8 ms·

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging

by lqet 7y ago

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

trickstra 7y ago
Our company switched from self-hosted RocketChat to Slack just this week. Personally I didn't agree with it, but it's not my call. The reason was mostly that Op guys were too busy with other things and didn't want to care about yet another critical company-wide service. They though outsourcing it would solve the downtimes and bugs. This outage couldn't come at a better time.
xiconfjs 7y ago
no, it's not. It's just a company based whatsapp group chat you can use while looking busy
zymhan 7y ago
It has emojis and is the Next Best Thing (tm)
falcolas 7y ago
Because they don’t trust their IT or operations groups to manage IRC or any other open source communication system; even as they trust those same people to run the software that makes them money. /shrug
- lqet 7y ago
  IRC is just a protocol, neither the server nor the client do have to be open source.
e1ven 7y ago
It's a reasonably nice client, and available on every platform. It has easy integrations with basically everything, and non-developers can set them up on their own. It has bouncer functionality built in - You don't miss messages. It can also archive them, and handle them in a corporate-compliant way without needing to speed a bunch of time setting that up manually. Because it's a central company and not IRC push-notifications are easy. Emoji are shared corporate wide, anyone can add them. It's a really nice out of the box experience. You can absolutely replicate it with enough setup and tweaking, but the free version of Slack will go a long way.
untog 7y ago
"just running an IRC server" is... a lot. Or can be. Who is running it? Does it scale well? How is login synced with corporate logins? What about mobile devices? It's not "better" than email, it's different. Real time. It has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't. Point is, it's really not all that crazy to just pay a third party to manage all this stuff for you. You might imagine the alternative is a perfect IRC server with 100% uptime, but I doubt that would be the reality. If you're saying a service like this is too important to be run by a third party then you're going to have to invest a lot internally to come up with an alternative that's more reliable.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  > Does it scale well? It's IRC. On modern hardware. It's practically infinite. > it has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't. There and were are things way before Slack, eg https://loqi.me/ https://loqi.me/
  - untog 7y ago
    Obviously you can create IRC integrations for anything. But how many are installable with one click, like Slack integrations are? Having to write custom implementations is yet another extra task and point of failure compared to just paying someone to manage it all for you.
    - pmlnr 7y ago
      another "but". First "but it doesn't scale". Now "but integrations". There will always be another "but", and there will always be a link on the internet showing that it's been done already. "but shiny web gui" - https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ "but mobile app" - https://github.com/MCMrARM/revolution-irc https://github.com/MCMrARM/revolution-irc "but it's complicated" - https://www.mirc.com/ https://www.mirc.com/ since 1995 IRC does have limits. Some. One is that to make it "modern" it needs a bouncer - that said znc is spectacularly simple to set up with it's web interface. Integrations were never one of those limits. Just google IRC bots.
ilikehurdles 7y ago
Not necessarily better than IRC, but email is a pain.
pmlnr 7y ago
They somehow got Clevels on the bandwagon. Those who actually understand the implications don't have a word. Truth is I see many capable people buying into these as well because of the convenience - read: lazyness - factor. The "ain' nobody got time for that" effects everyone and the willingness to pay for services had skyrocketed in the past decade. This applies to blogging, to home servers, backup, anything. We're all guilty at some level.
Thaxll 7y ago
IRC is pretty much useless since you don't have history. Comparing Slack and IRC are like comparing TCP and HTML5. Why IRC is pretty bad in enterprise: - no audio / video - no history - no SSO / AD integration - no rich features like links, pictures, upload docs ect ... - easy bot integration with APIs, I can have Datadog pushing things to Slack ( alerts, graph... ) - no archiving channels on the go, Slack is very useful when you have an incident and you create a temp channel and then archive it when the incident is closed.
- gerdesj 7y ago
  matrix does all that and can be self hosted - ours is.
  - steve19 7y ago
    Does the opensource matrix server scale? I may be wrong but I got the impression it was more an example implementation and was not used by Matrix in production?
    - Aaronn 7y ago
      There is no closed source Matrix server implementation that I'm aware of. Synapse is the server used in production for matrix.org, the French government deployments, and tons of other servers including my own. It is somewhat resource intensive but it can scale using workers. There is of course several other server implementations in progress but none are fully ready yet.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  IRC is a protocol. The features you're listing is server/client dependent.
- u801e 7y ago
  > no audio / video There are products that are far better for audio and video communication than Slack. At my company, we use Zoom. > no history Can be done with a bouncer if you need it. > no rich features like links, pictures, upload docs ect Is there a reason why an external service can't be used? I can't upload a image here on Hacker News, but I can always include a link to it. > easy bot integration with APIs So I have to use the HTTP protocol to manage a bot rather than checking for certain key words in the message itself. > no archiving channels on the go, Slack is very useful when you have an incident and you create a temp channel and then archive it when the incident is closed. That depends on the settings. One thing that happens every so often at work is that people get trapped as the last remaining person in a channel because only an administrator can archive a channel. In IRC, that's not an issue.
