12 ms·

The Slack Social Network

204 points by MindGods 6y ago

parliament32 6y ago
>the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts This is also why Atlassian is so popular in enterprises. I don't particularly like Jira or Confluence or Bamboo or Bitbucket/Stash, but they're "good enough", and the way they work together is effectively magic.
naringas 6y ago
Stratechery quoting Satya Nadella: > Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. [...] what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about. Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about? "An application experience that trascends any device"... isn't this the web? I can access it in my smartphone (the real personal computer device), my laptop, ipad, you name it... All of these of course powered by "the cloud" (somebody's server on somebody else's giant datacenters) Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling provider. At this rate they'll be eating the lunch Google could have had but can't quite get... It seems that Google is dangerously close to a crisis even if they cannot percieve this over all their ad revenue. Google original's innovation which got them to where they are now is basically their better technology. But how good is google search today? IMO it is way worse than it was around 5 to 10 years ago.
- verganileonardo 6y ago
  How is Google worse than 10 years ago? I would agree that they are doing shady moves that can hurt search quality, but overall, the results look much better today than 10 years ago.
  - kspacewalk2 6y ago
    It is much harder to bypass the you-really-meant-something-else algorithms and search for the exact terms I need. I don't need you to "correct" it, I don't need the helpful synonyms, etc. When I search for information about specific strings like class method names, now I quite often have to resort to GitHub search.
    - ryandvm 6y ago
      You don't need it, but 99% of their users do.
  - asjw 6y ago
    Relevance. if the search results has less relevance and historical data has lower importance compared to spikes in interest at the moment of the search, it's worse For example medical related searches right now prioritize covid related results, they are important _now_, but they are less important than general statistical data A general purpose search engine shouldn't be about what social networks talk more about
  - ProAm 6y ago
    > How is Google worse than 10 years ago? GMail is unable using the web client. Google search results are not great when doing research on new topics, its good for telling you things you already know but forgot, but when trying to search about new topics the search bubbles are bad. They beg for adoption of new products and then cancel them within 18 months. Android is essentially a giant spyware platform, using your mic sends everything to google. Using chrome sends everything to google. On and on, I believe Google was a better company 10 years ago.
  - ilikehurdles 6y ago
    In my experience, there are two massive pains: 1. For a few years now, it has been very difficult for me to search for specific phrases, even with surrounding quotes, without getting results that don't include those phrases 2. Lately, every search where I am trying to research a topic or look up some instructrions for how to do something leads to to pages upon pages of products and services in that space rather than information about the thing. I can't look up how to install a stove without endless ads (whether posing as explicit ads or as official search results) for handymen or appliance stores. I want to know how to change my swamp cooler motor but instead I get professional HVAC services, and useless sponsored articles that aren't about "how to do <thing>" but "why you should do <thing> oh and by the way hire us". On google search, results are neither informative nor accurate. The results exist only to sell something.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  Better technology or better application of commodity hardware?
- sudhirj 6y ago
  > Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about? Yes and no. The web started off and until recently was a content-first and application-second system. Reversing those two priorities is just starting to happen now, to some extent.
- appleiigs 6y ago
  > Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling provider. I think you are being too generous with Microsoft. My take is Microsoft is forced into this strategy because it failed build a successful mobile phone and the ecosystem around it, unlike Apple and Google. It has to transcend the hardware as its only option. MS 365 is capitulation that the strategy of using Office as the killer app to keep people on Windows is no longer as effective as before.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Microsoft was born as a developer tooling company that accidentally ended up in OSes because early OSes were developer tools. (BASIC was the first OS for the IBM PC, just as it was for the Commodore 64.) Microsoft's strategy to buy GitHub is clearly a developer tooling choice, nothing to do with the failure in phones. Microsoft's original strategy was always to transcend hardware (early Microsoft products were notoriously cross-platform in an age where cross-platform was much harder), they've always been a software company first (hence their name), and a hardware company begrudgingly.
dijit 6y ago
I'm going to be honest, this post is a very long winded way to state the obvious. Businesses already using some kind of microsoft software that get something "on top" which is "like slack!" are never going to switch. It doesn't matter that teams is basically sharepoint+email+skype (and not, as slack is: an IRC-style chat system) and it certainly does not matter that bringing bots to the platform is eggregiously painful. It only matters that business executives and people that have never stepped outside of the microsoft ecosystem perceive it as "being the same" and "being included".
- santoshalper 6y ago
  I'm not really sure I follow. I'm a long time IRC/Slack user for personal and side projects, and my company adopted Teams a couple years ago. The core chat functionality is very comparable and we use it regularly for exactly that use case. Every team (organized or virtual) owns a Team with multiple chat channels that most use all day long for talking. I am not implying that they are equally good - Slack has a huge advantage for power users with non-MSFT integrations and bots, but the core "channel-based chat" use case is pretty much 1:1.
  - dijit 6y ago
    I'm very interested in how this works. For full context: teams came out during my current employment and I have not moved to another company to see it used any other place. From my understanding; at least how it's configured for my company... A "channel" is more like a series of threads, reminiscent of a forum post per message which can be replied to. This is what I mean when I say it's like email; it's heavily thread based. "Chats" are ad-hoc, un-ordered and will become inaccessible/removed when they cycle out of the sidebar (as in, you can have 20~ chats, the one last interacted with the longest ago will be dropped if you add a new chat). Voice calls work well though.
- gfosco 6y ago
  > this post is a very long winded way to state the obvious. My hat is off, it has been a pretty successful business model for him. :)
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
