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I felt that Slacks innovation never went beyond stage 1-2. The app was thrusted onto stage by upending chat and the momentum was sustained against teams by its

• NickM 6y ago
  Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned I'm still mad about this. It was such a great piece of software, and then Slack bought it and literally killed it without offering anything to replace the lost functionality.
  • pmart123 6y ago
    Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack.
    • chimeracoder 6y ago
      > Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack. They claim they did, but Slack screensharing is nowhere near what Screenhero's was. A more Screenhero-like replacement is Tuple: https://tuple.app/ https://tuple.app/
      • llaolleh 6y ago
        I'm not really a fan of Tuple. It seems like a poor man's version of Screenhero.
        • Nuzzerino 6y ago
          Interesting, I found Tuple to have amazing quality and latency. Best I've seen with such a tool.
  • noneeeed 6y ago
    This is one of the small number of takeovers (along with Sparrow and Dark Sky) that actually make me angry, because they deprived everyone of something really great, for little apparent benefit. The fact that so many people use Slack, but then do all their voice, video and screensharing in Zoom or some other tool says a lot about Slack as a tool and company. My wife uses Teams for work. It's rubbish in many ways, but when she's using it they do everything in it. Somehow slack has failed at this despite having many of the same features built in.
    • ptrklly 6y ago
      What happened with Dark Sky? I have used it for years and it seems just as good as ever. And it’s one of the few iPhone apps I give full location information to so I like that it’s owned by Apple since they have that info anyway.
      • pcr0 6y ago
        The fact that they shut down the API and Android app.
        • ptrklly 6y ago
          Ah, of course.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • irrational 6y ago
      Why do you say Teams is rubbish? We used it for the better part of a year before moving to Slack (corporation wide mandate). So far my opinion of Slack is that it is rubbish. I never had any issues with Teams, but Slack has been a nightmare for me. I don’t get updates and notifications about channels I’m following like I should. It doesn’t work anywhere near as well on my phone as Teams did. I’m not a MS lover (I was a web developer during the first two browser wars and the standards war and still have bad feelings towards MS), but Teams seems to be really well put together. I’m interested to hear why you disagree.
  • nateabele 6y ago
    Then maybe knowing that Screenhero's founders went on to create Screen[0] will assuage some of the anger. Also, maybe it doesn't make it better, but it sounds like Slack didn't intend[1] to do this. [0] https://screen.so/ https://screen.so/ [1] https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-Work-57df16351a884bca8027f049698eb2ce https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-Work-57df16351a884bc...
    • CMCDragonkai 6y ago
      Can it record?
    • tyre 6y ago
      Tangential anecdote, the ScreenHero founders were in the same 4 unit apartment building as our first office at ZenPayroll/Gusto. They're amazing humans. We were all happy for them when they got acquired, and I'm glad that they get to do their thing now that the promise of Slack didn't work out.
• somehnguy 6y ago
  I completely agree. I've been using Slack for a couple years with a couple of niche groups. Besides the occasional small UI changes it has felt dead for a long time. I suppose to make it not feel like that I could get more involved with adding integrations & whatnot. But on the surface it just feels like a dead chat product without any major improvements in a very long time.
• mrkurt 6y ago
  I think they did innovate, just not in ways that we-who-post-on Hacker News benefit from. 1. Shared channels are amazing 2. The "Enterprise Grid" was the first viable enterprise chat product. Slack made chat ubiquitous at places like IBM. It's easy to blow off #2, but I think it's big. It was big enough to threaten MS Office.
  • realityking 6y ago
    I don’t have experience with Enterprise Grid but shared channels are absolutely amazing. We have shared channels with vendors, partners and customers and across all functions I haven’t heard a bad word about them (except that only IT can set them up but that might be a permission thing on our side)
    • lock-free 6y ago
      Shared channels are a godsend for startups trying to figure out their support story. Forums have been long known to suck, shared channels are much more responsive. There are obvious downsides but the benefits outweigh them. I really don't want to go back to forums and email for customers.
  • thrower123 6y ago
    Made chat ubiquitous at IBM? Maybe I'm a greybeard, but IBM made their own chat product that was ubique-itous* enough that Sametime became a verb there... * Ubique is the company Lotus bought before IBM bought Lotus, before IBM sold the scraps to HCL.
    • jasonjayr 6y ago
      Sametime seemed to have an AOLIM connection too; or was that imagined?
• an_opabinia 6y ago
  That's because the thing that killed Slack wasn't Microsoft - it wasn't a bunch of horseshit executives say just before their retirement into angel investing - but Discord.
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Interesting! Do you know of any workplaces using Discord?
  • lock-free 6y ago
    Discord isn't enterprise software and I feel really bad for anyone who wants to use it as such. Microsoft Teams is without a doubt the only thing threatening Slack, Discord is an entirely different beast.
    • whateveracct 6y ago
      Discord is why Slack doesn't have mass consumer appeal. They can't compete in that market.
      • halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
        They aren’t going after the same demo though. The market is big enough for both of them to exist. The path for Discord is a lot more hazy than Slack imo.
        • whateveracct 6y ago
          I think for Slack to be truly bigger than it got, it needed both demos. Being workplace only has a ceiling.