ProAm 7y ago
Ive always said Slack is IRC for millennials. "The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."
- strokirk 7y ago
  I certainly prefer it, but I've both heard many other millennials strongly oppose slack, and Gen X:ers talk highly about other "no-setup" systems. I don't think not a generational thing.
- nawitus 7y ago
  Plenty of millennials grew up with IRC.
phtrivier 7y ago
* search engine that just work * push-notifications that just work * client available for enough people * copy / pasting images that just work (the'll never admit it, but animated gif is their killer feature) * stable-enough infrastructure for something that costs you 15€/month/user not taken from your "salary" budget (often a different and substantially less taxed part) * and their outages are funny (receiving messages twice is arguably better than not receiving message) Yes, it's because it "just kinda works for what it costs, and you can forget about it most of the time and do your job." This seems to be characterized as "laziness" by some people, a point I honestly don't understand (I though lazyness was a virtue in our circles.) That being said, there are legitimate reasons to not use it: * software licence * data property * technical implementation of the native clients * general distrust of centralized solutions * cost of having IM at all (see Newport's whole publishing career) At least, it means there's an opportunity to create a company that handles decentralized user-friendly open-source standard-based data-respectful attention-preserving uber-reliable chat system. HN users would be a market.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > search engine that just work For some definitions of "just" and "working". Even ignoring the business limitation, the UX of Slack search is meh. That said, I'm yet to see any of the modern web&mobile-oriented IMs that would have a decent search UX. But yeah, your list is solid. They offer plenty of value, just mixed with plenty of negatives. A big source of the complaints against Slack is usually the network effect - in context of both work and OSS communities, it's usually somebody else that makes the decision and imposes it on you, forcing you to run face-first into all the "legitimate reasons to not use it" you listed. Half of the pain would be gone if they opened up their service to third-party clients; I'd say the reason they didn't have as much opposition from people initially is because they run the bait-and-switch with IRC gateway.
  - phtrivier 7y ago
    Interesting point about : work environment vs communities. For work, the decision of which IM tool is most likely going to be a corporate one, without much choice of solution. I guess the problem here is the same as for other corporate tools. (And people have strong feelings about corporate tools, but it seems there are less strong feelings about "using jira vs bugzilla" as there are "using slack vs irc". Or maybe there are as much strong feelings.) On the other end, I get the troubles with the "network" effect for out-of-work communities (open source projects, clubs, etc...) Such communities can at least have "some" level of debate about which solution to use, and balance the pros and cons as they see fit. It's completely acceptable for an OSS community to discourage using such platforms - as any other non-free, centralized platforms. We're still not forced to use anything. Then, there is the "club of non-power user" situation. I would be hard pressed to ask someone from my drama club to setup and maintain an IRC server (neither do I want to do it.) Thanks for adding this dimension. Follow-up: is there a "nice" provider of some slack-like solution (mattermost, etc...) that hosts servers for communities of non-techies for not too much money ?
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
What does years have to do with it? Look how many engineers have to sit on their hands when github goes down?
geofft 7y ago
- Mobile client, including mobile push - Search - Scrollback/history available in the main client interface people who newly join a channel (extraordinarily important during incident response) - Ability to link to a message in history - Ability to handle multi-line messages in a vaguely competent matter - Image uploads, snippets, etc. - Users of a GUI tool / web interface are first-class, users of a command-line client are second-class; this is unlike IRC, and important when the goal is a single chat system for the entire company, not just engineering (and usually a subset of engineering at that) - Client/UI expectation that you do not catch up on every message unless you want to (like IRC, but unlike email) - Quality integrations that have already been written with the third-party apps that you're already using IRC and email have both been time-tested, and have failed the test.
johannes1234321 7y ago
Aside from features: I have seen enough corporate mail servers going down, irc and jabber servers breaking etc. Using those won't magically give you 24/7 with more than five nines uptime. Key difference is: If slack goes down many companies are affected and it goes on the internet. If a company's mail setup goes down employees are a bit annoyed, but after a while it works again and nobody outside notices and it's no news on HN (unless it's a real major thing bringing a notable company completely down)
pmart123 7y ago
I’ve heard from countless of friends how many times Outlook goes down for their company, whether it’s a midsize company or a large company. I don’t think this is unique to Slack or company age.
bichiliad 7y ago
We used to run an IRC server at work, and it was pretty exclusionary to non-engineers; setting up something that'd log backscroll required maintaining a vm somewhere, searching through history required another service, etc. If all slack does is chat (and video communication by way of an acquisiton), I'm happy letting them be 5 years old. I'd scrutinize a company that: 1. has no fallback mechanism of Slack is mission-critical and goes offline 2. isn't careful about including non-technical stakeholders in communications. Edit: clarifying that I'm talking about my workplace, not a company I run.