> Teams is particularly effective as a way to prevent a Microsoft customer from even trying Slack. You sure about that, Ben? Teams has been a disappointment for my group. We need it. At least, we need what it is on paper. But it's been so bad that my (Microsoft-loving) boss asked me to write a groupware web app specifically for our workflow, so that we wouldn't have to try to make that shoe fit any more. The fundamental, universal problem that Microsoft is trying to fix with Teams is a problem of their own making: Office. Everyone LOVES to make Office documents. Can't write a memo without Word! Can't add a series of numbers without Excel! Can't have a meeting without a slide deck! So every non-single-office-sized organization has mountains and mountains of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it with SharePoint. They tried and failed to fix it with OneNote. And now they're failing to fix it with Teams. Ray Ozzie fixed it with Groove, 15 years ago, then Microsoft acqui-hired him, and threw the product away. Good work, there, Ballmer.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  I don't necessarily agree with you, but your point of view is rather interesting, and I've never seen or read it before. I guess it's hard to gauge the exact behavior of hundreds of millions of customers, from all over the world. Both you and I might be heavily biased by our point of view. I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users? Anyway, interesting thought.
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    > I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users? You at least know they have tens of thousands of Office documents that no one but their creators can find when they need to reference them. ;-)
- stefan_ 6y ago
  Your response was to flee, right?
- 6y ago
ForHackernews 6y ago
Chat is a feature, not a product. RIP Slack: It turns out IRC-but-with-emoji isn't really that compelling.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Chat is absolutely a product. In fact, there’s a number of companies that do nothing but that!
  - u801e 6y ago
    Products like MSN messenger, AOL instant messenger, Yahoo messenger, ICQ, etc are either no longer around or are far less popular than they used to be.
    - dewey 6y ago
      You realize that just because some companies in a space go out of fashion doesn't mean the market is shrinking? MySpace also went away and Facebook seems to just fine instead. There's a lot more messengers than ever before. Signal, Matrix, iMessage, FB Messenger,...
  - santoshalper 6y ago
    The difference between a feature and a product is in the eye of the beholder, but "just chat" isn't a very compelling product. All the strong products in this space (Teams, Slack, Discord et al.) are Chat+ products with integrations, voice, bots, and other non-chat features to make collaboration more productive. I think the product is facilitating remote collaboration, chat is just one very significant feature.
- FactCore 6y ago
  Yeah that's the real kicker. If you're a company with the resources to buy a small server (such as a raspberry pi if you're being cheap about it) and run an IRC chat, why not do it and be in total control of an essential part of your business?
aahhahahaaa 6y ago
All these large companies seem to be fighting each other to create the internet
irrational 6y ago
My company uses both. Slack is used for intra-department communication, Teams is used for inter-department communication.
ProAm 6y ago
Do people really enjoy slack? We're forced to use it, but if I had a choice I would not. It's similar to FB, everyone is on it so you have to use it but its not good software.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  > It's similar to FB, everyone is on it so you have to use it FWIW, that's the article's thesis. For my part, I've never used a chat or company communication tool that was better than Slack. Not saying it's good or that I "enjoy" it. But it's the least bad option available AFAIK.
- buzzert 6y ago
  This was my reaction too. Slack doesn’t have many fans at my job either, but that (rather childish) newspaper ad that Slack wrote suggests their users “love” it and would never switch to anything else. Both Teams and Slack are slow chat apps that run in the browser. One uses AWS and the other uses Azure. I’m not surprised there aren’t 100 alternatives at this point.
- LukeEF 6y ago
  Agree strongly with this sentiment. I always found it very clunky and hard to use. We migrated to Discord for our recently remote office. So much better. Chat is better. Voice rooms are great. Visibility is great. Granted, we are a small shop, so unclear how it will scale, but big step up so far.
conroy 6y ago
I maintain an open-source project with a few corporate sponsors. As part of their sponsorship, companies get Slack-based support. Shared channels have made this process incredibly easy. Since they already use Slack, I just create a shared channel in my organization and invite them. They get to decide who is in the channel. Even if you get added later, you can see the whole chat history. It's extremely valuable for doing cross-organization work.
btilly 6y ago
If you want something that does chat and does it well, go with Discord over Slack. While Teams doesn't do anything good to write home about, it avoids one giant misfeature of Slack - the fact that if I start typing a message, get distracted, then come back to Slack later, the person or channel that I was chatting in is gone. Into the invisible Drafts section. I never want this behavior. And there is no way to turn it off.
- paxys 6y ago
  If you value your company's privacy and IP do not go with Discord.
  - wyclif 6y ago
    Why?
    - paxys 6y ago
      Because according to their terms of service they can share your data with third parties - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/products/discord/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/product...
      - wyclif 6y ago
        Thanks, I was not aware of this!
- joe_fishfish 6y ago
  Yes! This is the biggest thing I hate about Slack. It feels like it's trying to make Slack more like email, and the whole reason I use Slack in the first place is to get away from email.
- libraryatnight 6y ago
  It doesn't do the drafts thing anymore. Well, it does, but it doesn't move it. It stays in the normal location and also goes to drafts. So you don't have that jarring moment where you scroll alphabetically and find missing dm's/channels.
Jonnax 6y ago
I'm so shocked at the positivity about Teams. At my company we use it and there's a timeline to shut down Skype for Business in favour of it. The app is incredibly slow, doesn't have tabs so if you're in a chat, then you want to reference a file you're making in the tools you have to click out of it. Teams chats and 1 on 1 chats are another "web page" to load. Clicks load as fast as my 1mbps internet connection in 2004 Skype for Business is still used for chat even though we're told by IT to transition because the app is so slow. I just see it as crap clone that Microsoft coded together in a messy hurry to copy Slack, and then included it free in their Office subscriptions. The conversations around using slack are that it's really expensive in comparison to free. Why isn't that anticompetitive?
- jerf 6y ago
