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The thing I don’t like about these tools is that they all imply a core, unspoken taskmaster in the form of a project manager assigning tasks and then chases peo

The thing I don’t like about these tools is that they all imply a core, unspoken taskmaster in the form of a project manager assigning tasks and then chases people down for it, and their whole paradigm is built around that. The future of workplace collaboration is not in the structured silos like these that are shaped based on project managers’ demands - it arises from the engineers doing the actual work. JIRA, Confluence and its ilk can work for a team where software engineers are replaceable - in fact, one of their main goals is to make them so - but in a startup team, trying to apply this usually leads to people quitting for a better startup. Probably rightfully so. Full disclosure, I work on a tool (https://aether.app https://aether.app) that does a more organic async collaboration between engineers than explicit task-based project management, so I’m biased.

jadbox 7y ago
So Aether is basically "Reddit but for teams", as the page implies. Sounds great actually- I'll give it a spin and reply with my thoughts later.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  Yes, you got that right. If you’d like to try it, hit me up, happy to answer questions. (email at profile)
  - jadbox 7y ago
    If you don't mind, could you provide your thoughts on how it differs from Zulip? From a 10,000 foot view, they seem similar, but I don't have experience with either yet (but I'll let you know if we have time this week to check it out!)
prepend 7y ago
Aether seems nice, but I’ve never had a “credit card necessary for trial” work out. I understand the downsides to the company for trying to collect this info, but I’m not willing to risk credit card hell even if you super pinkie promise not to be a jerk. Too many jerks made similar promises and then were jerks. The pricing seems high for what it is. $10/month is not a lot, but compared to the value derived is quite a bit. Especially since the cost of such a service to operate should be extremely low. This would be cool to bundle into something, but if this is a great tool spending $300/month on top of all our other stuff for medium sized team doesn’t compute. I’ll likely use the existing crappy IM that’s already in place but drastically less cost. I suppose that the value of productivity gained would be worth $300, but the cost of service aspect doesn’t fee right to me. If I buy a book that teaches me a technique that boosts my productivity I don’t want to pay $10/month for the rest of my life. All that being said the tool looks great and the design is very considerate. I will keep an eye out for any improvements or if the software goes OSS or Microsoft buys you and bundles it with some azure thing.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  All good feedback, thank you, this is helpful. The cost of service is a little higher than it seems at the beginning because we do full isolation, you get a full separate server VM, your own database, nothing is shared. It’s not like Slack which is effectively a time share on a global singleton instance. That means we can give you the keys to the kingdom, E2E encryption with no key held on our end (i.e. no escrow, you hold the only copy) or we can do on premises in a manner that can be pretty much up to you. We even offer a service to come in and maintain your own air-gapped physical box if you don’t want to do the sysadmin work for the on-prem. We can even accommodate custom requests like running the instance on our servers, but pointing the database to your on-premises database, so you remain in full control of the data while you can still avoid the maintenance cost for running an on-prem service. Also, if you’re a team large enough for it to cost $300, we do enterprise pricing, and can actually tailor it to you, so you might actually end up paying less depending on what that ends up being. For the features, you’re right, and we actually have lots of stuff in the docket, I just didn’t feel great about having upcoming features on the landing page, so that’s why it might have looked this way. Aether is actually open source, this specific one is Aether Pro. I’m the maintainer of Aether and the founder of the Pro one. I even wrote about how I ended up there recently: https://blog.getaether.net/post/187618079292/a-new-funding-model-for-open-source-software https://blog.getaether.net/post/187618079292/a-new-funding-m... I would love to hear if you have any feature requests, especially if you think it’s missing something. We want this to be as useful as humanly possible, and you’re pretty much our target audience. We’re designing for ourselves here, no holds barred.
  - prepend 7y ago
    Thanks for the response. I know I shouldn’t just an org based on its design but I think that sometimes thoughtfulness in design equates to responsiveness with comments like these. The isolation might be really helpful to me and is there a way to learn more about it? I work in an organization that is weird as the cost isn’t really the issue, but the effort to test and validate security. So it’s a weird cycle that’s hard to work with vendors because I might evaluate for a long time before purchasing, or never purchase at all. I rarely contact for enterprise pricing for new tools because I don’t know if it’s an enterprise option or if I want it for enterprise. And I don’t have time to enter the enterprise sales cycle unless I’m certain. This is probably frustrating for growing companies as I’m just another annoying customer and it’s hard to differentiate buyers from non-buyers. And 90% of the time, I’m not buying. Maybe have some case studies for enterprise licenses showing team combinations as I didn’t even consider that a 30 person team would be enterprise worthy. For me “contact us for enterprise” means a lifetime of dodging bizdev people. My throwaway email is now even too crowded :) Thanks for the oss link, this helps quite a bit and may be good enough for me to eval and follow up. There’s a whole cloud reg called FedRAMP that I rarely find small companies go through the documentation effort even if the design supports it. And the design constraints are real.