by lqet 7y ago

trickstra 7y ago

Our company switched from self-hosted RocketChat to Slack just this week. Personally I didn't agree with it, but it's not my call. The reason was mostly that Op guys were too busy with other things and didn't want to care about yet another critical company-wide service. They though outsourcing it would solve the downtimes and bugs. This outage couldn't come at a better time.

xiconfjs 7y ago

no, it's not. It's just a company based whatsapp group chat you can use while looking busy

zymhan 7y ago

It has emojis and is the Next Best Thing (tm)

falcolas 7y ago

Because they don’t trust their IT or operations groups to manage IRC or any other open source communication system; even as they trust those same people to run the software that makes them money. /shrug

lqet 7y ago
IRC is just a protocol, neither the server nor the client do have to be open source.

e1ven 7y ago

It's a reasonably nice client, and available on every platform. It has easy integrations with basically everything, and non-developers can set them up on their own. It has bouncer functionality built in - You don't miss messages. It can also archive them, and handle them in a corporate-compliant way without needing to speed a bunch of time setting that up manually. Because it's a central company and not IRC push-notifications are easy. Emoji are shared corporate wide, anyone can add them. It's a really nice out of the box experience. You can absolutely replicate it with enough setup and tweaking, but the free version of Slack will go a long way.

untog 7y ago

"just running an IRC server" is... a lot. Or can be. Who is running it? Does it scale well? How is login synced with corporate logins? What about mobile devices? It's not "better" than email, it's different. Real time. It has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't. Point is, it's really not all that crazy to just pay a third party to manage all this stuff for you. You might imagine the alternative is a perfect IRC server with 100% uptime, but I doubt that would be the reality. If you're saying a service like this is too important to be run by a third party then you're going to have to invest a lot internally to come up with an alternative that's more reliable.