  "The app is incredibly slow" I wish the forces didn't align to make every "enterprise" application drop performance down the priority list to somewhere around position 20 or 30. I understand how it happens, but I don't have to like it. Slack has been slowing down on me lately too. It seems like every couple of months, the amount of time between typing someone's @name and it finally resolving is growing longer, meaning I have more time to type more stuff before the cursor snaps back to just after the @name. (I wish there was a "hey, be less rounded and polished and deeply nested in HTML tags and be fast" mode....)
  - divbzero 6y ago
    I understand how performance isn’t a priority but would argue that it should be: The users of enterprise apps are typically employees whose time is valuable. That ought to be an important consideration for those who control the purse strings.
- kube-system 6y ago
  > At my company we use it and there's a timeline to shut down Skype for Business in favour of it. That's not because your company loves it, it's because Microsoft is starting to discontinue some versions of Skype for Business and forcing everyone over to Teams.
- 6y ago
ravedave5 6y ago
Nobody told this guy - you can make team chats across organizations. Actively use this for working with other orgs.
- wilsonrocks 6y ago
  We do this all the time with clients
cjblomqvist 6y ago
I've never tried Slack, uses Teams (and have used IRC and lots of other chat programs). Can someone clearly and concretely explain the differences/benefits of Slack over Teams? Would love to understand. At they moment they feel the same to me, more or less the same as IRC (except for some non-important details, except for maybe Teams integration with the rest of the MS ecosystem and how easy it supposedly is to add "extensions").
- outworlder 6y ago
  You can try Slack for free.
mrkwse 6y ago
As someone who moved job between a huge (>20k employee) org that had Slack (alongside Exchange, I believe was moving to G-Suite) to a smaller org (<1k) on Teams, while I miss some of the fun of Slack, generally I'm not desperate to switch back. Video calling (aka 2020's must-have) was always less than idea with Slack (prior org used Zoom for it) and the threaded interface was a mess (one colleague always replied to threads with the 'show in main feed' (owtte) option checked, which had the clumsiest UX of all time, with the main channel repeatedly interrupted with a linked header from a previous message). I do miss custom emoji and more diverse reactions (I long for a thumbs down particularly, I regularly disagree with suggestions without feeling sad/angry but have to add a text response). Now, any time a OS technology/etc. points me to a community Slack I'm hugely hesitant to join, the interface is unfamiliar and loud since the recent refreshes, and the difficulty to actually leave once one has joined is substantial (along with public emails which often lead to spam).
- draw_down 6y ago
  This piece is not about comparing Slack and Teams feature-for-feature.
samfisher83 6y ago
From what I understand Teams is pretty much free with office. That is why my company switched. It's hard to beat free.
matchbok 6y ago
Slack is popular because it makes people think they are doing work or are being productive. When in reality tons of people spend more and more time "chatting" and trying to communicate in Slack than... actually working. The whole idea that chat is a good way to get most work done isn't true, IMO. It's inherently synchronous and a terrible way to manage time.
- coderintherye 6y ago
  >When in reality tons of people spend more and more time "chatting" and trying to communicate in Slack than... actually working. This has always been the cases. Offices are social environments. Chat formalizes some of that communication, which is actually quite useful. But it doesn't suddenly make a chatty, distracting co-worker less chatty or more productive. I don't think anyone is arguing that chat is how most work should get done, but rather that it a good tool for promoting legible communication and good communication is one of the most important factors in driving effective work.
  - matchbok 6y ago
    Maybe. But most channels I'm in devolve into multiple cross-team chats that are interspersed and impossible to navigate if you aren't reading the messages as they come in. Hell, searching for topic of discussion that happened more than a few days ago is pretty much impossible in Slack.
    - coderintherye 6y ago
      My experience of Slack is that their search has gotten better recently, especially when using some of the filters available. That said, I would also agree that search is probably a key area for them to improve on.
      - matchbok 6y ago
        That exactly. The whole idea of a chatroom as a searchable archive doesn't make sense to me. Chats are quick bites of information that make sense "right now".
esch89 6y ago
I agree that there’s a need for communication / collaboration tools that allow easy work across organizational boundaries. MS Teams permissions to allow for outside collaborators is painfully complex. But Slack Connect, while better than Teams, still doesn’t get the job done well. So Slack’s so called “competitive edge” isn’t that competitive. For outside collaboration / communication - I like AirSend (www.airsend.io). It’s a lot simpler than Teams or Slack - less integrations, but perfect for people who work across organizational boundaries on a regular basis.
divbzero 6y ago
To me the product weaknesses of Slack have been: – Video chat integration (not as seamless as Teams) – Threading (not as good as Zulip) – Information discovery (i.e. slow search) In addition, Slack faces a bigger challenge that the “moat” described by OP might not be as defensible as the author suggests. I’m not convinced that an “enterprise social network” is a key feature sought by users of chat apps, and even if it is Microsoft has the stronger hand with its Office 365 user base supplemented by LinkedIn.
markshepard 6y ago
Correct me if I am wrong. Slack connect is available only in paid slack versions. When you collaborate across organizations than the assumption is all parties have paid slack. That most likely will not be the scenario when you collaborate with third parties. That is the big problem here.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Teams really killed it in this department. For example my junior sent an email to a vendor, and the vendor replied to him on Teams. No complex integration was required. It's just if you have Teams you can contact them.
bamborde_zaiku 6y ago
Our research team at Zaiku Capital wrote an article on Slack two weeks ago entitled 'Will Amazon Snatch Slack?`: https://zaikucapital.substack.com/p/will-amazon-snatch-slack https://zaikucapital.substack.com/p/will-amazon-snatch-slack Some arguments regarding Teams overlap with this article and so hopefully you enjoy reading! Ah, we compute the probability of Amazon snatching Slack at 47.6%, with a price tag in the range of $23Bn-$27Bn (stock + cash)! Cheers, Bambordé
throwbacktictac 6y ago
"And even when it comes to the cloud, the choice for startups is usually between AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft is out-of-sight and out-of-mind." I thought Azure was number two in the Cloud-as-a-service game.
- ByteJockey 6y ago
  It's possible that startups are not representative of the market as a whole. Intuitively this makes sense, I've seen an out-sized number (compared to their market-share) of enterprise products hosted on Azure. To the point where I'm usually surprised at how low their share is. I spend a lot of time working with large companies, so one way to square this would be large companies being more likely to use Azure than the average.
