can only waste so much money when the entire office demands Office. Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will always come out cheaper than Office + $other_thing.
  - ndarwincorn 7y ago
    Can confirm. Desktop Linux-using ops staff here, we're moving from dropbox to onedrive in the next ~month, and I'd switch from Slack to Teams if it didn't suffer from the same problem all MS IM products (UWP/Chromium Skype- & Lync-based alike) seem to face: intermittent failures to push notifications. We route alerts through IM primarily, and are remote-first. I get that some folks here complain about their inability to ignore chat notifications, but there's a decent chunk of us that need to find our uninterrupted time where we can, not when we want.
  - vmurthy 7y ago
    > Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. A few weeks ago the startup I work for started using NextCloud as a stop-gap till we get O365 and OneDrive. It is ridiculously simple for us at-least to just copy over our entire Dropbox folder to the NextCloud one.
    - Spivak 7y ago
      I hear that. I wish I could deploy Nextcloud at my company. We have plenty of resources and storage. Not paying per user per month would be so so so nice.
Spivak 7y ago
I'm not sure they'll be able to compete against a worse but integrated solution like MS teams long term. No doubt it's worse but the bundle is cheaper with when you're already paying for Windows and Office. Same story with G Suite. MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.
- ColinWielga 7y ago
  My company just switched from Slack to Teams. I think it is hard for cost conscious organizations with o365 to justify slack.
  - CameronBanga 7y ago
    I use Teams in a very large org. Sometimes, the lack of integration and capability is a benefit. People don’t message me unless they actually need something.
- tjr225 7y ago
  I have _never_ used teams. I have seen it creep up in enterprise focused orgs but I have still never used it. As a remote worker Slack is my office, essentially, and I think it's done an amazing job at being an office for remote first companies. I can't speak for Teams.
- wastedhours 7y ago
  Agree - there was a lot of talk about Slack in our org, until everyone realised we had Teams already as part of O365 and it delivers on most of the use cases you set up from Day One. It's actually pretty good for managing discreet work streams, and even for organising personal work (kind of against the "Team" ethos, but having a channel for myself keeps my work visible and tabs keep important things to hand easily).
khazhou 7y ago
My very-large project switched chat apps in one weekend (backed by a few weeks of prep by IT team). We had JIRA integration on day one, and one or two missing things within a week. It wasn't that big a deal. I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.
- gpm 7y ago
  Chat history seems like the issue to me. My company has tons of institutional knowledge locked away in slack channels.
  - dillonmckay 7y ago
    They really need to make the search better.
  - bjoernw 7y ago
    You could always just export all your company's slack data to preserve it and make it queryable https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-your-workspace-data https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...
    - gpm 7y ago
      Huh, good to know that exists.
  - sciurus 7y ago
    That might not be an issue at many big companies, which likely have data retention policies that disallow storing chat history longer than N days.
  - Jare 7y ago
    > My company has tons of institutional knowledge locked away I think your company should start working on that problem ASAP.
scarface74 7y ago
The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options. Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.
- CameronBanga 7y ago
  Teams shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s pretty great, and comes with a lot of great tools that no unicorn has found a way to replace.
  - neumann 7y ago
    It is currently abhorrent. They do appear to be updating regularly, but so much of the UX should have been fixed at the beginning. - Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobody uses teams but chats, which are only recently pinnable (!?!?) - the pages, plugins and sharepoint files is great, but too restrictive. Compared to Slack or Zulip, it is still very behind. However, once our 70k organisation moved to office 365 and started using teams, we sheepled and didn't want the team to use a fragmented tool and bit the bullet. So yeah. Watch out for teams.
    - cush 7y ago
      You're describing 12 months ago Teams. It's come a long way.
      - kjaftaedi 7y ago
        Some of my co-workers switched to Teams. They show up as offline on Skype for Business. I haven't moved to it yet because I require a chat application that works and allows people to contact me.

kemiller 7y ago

They are stickier than you think. Especially with shared channels.

Spivak 7y ago
Slacks biggest paying customers are enterprises using it for internal chat. Not very sticky overall since enterprise customers are used to vendors constantly raising prices.

sjg007 7y ago

Messaging apps are cyclical. I remember icq! Slack should become part of Google.. that would help Google widen its user base and perhaps a robust video conferencing system can piggy back on top of it.

Falkon1313 7y ago
Google might already have a messaging app and might still have video chat.
- sjg007 7y ago
  You missed the part about “expanding their user base”

colechristensen 7y ago

Companies switched to slack because hipchat didn't work very well. Slack works pretty well. It would be much harder for there to be internal political motivation to change unless someone does something significantly better which I cannot imagine.

Spooky23 7y ago

What backlash? The product is compelling enough that Microsoft is trying to position their clone as the lynchpin of everything in O365 that isn’t mail. It’s a platform that is attractive to all sorts of players. Apple has a huge enterprise business that they completely ignore. Google, Cisco, other enterprise plays are easily imaginable.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

While messaging apps have tended to be cyclical, I'd argue Slack has become much more than a simple messaging app at many large companies with their integrations and bots, and they are intrinsic to many teams' workflows (e.g. "ChatOps" is a real thing). I see Slack as more akin to something like Excel, where people who really depend on it (in a way much more than person-to-person chat) go beserk if it's taken away.

pierlu 7y ago

Basically M$ is pushing hard to switch off Skype For Business (SFB) in favor of Teams, especially when still on-premise. The new features are being developed only for Microsoft Teams and the user base is a click away from a decent Slackish app. Another killer feature of Teams (inherited from Lync and SFB) is the trunking possibility with a legacy SIP PBX (so called Microsoft Team Direct Routing, or some form of similar creative name from Redmond market intelligence). So, I think that the future of Slack is probably the same as the future of Spotify, both like the article says incidentally direct-listed at the NYSE (and not via a formal IPO). Both will have a trusted user base, a better interface, but motivated tech giants competing into the same market.

Kiro 7y ago

I haven't seen any backlash outside this tiny circle. HN is not a good yardstick.