pmlnr 7y ago
> Does it scale well? It's IRC. On modern hardware. It's practically infinite. > it has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't. There and were are things way before Slack, eg https://loqi.me/ https://loqi.me/
- untog 7y ago
  Obviously you can create IRC integrations for anything. But how many are installable with one click, like Slack integrations are? Having to write custom implementations is yet another extra task and point of failure compared to just paying someone to manage it all for you.
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    another "but". First "but it doesn't scale". Now "but integrations". There will always be another "but", and there will always be a link on the internet showing that it's been done already. "but shiny web gui" - https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ "but mobile app" - https://github.com/MCMrARM/revolution-irc https://github.com/MCMrARM/revolution-irc "but it's complicated" - https://www.mirc.com/ https://www.mirc.com/ since 1995 IRC does have limits. Some. One is that to make it "modern" it needs a bouncer - that said znc is spectacularly simple to set up with it's web interface. Integrations were never one of those limits. Just google IRC bots.

ilikehurdles 7y ago

Not necessarily better than IRC, but email is a pain.

pmlnr 7y ago

They somehow got Clevels on the bandwagon. Those who actually understand the implications don't have a word. Truth is I see many capable people buying into these as well because of the convenience - read: lazyness - factor. The "ain' nobody got time for that" effects everyone and the willingness to pay for services had skyrocketed in the past decade. This applies to blogging, to home servers, backup, anything. We're all guilty at some level.

Thaxll 7y ago

IRC is pretty much useless since you don't have history. Comparing Slack and IRC are like comparing TCP and HTML5. Why IRC is pretty bad in enterprise: - no audio / video - no history - no SSO / AD integration - no rich features like links, pictures, upload docs ect ... - easy bot integration with APIs, I can have Datadog pushing things to Slack ( alerts, graph... ) - no archiving channels on the go, Slack is very useful when you have an incident and you create a temp channel and then archive it when the incident is closed.

gerdesj 7y ago
matrix does all that and can be self hosted - ours is.
- steve19 7y ago
  Does the opensource matrix server scale? I may be wrong but I got the impression it was more an example implementation and was not used by Matrix in production?
  - Aaronn 7y ago
    There is no closed source Matrix server implementation that I'm aware of. Synapse is the server used in production for matrix.org, the French government deployments, and tons of other servers including my own. It is somewhat resource intensive but it can scale using workers. There is of course several other server implementations in progress but none are fully ready yet.
pmlnr 7y ago
IRC is a protocol. The features you're listing is server/client dependent.
u801e 7y ago
> no audio / video There are products that are far better for audio and video communication than Slack. At my company, we use Zoom. > no history Can be done with a bouncer if you need it. > no rich features like links, pictures, upload docs ect Is there a reason why an external service can't be used? I can't upload a image here on Hacker News, but I can always include a link to it. > easy bot integration with APIs So I have to use the HTTP protocol to manage a bot rather than checking for certain key words in the message itself. > no archiving channels on the go, Slack is very useful when you have an incident and you create a temp channel and then archive it when the incident is closed. That depends on the settings. One thing that happens every so often at work is that people get trapped as the last remaining person in a channel because only an administrator can archive a channel. In IRC, that's not an issue.

ProAm 7y ago

Ive always said Slack is IRC for millennials. "The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."

strokirk 7y ago
I certainly prefer it, but I've both heard many other millennials strongly oppose slack, and Gen X:ers talk highly about other "no-setup" systems. I don't think not a generational thing.
nawitus 7y ago
Plenty of millennials grew up with IRC.