vmateixeira 6y ago
Not that Teams is better but I feel like Slack started to die the moment it removed IRC and XMPP support. That was their only clear advantage over the competition. The inability to turn off notifications shouldn't be a feature. People (at least me) want more work time, less noise. Voice/video chat is completely broken (at least for Linux). Having to very often "clear the cache and hard reload" on the "native" app, makes me feel I'm using a bloated browser tab. How, with all those quirks, do they want to compete with Teams - (from a well established company with such a big user base? (edit: clarification)
binarysneaker 6y ago
Hoping the Microsoft Teams devs are following these comments. I've been a long time Slack user in multiple large orgs, and I'm using Teams in my current role for the first time with multiple teams, total headcount around 100. Things that need love - 1. The UX. The navigation bar, tabs along the top of the chat window, separate chats and groups, ugh. In Slack, the navigation panel is tidy and chats and groups are in one consistent place, the chat header is minimal and functional. 2. Message formatting. Pasting code into a message doesn't automatically change the style to monospaced, and there's no syntax highlighting like in Slack. 3. Pasting a picture or attachment into the chat waits for another ENTER keypress before sending, presumably so that you can add some text alongside the picture. This seems counter intuitive, compared to the behaviour in messaging apps (whatsapp, fb, signal, etc). 4. Experience parity across all versions/platforms. It bugs me that Teams for Web is incapable of video and phone calls. But worse, the Linux version doesn't have feature parity with the Windows version. Useful tools such as remote control and video call background blurring don't exist. 5. More emojis! There are so many times when I've tried to use an emoji and it's just not there. Slack has this pretty well covered, as does every other messaging app out there. 6. @channel usage. If I type @channel, when the message is posted, it's converted to the channel name. So I type "Good morning @channel, just to let you know...", Teams will convert the message to "Good morning General, just to let you know..." - that makes no sense when you're reading it! Who's "General"!? 7. The General channel. WHY?! I can make it read only, I can't hide it, I can't rename it. UGH. 8. Sending a new message. I can type Ctrl+/chat name to start a new message, or click the icon (WHY is right aligned at the top of the navigation pane?). This should be as easy as Ctrl+K name messsage, like in Slack. 9. The linux version seems to run 2 threads, both using around 800mb of RAM. I wouldn't mind so much, but one of threads seems to be just for the system taskbar icon.
- ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
  I find the fact it waits for enter to be pressed before sending the photo very intuitive.
  - screye 6y ago
    If anything I strongly prefer it
andersco 6y ago
Our organization was recently forced to switch from Slack to Teams. In Slack, there was a sense of spontaneity and fluidity to the experience, allowing for countless types of emojis and integration with services like giphy that made collaborating fun. With Teams, it’s all business. No more #random channel or water cooler chats. Not sure which of the tools actually is better but personally I really miss Slack :-/
- brown9-2 6y ago
  I’m confused by this, can’t you just create the #random channel you wish existed in Teams?
hacym 6y ago
I don't like Teams, but am forced to use it for work because they don't support Slack. They don't support it for a pretty practical reason: they've spent a lot of time vetting Microsoft's security, SLAs, etc. So have our customers. Slack is a new variable that introduces more work and cost. Leadership basically sees Teams as a version of Slack that is already integrated into Outlook and Office. Slack doesn't offer enough for them to switch to it. That would also require clearing it with all of our customers, too, for communicating about customer projects. Microsoft has something Slack doesn't have: a built-in customer base that is already fully committed to their products.
- teej 6y ago
  I see these as reasons why Teams doesn't have to compete on usability or features. Their customers literally can't use anything else.
aripickar 6y ago
I think that the biggest thing about slack is just how nice it is to use. I remember first trying it for groups in college, and it was a godsend compared to most messaging services.
SergeAx 6y ago
Slack is the worst piece of tech I forced to use in years. It is also an eye opener for wishful thinking myths like "better products will eventually win the customers". But it is still no wonder they lost to first competitor with similar feature set and slightly better user experience.
55555 6y ago
Does anyone know a Slack alternative that supports one-click voice and video messages? Slack has some clumsy integrations but nothing one-click. My team recently switched from Telegram (yes, seriously) to Slack and you'd be surprised but for small teams Telegram is great. Specifically, the fast easy video notes save management time and prevent confusion.
- maguay 6y ago
  Discord may be the closest, with its voice chat rooms. It's not designed for work chat per se, but can work ok as a Slack replacement.
lmeyerov 6y ago
Reasoning stopped short: - On the business social network side, I now get as many Teams invites as Slack invites. Teams won the bigger social moat. Hard for a #3 to enter, and sounds like Slack quietly lost #1. - On the tech community Slack side, Slack community features are hostile, so pushed to discord and friends. Slack is losing their base ('love'). Interesting times for one of the oldest internet technologies. Or.. were for a second there.
didip 6y ago
While we are talking about Slack, do people use MatterMost in their org? The idea of self hosting Slack is appealing to me. But I don't know how close it is to Slack.
- jasonblais 6y ago
  Hi didip, glad you asked! Mattermost is an open source Slack alternative - it's got the same core features, familiar user interface, Slack-compatible integrations (so you can migrate them easily if you choose to), and more. The added benefit with self hosting is privacy, customization - and basically full control of your data. If you're curious to know who uses Mattermost, you can check out https://mattermost.com/customers/ https://mattermost.com/customers/ for some examples.
indigodaddy 6y ago
How is security going to be handled with Shared Channels? Eg, there is a ton of private/proprietary information that may not want to be shared between companies/partners/vendors. Now I can just send a file through chat to a vendor (presumably, not sure what will be allowed and not be allowed) ? This makes me nervous. But I guess this could always be done via email between companies/vendors/partners, so the onus is still on the individual to be responsible and follow internal company policies in making the determination about what to share at the end of the day.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
Slack claims to be an open platform, yet their platform is closed, and they took away IRC features, one of the few things they could claim as being "open" about the platform. I'm not about to try using Teams, but I'm also not about to use Slack, and for mostly the same reasons. Closed source, centralized platform, and "you must use our frontend". Fuck that.

