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> But migrating everything is _so painful_ This is a key point is the popularity amongst VCs in investing in B2B SaaS. I take their (and your) word for it. But

> But migrating everything is _so painful_ This is a key point is the popularity amongst VCs in investing in B2B SaaS. I take their (and your) word for it. But honestly, I don't actually understand this. Why is migration so hard?

danpalmer 6y ago
Medium sized team on Slack. We'd need to move ~60 full time in-house employees, ~10 remote contractors who aren't on other comms channels, ~20 infrequent freelance contributors who may not check messages often, ~5 custom bots and apps, and ~15 3rd party integrations (of which some won't support any given choice of alternative). This is not to mention the fact that half our staff aren't hugely technical, so have actively _learnt_ how to use Slack and it's features around notification control (things that may come "naturally" to the tech-savvy crowd on HN), @-things, bots, etc, and they would need to re-learn a new tool that is going to work in a different way. This would be a substantial effort for us, and we're a small company. Are there ways to materially minimise this cost?
f0ff 6y ago
>Why is migration so hard? Why would anyone make it easy
- dijit 6y ago
  I think there should be a new computer science law (if this one doesn't exist already): Things that are easy to migrate from get replaced by things that are hard to migrate from, eventually. IRC is incredibly easy to migrate from.
  - ludjer 6y ago
    IRC is easy to migrate from since there is nothing to migrate other then chat history. IRC is also missing so many features that slack provides out the box. And a law like that would not work since you would need to write complicated transformation scripts to transform between services. Also not all services are a 1-1 mapping. I like IRC but it has its limitations. That is why slack succeeded where IRC did not.
    - tpxl 6y ago
      > And a law like that would not work The parent meant a law as in "a law of physics", not a piece of legislation.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    We can call it the "Law Of Lotus Notes". I'm not sure if it's hard to migrate from, I can only assume that it is impossible to migrate from.
dhagz 6y ago
Getting workflows re-established, any integrations you had developed or otherwise come to depend on may not work, you will probably lose history, etc. Plus, it will just take a long time to get everyone on board and using the replacement system. My department is slowly plodding towards using Teams over Slack, but there are enough hold-outs (my sub-department being one of them) that it still doesn't have wide-spread adoption.
Frost1x 6y ago
Training, integration with proprietary internal systems, sheer momentum in the employee base, justifying or even creating a metric to show cost savings of a migration effort, business processes that rely on a specific feature of existing infrastructure needing to be met, the uncertainty of new vs the certain and known instability of something you have.... If you had a small shop with a dozen tech-savvy people and Slack became a problem which was used exclusively for quick business chats, you could probably push a change to another chat platform the next day. You might struggle when you have thousands of employees, some that needed training to use Slack and still aren't that proficient.
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
It's not, honestly. I worked at a huge corp which employed many non-technical people and had global offices and all sorts of contractors / full-time employees at various levels. But they invested in organizational / business software early (think SAP-type stuff) and so at any moment every employee / hired hand is accounted for, has a number, has a position in the org chart, has access to a wiki-type platform where they can be trained and informed of any changes to the workplace software suite and guided through any migrations. I've seen the company migrate off Slack onto Microsoft Teams. I've seen the company migrate to MS Sharepoint from Box. I've seen them migrate everyone onto a platform called SuccessFactors (still don't really know what it does, it's for tracking your career progress I think). There's work involved. Someone has to write a guide to get users to sign up with the new service (even with SSO linked to your corporate account it's not easy for most non-technical people). In the case of Slack, any hooks or bots created for any teams need to be turned off and people need to be informed well in advance of the shift and multiple times. Optional in-person trainings need to be provided. Some employees may have issues with the change (a missing feature in the new software that they rely on) and they need a forum (or even just someone to contact) where they can lay out these issues and get them resolved. But that's not that bad honestly. If moving from a platform gives you serious gains in uptime, it's not that bad. I think Slack's downtime problems are not so bad that most people will move yet, but they may soon get there.
twh270 6y ago
Many reasons, almost none of them technical. Off the top of my head, a few: * Getting out of the Enterprise Contract, or waiting for the year to end. * Training people on new software. * Loss of productivity. (1) Learning a new UI, processes, workflows -- both individually and organizationally. A feature or concept in "Tool A" may exist in a completely different form in "Tool B". Or not exist, and then people need to adapt to and work around the missing feature. (2) Missing out on needed information due to the above. Ultimately, software exists to move and transform data, and when you change the software people have to adjust. Sometimes that doesn't go great. "Oh, I didn't realize I needed to check this checkbox". Another way to say this is "organizational inertia", which is a fancy term that means "it's hard for people to adjust to change". And you might think developers and other technical people would have an easier time of it. They (we) do, but not to the extent you may expect. I've been on the front lines of a handful of migrations that affected only the IT staff, and it was a long and arduous process each time.
- tpxl 6y ago
  > Loss of productivity. (1) Learning a new UI Man it bothers me so much when applications change their UIs on updates for no apparent reason other than "it looks better". IntelliJ changed the way build and debug buttons looked in some update and it took me days to get used to it and I could find them in a snap again. Slack did a couple of no-reason changes as well.
gen220 6y ago
There are plenty of UX reasons (learning new interfaces, etc). The burden here is generally distributed and diffuse. The really big one, for companies of a certain size / cash flow, is compliance. Companies spend a lot of time developing compliant work flows around a service like Slack. Migrating to another service requires rewriting the compliance narrative. The current compliance people might not have the confidence or willpower to do that effectively, and can raise legal objections to any such migration indefinitely.

