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I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'gl

I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can really do anything about it. So, I congratulate them on their success but I, too, am utterly mystified.

hayksaakian 7y ago
I believe hipchat was a paid product, which stunted it's growth compared to Slack. Slack is 'free by default' but converts users to paid.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
> I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat Stay up? I was at a company that was on Hipchat, and we really liked it, but the amount of downtime got to be semi-unbearable. We switched to Slack and it had much better uptime.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Hipchat had service issues at the same time Slack was getting momentum. It was terrible timing for HipChat.
GuiA 7y ago
One thing that can’t hurt is that Stewart Butterfield is well connected, and got all his friends to push Slack at their startups. I was at a startup, we used a mix of Hipchat (business types) and IRC (developers). A marketing/social media guy who was buddies with Stewart joined and insisted we should all switch to this, and there we were, dogfooding Slack (this was closed beta days). Hard to beat free user acquisition.
atombender 7y ago
Back when Slack came out, my company was using HipChat. It was okay, but clearly outdated and not great -- barely a step up from AOL Messenger. I was invited into a Slack by some former colleagues, and it was a breath of fresh air. Someone finally upgraded the chat UI to something modern and un-clunky. It didn't hurt that it had a web UI, that it was free, and that it had configurable integrations that could work right inside the channel. Another thing that I think helped it take off was the simplicity with which it handled embedded media. Post a YouTube video or a tweet or a GIF, and the thing came alive on your screen, embedded right in the channel. You shouldn't underestimate the power of GIF sharing. There was nothing groundbreaking about Slack, and there still isn't. There are a lot of naysayers on HN scoffing at Slack for basically being a worse form of IRC, which is silly and wrong, but also right in that there is nothing groundbreaking about the tech. But products don't need to be groundbreaking to win. They just need to be better than the rest, and perhaps generate the necessary "reality distortion field" that convinces people that it's the next natural evolutionary step. Once you convince people of that, they don't go back to HipChat.
orthoxerox 7y ago
Slack and IRC are incomparable. Slack has authentication, message retention and search, multimedia attachments, mobile application with notifications, conversation threads, etc. You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.
- kuschku 7y ago
  Except for message retention and search, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible with bouncers. Mobile applications with notifications, conversation threads with +draft/reply (IRCv3 draft), multimedia attachments (IRCv3 idea), authentication with SASL and standardized account management (IRCv3 draft), etc. Look at what IRCCloud provides, and what IRCv3 is doing.
  - oblio 7y ago
    > Except for ##2 killer features##, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible ##if you implement it yourself##. That's what normal people see when they read your message.
    - kuschku 7y ago
      Going to irccloud.com, creating an account, and connecting is "implementing it yourself" how again? And IRCCloud has all that in a single solution. Even if you want to self-host, there are solutions — get any server, run docker run \ -v /path/to/folder/where/you/want/to/store/the/config:/config \ k8r.eu/justjanne/quassel-docker:v0.13.1 and connect with quassel or quasseldroid to that server (the setup wizard guides you through everything else). It's about as simple as it can get for selfhosted. (Quassel gets you message retention and search immediately, and the other features are already being worked on).
      - oblio 7y ago
        Well, irccloud.com must be doing something wrong if they're using a pre-existing protocol, have solved its problems and yet Slack is the company worth billions.
twblalock 7y ago
Hipchat has terrible scalability problems and poor uptime.
liopleurodon 7y ago
Hipchat was horrible. Barely worked. Flaky. Was happy when my company switched to Slack

hayksaakian 7y ago

I believe hipchat was a paid product, which stunted it's growth compared to Slack. Slack is 'free by default' but converts users to paid.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

> I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat Stay up? I was at a company that was on Hipchat, and we really liked it, but the amount of downtime got to be semi-unbearable. We switched to Slack and it had much better uptime.

conanbatt 7y ago
Hipchat had service issues at the same time Slack was getting momentum. It was terrible timing for HipChat.

GuiA 7y ago

One thing that can’t hurt is that Stewart Butterfield is well connected, and got all his friends to push Slack at their startups. I was at a startup, we used a mix of Hipchat (business types) and IRC (developers). A marketing/social media guy who was buddies with Stewart joined and insisted we should all switch to this, and there we were, dogfooding Slack (this was closed beta days). Hard to beat free user acquisition.

atombender 7y ago

Back when Slack came out, my company was using HipChat. It was okay, but clearly outdated and not great -- barely a step up from AOL Messenger. I was invited into a Slack by some former colleagues, and it was a breath of fresh air. Someone finally upgraded the chat UI to something modern and un-clunky. It didn't hurt that it had a web UI, that it was free, and that it had configurable integrations that could work right inside the channel. Another thing that I think helped it take off was the simplicity with which it handled embedded media. Post a YouTube video or a tweet or a GIF, and the thing came alive on your screen, embedded right in the channel. You shouldn't underestimate the power of GIF sharing. There was nothing groundbreaking about Slack, and there still isn't. There are a lot of naysayers on HN scoffing at Slack for basically being a worse form of IRC, which is silly and wrong, but also right in that there is nothing groundbreaking about the tech. But products don't need to be groundbreaking to win. They just need to be better than the rest, and perhaps generate the necessary "reality distortion field" that convinces people that it's the next natural evolutionary step. Once you convince people of that, they don't go back to HipChat.

orthoxerox 7y ago

Slack and IRC are incomparable. Slack has authentication, message retention and search, multimedia attachments, mobile application with notifications, conversation threads, etc. You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.

kuschku 7y ago
Except for message retention and search, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible with bouncers. Mobile applications with notifications, conversation threads with +draft/reply (IRCv3 draft), multimedia attachments (IRCv3 idea), authentication with SASL and standardized account management (IRCv3 draft), etc. Look at what IRCCloud provides, and what IRCv3 is doing.
- oblio 7y ago
  > Except for ##2 killer features##, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible ##if you implement it yourself##. That's what normal people see when they read your message.
  - kuschku 7y ago
    Going to irccloud.com, creating an account, and connecting is "implementing it yourself" how again? And IRCCloud has all that in a single solution. Even if you want to self-host, there are solutions — get any server, run docker run \ -v /path/to/folder/where/you/want/to/store/the/config:/config \ k8r.eu/justjanne/quassel-docker:v0.13.1 and connect with quassel or quasseldroid to that server (the setup wizard guides you through everything else). It's about as simple as it can get for selfhosted. (Quassel gets you message retention and search immediately, and the other features are already being worked on).
    - oblio 7y ago
      Well, irccloud.com must be doing something wrong if they're using a pre-existing protocol, have solved its problems and yet Slack is the company worth billions.

twblalock 7y ago

Hipchat has terrible scalability problems and poor uptime.

liopleurodon 7y ago

Hipchat was horrible. Barely worked. Flaky. Was happy when my company switched to Slack