204 points by MindGods 6y ago

>the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts This is also why Atlassian is so popular in enterprises. I don't particularly like Jira or Confluence or Bamboo or Bitbucket/Stash, but they're "good enough", and the way they work together is effectively magic.

naringas 6y ago

Stratechery quoting Satya Nadella: > Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. [...] what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about. Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about? "An application experience that trascends any device"... isn't this the web? I can access it in my smartphone (the real personal computer device), my laptop, ipad, you name it... All of these of course powered by "the cloud" (somebody's server on somebody else's giant datacenters) Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling provider. At this rate they'll be eating the lunch Google could have had but can't quite get... It seems that Google is dangerously close to a crisis even if they cannot percieve this over all their ad revenue. Google original's innovation which got them to where they are now is basically their better technology. But how good is google search today? IMO it is way worse than it was around 5 to 10 years ago.

verganileonardo 6y ago
How is Google worse than 10 years ago? I would agree that they are doing shady moves that can hurt search quality, but overall, the results look much better today than 10 years ago.
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  It is much harder to bypass the you-really-meant-something-else algorithms and search for the exact terms I need. I don't need you to "correct" it, I don't need the helpful synonyms, etc. When I search for information about specific strings like class method names, now I quite often have to resort to GitHub search.
  - ryandvm 6y ago
    You don't need it, but 99% of their users do.
- asjw 6y ago
  Relevance. if the search results has less relevance and historical data has lower importance compared to spikes in interest at the moment of the search, it's worse For example medical related searches right now prioritize covid related results, they are important _now_, but they are less important than general statistical data A general purpose search engine shouldn't be about what social networks talk more about
- ProAm 6y ago
  > How is Google worse than 10 years ago? GMail is unable using the web client. Google search results are not great when doing research on new topics, its good for telling you things you already know but forgot, but when trying to search about new topics the search bubbles are bad. They beg for adoption of new products and then cancel them within 18 months. Android is essentially a giant spyware platform, using your mic sends everything to google. Using chrome sends everything to google. On and on, I believe Google was a better company 10 years ago.
- ilikehurdles 6y ago
  In my experience, there are two massive pains: 1. For a few years now, it has been very difficult for me to search for specific phrases, even with surrounding quotes, without getting results that don't include those phrases 2. Lately, every search where I am trying to research a topic or look up some instructrions for how to do something leads to to pages upon pages of products and services in that space rather than information about the thing. I can't look up how to install a stove without endless ads (whether posing as explicit ads or as official search results) for handymen or appliance stores. I want to know how to change my swamp cooler motor but instead I get professional HVAC services, and useless sponsored articles that aren't about "how to do <thing>" but "why you should do <thing> oh and by the way hire us". On google search, results are neither informative nor accurate. The results exist only to sell something.
dillonmckay 6y ago
Better technology or better application of commodity hardware?
sudhirj 6y ago
> Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about? Yes and no. The web started off and until recently was a content-first and application-second system. Reversing those two priorities is just starting to happen now, to some extent.
appleiigs 6y ago
> Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling provider. I think you are being too generous with Microsoft. My take is Microsoft is forced into this strategy because it failed build a successful mobile phone and the ecosystem around it, unlike Apple and Google. It has to transcend the hardware as its only option. MS 365 is capitulation that the strategy of using Office as the killer app to keep people on Windows is no longer as effective as before.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Microsoft was born as a developer tooling company that accidentally ended up in OSes because early OSes were developer tools. (BASIC was the first OS for the IBM PC, just as it was for the Commodore 64.) Microsoft's strategy to buy GitHub is clearly a developer tooling choice, nothing to do with the failure in phones. Microsoft's original strategy was always to transcend hardware (early Microsoft products were notoriously cross-platform in an age where cross-platform was much harder), they've always been a software company first (hence their name), and a hardware company begrudgingly.

dijit 6y ago

I'm going to be honest, this post is a very long winded way to state the obvious. Businesses already using some kind of microsoft software that get something "on top" which is "like slack!" are never going to switch. It doesn't matter that teams is basically sharepoint+email+skype (and not, as slack is: an IRC-style chat system) and it certainly does not matter that bringing bots to the platform is eggregiously painful. It only matters that business executives and people that have never stepped outside of the microsoft ecosystem perceive it as "being the same" and "being included".

santoshalper 6y ago
I'm not really sure I follow. I'm a long time IRC/Slack user for personal and side projects, and my company adopted Teams a couple years ago. The core chat functionality is very comparable and we use it regularly for exactly that use case. Every team (organized or virtual) owns a Team with multiple chat channels that most use all day long for talking. I am not implying that they are equally good - Slack has a huge advantage for power users with non-MSFT integrations and bots, but the core "channel-based chat" use case is pretty much 1:1.
- dijit 6y ago
  I'm very interested in how this works. For full context: teams came out during my current employment and I have not moved to another company to see it used any other place. From my understanding; at least how it's configured for my company... A "channel" is more like a series of threads, reminiscent of a forum post per message which can be replied to. This is what I mean when I say it's like email; it's heavily thread based. "Chats" are ad-hoc, un-ordered and will become inaccessible/removed when they cycle out of the sidebar (as in, you can have 20~ chats, the one last interacted with the longest ago will be dropped if you add a new chat). Voice calls work well though.
gfosco 6y ago
> this post is a very long winded way to state the obvious. My hat is off, it has been a pretty successful business model for him. :)

