6 ms·

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 m

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.

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.