danpalmer 6y ago

Medium sized team on Slack. We'd need to move ~60 full time in-house employees, ~10 remote contractors who aren't on other comms channels, ~20 infrequent freelance contributors who may not check messages often, ~5 custom bots and apps, and ~15 3rd party integrations (of which some won't support any given choice of alternative). This is not to mention the fact that half our staff aren't hugely technical, so have actively _learnt_ how to use Slack and it's features around notification control (things that may come "naturally" to the tech-savvy crowd on HN), @-things, bots, etc, and they would need to re-learn a new tool that is going to work in a different way. This would be a substantial effort for us, and we're a small company. Are there ways to materially minimise this cost?

f0ff 6y ago

>Why is migration so hard? Why would anyone make it easy

dijit 6y ago
I think there should be a new computer science law (if this one doesn't exist already): Things that are easy to migrate from get replaced by things that are hard to migrate from, eventually. IRC is incredibly easy to migrate from.
- ludjer 6y ago
  IRC is easy to migrate from since there is nothing to migrate other then chat history. IRC is also missing so many features that slack provides out the box. And a law like that would not work since you would need to write complicated transformation scripts to transform between services. Also not all services are a 1-1 mapping. I like IRC but it has its limitations. That is why slack succeeded where IRC did not.
  - tpxl 6y ago
    > And a law like that would not work The parent meant a law as in "a law of physics", not a piece of legislation.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  We can call it the "Law Of Lotus Notes". I'm not sure if it's hard to migrate from, I can only assume that it is impossible to migrate from.

dhagz 6y ago

Getting workflows re-established, any integrations you had developed or otherwise come to depend on may not work, you will probably lose history, etc. Plus, it will just take a long time to get everyone on board and using the replacement system. My department is slowly plodding towards using Teams over Slack, but there are enough hold-outs (my sub-department being one of them) that it still doesn't have wide-spread adoption.

Frost1x 6y ago

Training, integration with proprietary internal systems, sheer momentum in the employee base, justifying or even creating a metric to show cost savings of a migration effort, business processes that rely on a specific feature of existing infrastructure needing to be met, the uncertainty of new vs the certain and known instability of something you have.... If you had a small shop with a dozen tech-savvy people and Slack became a problem which was used exclusively for quick business chats, you could probably push a change to another chat platform the next day. You might struggle when you have thousands of employees, some that needed training to use Slack and still aren't that proficient.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago

It's not, honestly. I worked at a huge corp which employed many non-technical people and had global offices and all sorts of contractors / full-time employees at various levels. But they invested in organizational / business software early (think SAP-type stuff) and so at any moment every employee / hired hand is accounted for, has a number, has a position in the org chart, has access to a wiki-type platform where they can be trained and informed of any changes to the workplace software suite and guided through any migrations. I've seen the company migrate off Slack onto Microsoft Teams. I've seen the company migrate to MS Sharepoint from Box. I've seen them migrate everyone onto a platform called SuccessFactors (still don't really know what it does, it's for tracking your career progress I think). There's work involved. Someone has to write a guide to get users to sign up with the new service (even with SSO linked to your corporate account it's not easy for most non-technical people). In the case of Slack, any hooks or bots created for any teams need to be turned off and people need to be informed well in advance of the shift and multiple times. Optional in-person trainings need to be provided. Some employees may have issues with the change (a missing feature in the new software that they rely on) and they need a forum (or even just someone to contact) where they can lay out these issues and get them resolved. But that's not that bad honestly. If moving from a platform gives you serious gains in uptime, it's not that bad. I think Slack's downtime problems are not so bad that most people will move yet, but they may soon get there.

twh270 6y ago

Many reasons, almost none of them technical. Off the top of my head, a few: * Getting out of the Enterprise Contract, or waiting for the year to end. * Training people on new software. * Loss of productivity. (1) Learning a new UI, processes, workflows -- both individually and organizationally. A feature or concept in "Tool A" may exist in a completely different form in "Tool B". Or not exist, and then people need to adapt to and work around the missing feature. (2) Missing out on needed information due to the above. Ultimately, software exists to move and transform data, and when you change the software people have to adjust. Sometimes that doesn't go great. "Oh, I didn't realize I needed to check this checkbox". Another way to say this is "organizational inertia", which is a fancy term that means "it's hard for people to adjust to change". And you might think developers and other technical people would have an easier time of it. They (we) do, but not to the extent you may expect. I've been on the front lines of a handful of migrations that affected only the IT staff, and it was a long and arduous process each time.

tpxl 6y ago
> Loss of productivity. (1) Learning a new UI Man it bothers me so much when applications change their UIs on updates for no apparent reason other than "it looks better". IntelliJ changed the way build and debug buttons looked in some update and it took me days to get used to it and I could find them in a snap again. Slack did a couple of no-reason changes as well.

gen220 6y ago

There are plenty of UX reasons (learning new interfaces, etc). The burden here is generally distributed and diffuse. The really big one, for companies of a certain size / cash flow, is compliance. Companies spend a lot of time developing compliant work flows around a service like Slack. Migrating to another service requires rewriting the compliance narrative. The current compliance people might not have the confidence or willpower to do that effectively, and can raise legal objections to any such migration indefinitely.