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

> Teams is particularly effective as a way to prevent a Microsoft customer from even trying Slack. You sure about that, Ben? Teams has been a disappointment for my group. We need it. At least, we need what it is on paper. But it's been so bad that my (Microsoft-loving) boss asked me to write a groupware web app specifically for our workflow, so that we wouldn't have to try to make that shoe fit any more. The fundamental, universal problem that Microsoft is trying to fix with Teams is a problem of their own making: Office. Everyone LOVES to make Office documents. Can't write a memo without Word! Can't add a series of numbers without Excel! Can't have a meeting without a slide deck! So every non-single-office-sized organization has mountains and mountains of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it with SharePoint. They tried and failed to fix it with OneNote. And now they're failing to fix it with Teams. Ray Ozzie fixed it with Groove, 15 years ago, then Microsoft acqui-hired him, and threw the product away. Good work, there, Ballmer.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I don't necessarily agree with you, but your point of view is rather interesting, and I've never seen or read it before. I guess it's hard to gauge the exact behavior of hundreds of millions of customers, from all over the world. Both you and I might be heavily biased by our point of view. I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users? Anyway, interesting thought.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  > I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users? You at least know they have tens of thousands of Office documents that no one but their creators can find when they need to reference them. ;-)
stefan_ 6y ago
Your response was to flee, right?
6y ago

ForHackernews 6y ago

Chat is a feature, not a product. RIP Slack: It turns out IRC-but-with-emoji isn't really that compelling.

saagarjha 6y ago
Chat is absolutely a product. In fact, there’s a number of companies that do nothing but that!
- u801e 6y ago
  Products like MSN messenger, AOL instant messenger, Yahoo messenger, ICQ, etc are either no longer around or are far less popular than they used to be.
  - dewey 6y ago
    You realize that just because some companies in a space go out of fashion doesn't mean the market is shrinking? MySpace also went away and Facebook seems to just fine instead. There's a lot more messengers than ever before. Signal, Matrix, iMessage, FB Messenger,...
- santoshalper 6y ago
  The difference between a feature and a product is in the eye of the beholder, but "just chat" isn't a very compelling product. All the strong products in this space (Teams, Slack, Discord et al.) are Chat+ products with integrations, voice, bots, and other non-chat features to make collaboration more productive. I think the product is facilitating remote collaboration, chat is just one very significant feature.
FactCore 6y ago
Yeah that's the real kicker. If you're a company with the resources to buy a small server (such as a raspberry pi if you're being cheap about it) and run an IRC chat, why not do it and be in total control of an essential part of your business?

aahhahahaaa 6y ago

All these large companies seem to be fighting each other to create the internet

irrational 6y ago

My company uses both. Slack is used for intra-department communication, Teams is used for inter-department communication.

ProAm 6y ago

Do people really enjoy slack? We're forced to use it, but if I had a choice I would not. It's similar to FB, everyone is on it so you have to use it but its not good software.

jdm2212 6y ago
> It's similar to FB, everyone is on it so you have to use it FWIW, that's the article's thesis. For my part, I've never used a chat or company communication tool that was better than Slack. Not saying it's good or that I "enjoy" it. But it's the least bad option available AFAIK.
buzzert 6y ago
This was my reaction too. Slack doesn’t have many fans at my job either, but that (rather childish) newspaper ad that Slack wrote suggests their users “love” it and would never switch to anything else. Both Teams and Slack are slow chat apps that run in the browser. One uses AWS and the other uses Azure. I’m not surprised there aren’t 100 alternatives at this point.
LukeEF 6y ago
Agree strongly with this sentiment. I always found it very clunky and hard to use. We migrated to Discord for our recently remote office. So much better. Chat is better. Voice rooms are great. Visibility is great. Granted, we are a small shop, so unclear how it will scale, but big step up so far.

conroy 6y ago

I maintain an open-source project with a few corporate sponsors. As part of their sponsorship, companies get Slack-based support. Shared channels have made this process incredibly easy. Since they already use Slack, I just create a shared channel in my organization and invite them. They get to decide who is in the channel. Even if you get added later, you can see the whole chat history. It's extremely valuable for doing cross-organization work.

btilly 6y ago

If you want something that does chat and does it well, go with Discord over Slack. While Teams doesn't do anything good to write home about, it avoids one giant misfeature of Slack - the fact that if I start typing a message, get distracted, then come back to Slack later, the person or channel that I was chatting in is gone. Into the invisible Drafts section. I never want this behavior. And there is no way to turn it off.

paxys 6y ago
If you value your company's privacy and IP do not go with Discord.
- wyclif 6y ago
  Why?
  - paxys 6y ago
    Because according to their terms of service they can share your data with third parties - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/products/discord/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/product...
    - wyclif 6y ago
      Thanks, I was not aware of this!
joe_fishfish 6y ago
Yes! This is the biggest thing I hate about Slack. It feels like it's trying to make Slack more like email, and the whole reason I use Slack in the first place is to get away from email.
libraryatnight 6y ago
It doesn't do the drafts thing anymore. Well, it does, but it doesn't move it. It stays in the normal location and also goes to drafts. So you don't have that jarring moment where you scroll alphabetically and find missing dm's/channels.

Jonnax 6y ago

I'm so shocked at the positivity about Teams. At my company we use it and there's a timeline to shut down Skype for Business in favour of it. The app is incredibly slow, doesn't have tabs so if you're in a chat, then you want to reference a file you're making in the tools you have to click out of it. Teams chats and 1 on 1 chats are another "web page" to load. Clicks load as fast as my 1mbps internet connection in 2004 Skype for Business is still used for chat even though we're told by IT to transition because the app is so slow. I just see it as crap clone that Microsoft coded together in a messy hurry to copy Slack, and then included it free in their Office subscriptions. The conversations around using slack are that it's really expensive in comparison to free. Why isn't that anticompetitive?

jerf 6y ago
"The app is incredibly slow" I wish the forces didn't align to make every "enterprise" application drop performance down the priority list to somewhere around position 20 or 30. I understand how it happens, but I don't have to like it. Slack has been slowing down on me lately too. It seems like every couple of months, the amount of time between typing someone's @name and it finally resolving is growing longer, meaning I have more time to type more stuff before the cursor snaps back to just after the @name. (I wish there was a "hey, be less rounded and polished and deeply nested in HTML tags and be fast" mode....)
- divbzero 6y ago
  I understand how performance isn’t a priority but would argue that it should be: The users of enterprise apps are typically employees whose time is valuable. That ought to be an important consideration for those who control the purse strings.
kube-system 6y ago
> At my company we use it and there's a timeline to shut down Skype for Business in favour of it. That's not because your company loves it, it's because Microsoft is starting to discontinue some versions of Skype for Business and forcing everyone over to Teams.
6y ago

ravedave5 6y ago

Nobody told this guy - you can make team chats across organizations. Actively use this for working with other orgs.