jadbox 7y ago

So Aether is basically "Reddit but for teams", as the page implies. Sounds great actually- I'll give it a spin and reply with my thoughts later.

rolleiflex 7y ago
Yes, you got that right. If you’d like to try it, hit me up, happy to answer questions. (email at profile)
- jadbox 7y ago
  If you don't mind, could you provide your thoughts on how it differs from Zulip? From a 10,000 foot view, they seem similar, but I don't have experience with either yet (but I'll let you know if we have time this week to check it out!)

prepend 7y ago

Aether seems nice, but I’ve never had a “credit card necessary for trial” work out. I understand the downsides to the company for trying to collect this info, but I’m not willing to risk credit card hell even if you super pinkie promise not to be a jerk. Too many jerks made similar promises and then were jerks. The pricing seems high for what it is. $10/month is not a lot, but compared to the value derived is quite a bit. Especially since the cost of such a service to operate should be extremely low. This would be cool to bundle into something, but if this is a great tool spending $300/month on top of all our other stuff for medium sized team doesn’t compute. I’ll likely use the existing crappy IM that’s already in place but drastically less cost. I suppose that the value of productivity gained would be worth $300, but the cost of service aspect doesn’t fee right to me. If I buy a book that teaches me a technique that boosts my productivity I don’t want to pay $10/month for the rest of my life. All that being said the tool looks great and the design is very considerate. I will keep an eye out for any improvements or if the software goes OSS or Microsoft buys you and bundles it with some azure thing.

rolleiflex 7y ago
All good feedback, thank you, this is helpful. The cost of service is a little higher than it seems at the beginning because we do full isolation, you get a full separate server VM, your own database, nothing is shared. It’s not like Slack which is effectively a time share on a global singleton instance. That means we can give you the keys to the kingdom, E2E encryption with no key held on our end (i.e. no escrow, you hold the only copy) or we can do on premises in a manner that can be pretty much up to you. We even offer a service to come in and maintain your own air-gapped physical box if you don’t want to do the sysadmin work for the on-prem. We can even accommodate custom requests like running the instance on our servers, but pointing the database to your on-premises database, so you remain in full control of the data while you can still avoid the maintenance cost for running an on-prem service. Also, if you’re a team large enough for it to cost $300, we do enterprise pricing, and can actually tailor it to you, so you might actually end up paying less depending on what that ends up being. For the features, you’re right, and we actually have lots of stuff in the docket, I just didn’t feel great about having upcoming features on the landing page, so that’s why it might have looked this way. Aether is actually open source, this specific one is Aether Pro. I’m the maintainer of Aether and the founder of the Pro one. I even wrote about how I ended up there recently: https://blog.getaether.net/post/187618079292/a-new-funding-model-for-open-source-software https://blog.getaether.net/post/187618079292/a-new-funding-m... I would love to hear if you have any feature requests, especially if you think it’s missing something. We want this to be as useful as humanly possible, and you’re pretty much our target audience. We’re designing for ourselves here, no holds barred.
- prepend 7y ago
  Thanks for the response. I know I shouldn’t just an org based on its design but I think that sometimes thoughtfulness in design equates to responsiveness with comments like these. The isolation might be really helpful to me and is there a way to learn more about it? I work in an organization that is weird as the cost isn’t really the issue, but the effort to test and validate security. So it’s a weird cycle that’s hard to work with vendors because I might evaluate for a long time before purchasing, or never purchase at all. I rarely contact for enterprise pricing for new tools because I don’t know if it’s an enterprise option or if I want it for enterprise. And I don’t have time to enter the enterprise sales cycle unless I’m certain. This is probably frustrating for growing companies as I’m just another annoying customer and it’s hard to differentiate buyers from non-buyers. And 90% of the time, I’m not buying. Maybe have some case studies for enterprise licenses showing team combinations as I didn’t even consider that a 30 person team would be enterprise worthy. For me “contact us for enterprise” means a lifetime of dodging bizdev people. My throwaway email is now even too crowded :) Thanks for the oss link, this helps quite a bit and may be good enough for me to eval and follow up. There’s a whole cloud reg called FedRAMP that I rarely find small companies go through the documentation effort even if the design supports it. And the design constraints are real.