phtrivier 7y ago

* search engine that just work * push-notifications that just work * client available for enough people * copy / pasting images that just work (the'll never admit it, but animated gif is their killer feature) * stable-enough infrastructure for something that costs you 15€/month/user not taken from your "salary" budget (often a different and substantially less taxed part) * and their outages are funny (receiving messages twice is arguably better than not receiving message) Yes, it's because it "just kinda works for what it costs, and you can forget about it most of the time and do your job." This seems to be characterized as "laziness" by some people, a point I honestly don't understand (I though lazyness was a virtue in our circles.) That being said, there are legitimate reasons to not use it: * software licence * data property * technical implementation of the native clients * general distrust of centralized solutions * cost of having IM at all (see Newport's whole publishing career) At least, it means there's an opportunity to create a company that handles decentralized user-friendly open-source standard-based data-respectful attention-preserving uber-reliable chat system. HN users would be a market.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> search engine that just work For some definitions of "just" and "working". Even ignoring the business limitation, the UX of Slack search is meh. That said, I'm yet to see any of the modern web&mobile-oriented IMs that would have a decent search UX. But yeah, your list is solid. They offer plenty of value, just mixed with plenty of negatives. A big source of the complaints against Slack is usually the network effect - in context of both work and OSS communities, it's usually somebody else that makes the decision and imposes it on you, forcing you to run face-first into all the "legitimate reasons to not use it" you listed. Half of the pain would be gone if they opened up their service to third-party clients; I'd say the reason they didn't have as much opposition from people initially is because they run the bait-and-switch with IRC gateway.
- phtrivier 7y ago
  Interesting point about : work environment vs communities. For work, the decision of which IM tool is most likely going to be a corporate one, without much choice of solution. I guess the problem here is the same as for other corporate tools. (And people have strong feelings about corporate tools, but it seems there are less strong feelings about "using jira vs bugzilla" as there are "using slack vs irc". Or maybe there are as much strong feelings.) On the other end, I get the troubles with the "network" effect for out-of-work communities (open source projects, clubs, etc...) Such communities can at least have "some" level of debate about which solution to use, and balance the pros and cons as they see fit. It's completely acceptable for an OSS community to discourage using such platforms - as any other non-free, centralized platforms. We're still not forced to use anything. Then, there is the "club of non-power user" situation. I would be hard pressed to ask someone from my drama club to setup and maintain an IRC server (neither do I want to do it.) Thanks for adding this dimension. Follow-up: is there a "nice" provider of some slack-like solution (mattermost, etc...) that hosts servers for communities of non-techies for not too much money ?

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

What does years have to do with it? Look how many engineers have to sit on their hands when github goes down?

geofft 7y ago

- Mobile client, including mobile push - Search - Scrollback/history available in the main client interface people who newly join a channel (extraordinarily important during incident response) - Ability to link to a message in history - Ability to handle multi-line messages in a vaguely competent matter - Image uploads, snippets, etc. - Users of a GUI tool / web interface are first-class, users of a command-line client are second-class; this is unlike IRC, and important when the goal is a single chat system for the entire company, not just engineering (and usually a subset of engineering at that) - Client/UI expectation that you do not catch up on every message unless you want to (like IRC, but unlike email) - Quality integrations that have already been written with the third-party apps that you're already using IRC and email have both been time-tested, and have failed the test.

johannes1234321 7y ago

Aside from features: I have seen enough corporate mail servers going down, irc and jabber servers breaking etc. Using those won't magically give you 24/7 with more than five nines uptime. Key difference is: If slack goes down many companies are affected and it goes on the internet. If a company's mail setup goes down employees are a bit annoyed, but after a while it works again and nobody outside notices and it's no news on HN (unless it's a real major thing bringing a notable company completely down)

pmart123 7y ago

I’ve heard from countless of friends how many times Outlook goes down for their company, whether it’s a midsize company or a large company. I don’t think this is unique to Slack or company age.

bichiliad 7y ago

We used to run an IRC server at work, and it was pretty exclusionary to non-engineers; setting up something that'd log backscroll required maintaining a vm somewhere, searching through history required another service, etc. If all slack does is chat (and video communication by way of an acquisiton), I'm happy letting them be 5 years old. I'd scrutinize a company that: 1. has no fallback mechanism of Slack is mission-critical and goes offline 2. isn't careful about including non-technical stakeholders in communications. Edit: clarifying that I'm talking about my workplace, not a company I run.