wilsonrocks 6y ago
We do this all the time with clients

cjblomqvist 6y ago

I've never tried Slack, uses Teams (and have used IRC and lots of other chat programs). Can someone clearly and concretely explain the differences/benefits of Slack over Teams? Would love to understand. At they moment they feel the same to me, more or less the same as IRC (except for some non-important details, except for maybe Teams integration with the rest of the MS ecosystem and how easy it supposedly is to add "extensions").

outworlder 6y ago
You can try Slack for free.

mrkwse 6y ago

As someone who moved job between a huge (>20k employee) org that had Slack (alongside Exchange, I believe was moving to G-Suite) to a smaller org (<1k) on Teams, while I miss some of the fun of Slack, generally I'm not desperate to switch back. Video calling (aka 2020's must-have) was always less than idea with Slack (prior org used Zoom for it) and the threaded interface was a mess (one colleague always replied to threads with the 'show in main feed' (owtte) option checked, which had the clumsiest UX of all time, with the main channel repeatedly interrupted with a linked header from a previous message). I do miss custom emoji and more diverse reactions (I long for a thumbs down particularly, I regularly disagree with suggestions without feeling sad/angry but have to add a text response). Now, any time a OS technology/etc. points me to a community Slack I'm hugely hesitant to join, the interface is unfamiliar and loud since the recent refreshes, and the difficulty to actually leave once one has joined is substantial (along with public emails which often lead to spam).

draw_down 6y ago
This piece is not about comparing Slack and Teams feature-for-feature.

samfisher83 6y ago

From what I understand Teams is pretty much free with office. That is why my company switched. It's hard to beat free.

matchbok 6y ago

Slack is popular because it makes people think they are doing work or are being productive. When in reality tons of people spend more and more time "chatting" and trying to communicate in Slack than... actually working. The whole idea that chat is a good way to get most work done isn't true, IMO. It's inherently synchronous and a terrible way to manage time.

coderintherye 6y ago
>When in reality tons of people spend more and more time "chatting" and trying to communicate in Slack than... actually working. This has always been the cases. Offices are social environments. Chat formalizes some of that communication, which is actually quite useful. But it doesn't suddenly make a chatty, distracting co-worker less chatty or more productive. I don't think anyone is arguing that chat is how most work should get done, but rather that it a good tool for promoting legible communication and good communication is one of the most important factors in driving effective work.
- matchbok 6y ago
  Maybe. But most channels I'm in devolve into multiple cross-team chats that are interspersed and impossible to navigate if you aren't reading the messages as they come in. Hell, searching for topic of discussion that happened more than a few days ago is pretty much impossible in Slack.
  - coderintherye 6y ago
    My experience of Slack is that their search has gotten better recently, especially when using some of the filters available. That said, I would also agree that search is probably a key area for them to improve on.
    - matchbok 6y ago
      That exactly. The whole idea of a chatroom as a searchable archive doesn't make sense to me. Chats are quick bites of information that make sense "right now".

esch89 6y ago

I agree that there’s a need for communication / collaboration tools that allow easy work across organizational boundaries. MS Teams permissions to allow for outside collaborators is painfully complex. But Slack Connect, while better than Teams, still doesn’t get the job done well. So Slack’s so called “competitive edge” isn’t that competitive. For outside collaboration / communication - I like AirSend (www.airsend.io). It’s a lot simpler than Teams or Slack - less integrations, but perfect for people who work across organizational boundaries on a regular basis.

divbzero 6y ago

To me the product weaknesses of Slack have been: – Video chat integration (not as seamless as Teams) – Threading (not as good as Zulip) – Information discovery (i.e. slow search) In addition, Slack faces a bigger challenge that the “moat” described by OP might not be as defensible as the author suggests. I’m not convinced that an “enterprise social network” is a key feature sought by users of chat apps, and even if it is Microsoft has the stronger hand with its Office 365 user base supplemented by LinkedIn.

markshepard 6y ago

Correct me if I am wrong. Slack connect is available only in paid slack versions. When you collaborate across organizations than the assumption is all parties have paid slack. That most likely will not be the scenario when you collaborate with third parties. That is the big problem here.

jschwartzi 6y ago
Teams really killed it in this department. For example my junior sent an email to a vendor, and the vendor replied to him on Teams. No complex integration was required. It's just if you have Teams you can contact them.

bamborde_zaiku 6y ago

Our research team at Zaiku Capital wrote an article on Slack two weeks ago entitled 'Will Amazon Snatch Slack?`: https://zaikucapital.substack.com/p/will-amazon-snatch-slack https://zaikucapital.substack.com/p/will-amazon-snatch-slack Some arguments regarding Teams overlap with this article and so hopefully you enjoy reading! Ah, we compute the probability of Amazon snatching Slack at 47.6%, with a price tag in the range of $23Bn-$27Bn (stock + cash)! Cheers, Bambordé

throwbacktictac 6y ago

"And even when it comes to the cloud, the choice for startups is usually between AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft is out-of-sight and out-of-mind." I thought Azure was number two in the Cloud-as-a-service game.