      • lock-free 6y ago
        Who wants mass consumer appeal? Consumers don't pay for things. Discord has like a $2billion valuation and no exit. Slack had a $24 billion IPO. Consumer software is not as valuable as enterprise.
• paxys 6y ago
  On the contrary, I'm happy that Slack chose to do one thing extremely well rather than stretch itself thin releasing half-baked an unnecessary products. There are plenty of good services for docs, storage, whiteboarding etc., and I don't need any of them shoved in my Slack client.
  • pas 6y ago
    But they are not doing it "extremely" well. It's shoddy, spotty, resource-hog. It's (is/was) innovative, but it's no longer an amazing added value over running your own (RocketChet) or picking a cheaper option.
  • antoniuschan99 6y ago
    I agree with you, maybe Salesforce will let it continue focusing on its niche. It’s working for Heroku.
• amw-zero 6y ago
  Why would a chat app do any things? Why does an application need to continuously grow to be useful?
  • antoniuschan99 6y ago
    Because it’s a public company now. Shareholders demand growth or they’ll just invest in other high growth companies. Bootstrapped products/companies like Campfire by 37Signals didn’t need to grow, but they also stopped innovating and the chat frature became just a feature inside basecamp. I think it’s really how companies are structured. The way Slack was positioned, it also had to grow or it will get taken over by a competitor like teams, or risk getting bought out which is what happened. Maybe the stakes are different when you’re #1 vs #10 in tech!
• llaolleh 6y ago
  I completely agree with you on this. Companies have to innovate or they die. To me Slack had plenty of chances to go beyond their initial product. Imagine if they incorporated Screen Hero into Slack and poured resources to reduce latency and better real time collaboration as if you were a feet away from your coworker. Would Microsoft be able to replicate all of that from scratch? You also have to consider that if you're a startup you can be a lot more agile because you deal with a lot less bullshit. Microsoft probably has tons of red tape and they are also spread thin. Their design space is also restricted in that they have to follow existing patterns. Slack should have been able to roam the earth however they wished. But they didn't. Slack had the lead and momentum but they blew it. I don't see Teams as necessarily a bad thing as the article implies. Every product we have is a derivative of something else. It fosters innovation.
• benhurmarcel 6y ago
  I find it funny that HN can criticize Slack for sticking to their main product without adding new collaboration features, while criticizing Dropbox for doing exactly the opposite.
  • foolmeonce 6y ago
    I'm not very familiar with Dropbox, but I would not be surprised if both were in fact wrong. In the closest strategy to what slack did, one would define a main product and then optimize away any prototype bloat. As far as I observed, Slack's clients stayed pretty awful and they were trying to do Dropbox's strategy without success.
• babesh 6y ago
  I think most of the value of Slack was cultural rather than technological. It was in getting people to discover/communicate via these abstractions of channels rather than point to point. This provides a lot of value in a company when you don’t know the specific person to talk to or want to talk to a group rather than one person. EDIT: It also allows bystanders to learn from or keep abreast of the conversation. However, this cultural practice can be easily transferred to another tool. As an external observer, Slack seemed to have various issues that prevented it from innovating further. One was lack of vision of how to innovate further. I think this often happens when someone stumbles onto an idea. They don’t have deep reasoning or conviction of where to go further. Another issue is that they seemed to have other cultural preoccupations for a time. Look at the cultural discussions brewing when their growth was exploding. They have since stepped back from that but I think it slowed them down. I don’t think these helped when you have a competitor that can integrate their entire suite of products into their chat system while effectively selling the chat for free. Slack didn’t even integrate as well or as quickly. Slack wasn’t innovating enough to not be overtaken.
  • tracer4201 6y ago
    >It was in getting people to discover/communicate via these abstractions of channels rather than point to point. Do you mean Slack is or was the first to get users to communicate over channels (vs point to point) in a business or enterprise setting? I’m honestly not sure about what innovation came out of Slack. I worked for a startup in the early 2000s, and we ran our own IRC channels. I’m only vaguely familiar with Slack, but what am I missing?
    • babesh 6y ago
      I have a limited perspective but my experience was in getting acquired by a larger company that used Slack. In the larger company, especially when you first join, you don’t know who to talk to to get information you need or to coordinate work. This was partly due to the by design self service/decentralized culture of the company. The use of channels was eminently useful then. You discover the general channel to use and then people that you didn’t previously know can help you. Also it doesn’t have to be a specific person helping you. Different people can help you at different times and with different questions. Likewise, you return the favor. Also, you can then snoop in on a channel to keep track of areas you are interested in. This was a way of extracting and sharing institutional knowledge. Lastly, you can create temporary channels for coordinating projects. Although channels existed before, this was the first setting that I found it used extensively and effectively in this way. Perhaps most importantly to getting the whole system to work, there were cultural expectations placed on groups responsible for particular channels of being timely and helpful in replies. Therefore you would get replies to questions in seconds or minutes. That was very useful in getting unblocked and unblocking others. You would almost never encounter the flame wars that you would see on Hacker News (well besides the social channels). The organizational environment and the culture of how to use channels is what I mean when I say the innovation was cultural. Divorce channels from the environment or culture and you will see very different outcomes.