ByteJockey 6y ago
It's possible that startups are not representative of the market as a whole. Intuitively this makes sense, I've seen an out-sized number (compared to their market-share) of enterprise products hosted on Azure. To the point where I'm usually surprised at how low their share is. I spend a lot of time working with large companies, so one way to square this would be large companies being more likely to use Azure than the average.

vmateixeira 6y ago

Not that Teams is better but I feel like Slack started to die the moment it removed IRC and XMPP support. That was their only clear advantage over the competition. The inability to turn off notifications shouldn't be a feature. People (at least me) want more work time, less noise. Voice/video chat is completely broken (at least for Linux). Having to very often "clear the cache and hard reload" on the "native" app, makes me feel I'm using a bloated browser tab. How, with all those quirks, do they want to compete with Teams - (from a well established company with such a big user base? (edit: clarification)

binarysneaker 6y ago

Hoping the Microsoft Teams devs are following these comments. I've been a long time Slack user in multiple large orgs, and I'm using Teams in my current role for the first time with multiple teams, total headcount around 100. Things that need love - 1. The UX. The navigation bar, tabs along the top of the chat window, separate chats and groups, ugh. In Slack, the navigation panel is tidy and chats and groups are in one consistent place, the chat header is minimal and functional. 2. Message formatting. Pasting code into a message doesn't automatically change the style to monospaced, and there's no syntax highlighting like in Slack. 3. Pasting a picture or attachment into the chat waits for another ENTER keypress before sending, presumably so that you can add some text alongside the picture. This seems counter intuitive, compared to the behaviour in messaging apps (whatsapp, fb, signal, etc). 4. Experience parity across all versions/platforms. It bugs me that Teams for Web is incapable of video and phone calls. But worse, the Linux version doesn't have feature parity with the Windows version. Useful tools such as remote control and video call background blurring don't exist. 5. More emojis! There are so many times when I've tried to use an emoji and it's just not there. Slack has this pretty well covered, as does every other messaging app out there. 6. @channel usage. If I type @channel, when the message is posted, it's converted to the channel name. So I type "Good morning @channel, just to let you know...", Teams will convert the message to "Good morning General, just to let you know..." - that makes no sense when you're reading it! Who's "General"!? 7. The General channel. WHY?! I can make it read only, I can't hide it, I can't rename it. UGH. 8. Sending a new message. I can type Ctrl+/chat name to start a new message, or click the icon (WHY is right aligned at the top of the navigation pane?). This should be as easy as Ctrl+K name messsage, like in Slack. 9. The linux version seems to run 2 threads, both using around 800mb of RAM. I wouldn't mind so much, but one of threads seems to be just for the system taskbar icon.

ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
I find the fact it waits for enter to be pressed before sending the photo very intuitive.
- screye 6y ago
  If anything I strongly prefer it

andersco 6y ago

Our organization was recently forced to switch from Slack to Teams. In Slack, there was a sense of spontaneity and fluidity to the experience, allowing for countless types of emojis and integration with services like giphy that made collaborating fun. With Teams, it’s all business. No more #random channel or water cooler chats. Not sure which of the tools actually is better but personally I really miss Slack :-/

brown9-2 6y ago
I’m confused by this, can’t you just create the #random channel you wish existed in Teams?

hacym 6y ago

I don't like Teams, but am forced to use it for work because they don't support Slack. They don't support it for a pretty practical reason: they've spent a lot of time vetting Microsoft's security, SLAs, etc. So have our customers. Slack is a new variable that introduces more work and cost. Leadership basically sees Teams as a version of Slack that is already integrated into Outlook and Office. Slack doesn't offer enough for them to switch to it. That would also require clearing it with all of our customers, too, for communicating about customer projects. Microsoft has something Slack doesn't have: a built-in customer base that is already fully committed to their products.

teej 6y ago
I see these as reasons why Teams doesn't have to compete on usability or features. Their customers literally can't use anything else.

aripickar 6y ago

I think that the biggest thing about slack is just how nice it is to use. I remember first trying it for groups in college, and it was a godsend compared to most messaging services.

SergeAx 6y ago

Slack is the worst piece of tech I forced to use in years. It is also an eye opener for wishful thinking myths like "better products will eventually win the customers". But it is still no wonder they lost to first competitor with similar feature set and slightly better user experience.

55555 6y ago

Does anyone know a Slack alternative that supports one-click voice and video messages? Slack has some clumsy integrations but nothing one-click. My team recently switched from Telegram (yes, seriously) to Slack and you'd be surprised but for small teams Telegram is great. Specifically, the fast easy video notes save management time and prevent confusion.

maguay 6y ago
Discord may be the closest, with its voice chat rooms. It's not designed for work chat per se, but can work ok as a Slack replacement.

lmeyerov 6y ago

Reasoning stopped short: - On the business social network side, I now get as many Teams invites as Slack invites. Teams won the bigger social moat. Hard for a #3 to enter, and sounds like Slack quietly lost #1. - On the tech community Slack side, Slack community features are hostile, so pushed to discord and friends. Slack is losing their base ('love'). Interesting times for one of the oldest internet technologies. Or.. were for a second there.

didip 6y ago

While we are talking about Slack, do people use MatterMost in their org? The idea of self hosting Slack is appealing to me. But I don't know how close it is to Slack.

jasonblais 6y ago
Hi didip, glad you asked! Mattermost is an open source Slack alternative - it's got the same core features, familiar user interface, Slack-compatible integrations (so you can migrate them easily if you choose to), and more. The added benefit with self hosting is privacy, customization - and basically full control of your data. If you're curious to know who uses Mattermost, you can check out https://mattermost.com/customers/ https://mattermost.com/customers/ for some examples.

indigodaddy 6y ago

How is security going to be handled with Shared Channels? Eg, there is a ton of private/proprietary information that may not want to be shared between companies/partners/vendors. Now I can just send a file through chat to a vendor (presumably, not sure what will be allowed and not be allowed) ? This makes me nervous. But I guess this could always be done via email between companies/vendors/partners, so the onus is still on the individual to be responsible and follow internal company policies in making the determination about what to share at the end of the day.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

Slack claims to be an open platform, yet their platform is closed, and they took away IRC features, one of the few things they could claim as being "open" about the platform. I'm not about to try using Teams, but I'm also not about to use Slack, and for mostly the same reasons. Closed source, centralized platform, and "you must use our frontend". Fuck that.