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I think both Slack and Discord are good examples of products that entered already well established niches and still succeeded. Slack launched in August 2013 as

I think both Slack and Discord are good examples of products that entered already well established niches and still succeeded. Slack launched in August 2013 as a plain text chat service without voice and video calls. Skype and HipChat already existed for a decade before Slack entered the market. In just seven years Slack went from being an internal team chat app to making a $28 billion exit.

echelon 5y ago
A key difference is that Slack was worried it couldn't complete with Microsoft's entire business suite. They had big ambitions but ultimately had to exit. A smarter play might have been to buy similar office services years ago and create a package of their own. Discord is relatively safe from this and can continue to grow atop its gamer user base.
1123581321 5y ago
Indeed. The week Slack became available, I was asking around for recommendations for a service that was “HipChat but nicer to use” and got a lot of scoffing in reply. Eventually someone linked Slack and said it looked dumb but maybe I could try it and see if it was different enough. Of course it was exactly what I wanted and got the right bunch of people talking to each other at work. I’m pretty sure every one of those scoffers had multiple Slack accounts within a couple years. :)
kwanbix 5y ago
I have been using chat systems since ICQ. I really don't get the hype on Slack and Discord. Discord in particular is so crowded, and I like tight interfaces, that is overwhelming. Maybe it is the servers that I have, but I am sure that the app allows that, like at the time MySPace allowed crazy profiles.
- josephd79 5y ago
  too bad Discord doesn't allow 3rd party chat applications. Something like irssi for Discord would be awesome.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
    - d3nj4l 5y ago
      They exist, but they’re technically ToS violations, and mentioning that you use one in large public servers is taboo. Doesn’t stop people from using them, as discord has been lenient so far, but you’ll have only yourself to blame if discord does ban you.
notjustanymike 5y ago
Atlassian feels like a Xerox or Kodak of the modern age. A lot of their products were for a while the only option, and never bothered to evolve. Now we've got competitive options through Slack instead of Hipchat, Asana instead of Jira, and Notion instead of Confluence. Heck even Trello became competitive enough for Atlassian to acquire them.
- pineconewarrior 5y ago
  Atlassian really needs to get it together. At my agency we're moving away from BitBucket because it has degraded so much over the past year. I was fine with the lack of features, but they've been actively making the product worse.
  - ep103 5y ago
    When they bought the company that now makes what they sell as Bitbucket On Premises, they should have literally thrown away their cloud offering, and just offered that... in the cloud. This years long process of badly re-implementing bitbucket on prem into the cloud, feature by feature, while the rest of the world evolves passed what they bought years ago is absurd.
    - bberenberg 5y ago
      Stash (now called BitBucket Server) was built in house, it wasn't acquired. As far as I know, the BB Cloud and BB Server teams didn't have aligned roadmaps. Source: I was an employee there when this was being built.
- crawsome 5y ago
  You can’t even CC someone ex a vendor) in a Jira ticket without them having to make themselves an account. Atlassian and all Jira products are ugly, and have more menus and settings scattered around than microsoft.
- polote 5y ago
  > Notion instead of Confluence Google luck replacing Confluence with Notion if you are a company of more than 100 employees
asddubs 5y ago
It helps that microsoft completely ruined skype and turned it into an unreliable piece of shit
- MR4D 5y ago
  I hope that case study is taught in business schools. That Microsoft did such a bad job is stunning to me. And Teams is darn near unusable due to interface weirdness, but Windows 11 integration gives me hope that this problem can be fixed.
  - OedipusRex 5y ago
    Teams is the worst UI I’ve ever used in an application.
    - kleiba 5y ago
      Seconded, yet my university chose it as the collaboration app for all employees.
      - briffle 5y ago
        For the same reason as most others: "its included for free in our existing subscription. Is your other tool free?"
        kleiba 5y ago
        Aren't there tons of free or even open-source tools?
        skeeter2020 5y ago
        Teams is not free, it's a free addition to the subscriptions that almost every IT department buys already. So you can think of it as a subsidized moat, or a loss-leader for new clients. Any competitor needs to figure out how to cover the not insignificant costs of running this service, plus to give them their due, Microsoft support is better than almost everyone else in the enterprise setting.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I was on a team that was on HipChat that switched over to Slack shortly after it came out. One simple reason: reliability. At that time HipChat had frequent outages. It's certainly all over HN when Slack goes down but I think that's partly because it actually is down quite rarely, and because of this reliability people have built more and more mission critical integrations into Slack, like ChatOps.
shoto_io 5y ago
Great insights. Any hypothesis on why they could pull this off? Better sales? Better product? Both?
odiroot 5y ago
HipChat had probably the best native desktop chat client for Linux. I really miss it.

echelon 5y ago

A key difference is that Slack was worried it couldn't complete with Microsoft's entire business suite. They had big ambitions but ultimately had to exit. A smarter play might have been to buy similar office services years ago and create a package of their own. Discord is relatively safe from this and can continue to grow atop its gamer user base.

1123581321 5y ago

Indeed. The week Slack became available, I was asking around for recommendations for a service that was “HipChat but nicer to use” and got a lot of scoffing in reply. Eventually someone linked Slack and said it looked dumb but maybe I could try it and see if it was different enough. Of course it was exactly what I wanted and got the right bunch of people talking to each other at work. I’m pretty sure every one of those scoffers had multiple Slack accounts within a couple years. :)

kwanbix 5y ago

I have been using chat systems since ICQ. I really don't get the hype on Slack and Discord. Discord in particular is so crowded, and I like tight interfaces, that is overwhelming. Maybe it is the servers that I have, but I am sure that the app allows that, like at the time MySPace allowed crazy profiles.

josephd79 5y ago
too bad Discord doesn't allow 3rd party chat applications. Something like irssi for Discord would be awesome.
- dannyw 5y ago
  https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    They exist, but they’re technically ToS violations, and mentioning that you use one in large public servers is taboo. Doesn’t stop people from using them, as discord has been lenient so far, but you’ll have only yourself to blame if discord does ban you.

notjustanymike 5y ago

Atlassian feels like a Xerox or Kodak of the modern age. A lot of their products were for a while the only option, and never bothered to evolve. Now we've got competitive options through Slack instead of Hipchat, Asana instead of Jira, and Notion instead of Confluence. Heck even Trello became competitive enough for Atlassian to acquire them.

pineconewarrior 5y ago
Atlassian really needs to get it together. At my agency we're moving away from BitBucket because it has degraded so much over the past year. I was fine with the lack of features, but they've been actively making the product worse.
- ep103 5y ago
  When they bought the company that now makes what they sell as Bitbucket On Premises, they should have literally thrown away their cloud offering, and just offered that... in the cloud. This years long process of badly re-implementing bitbucket on prem into the cloud, feature by feature, while the rest of the world evolves passed what they bought years ago is absurd.
  - bberenberg 5y ago
    Stash (now called BitBucket Server) was built in house, it wasn't acquired. As far as I know, the BB Cloud and BB Server teams didn't have aligned roadmaps. Source: I was an employee there when this was being built.
crawsome 5y ago
You can’t even CC someone ex a vendor) in a Jira ticket without them having to make themselves an account. Atlassian and all Jira products are ugly, and have more menus and settings scattered around than microsoft.
polote 5y ago
> Notion instead of Confluence Google luck replacing Confluence with Notion if you are a company of more than 100 employees

asddubs 5y ago

It helps that microsoft completely ruined skype and turned it into an unreliable piece of shit

MR4D 5y ago
I hope that case study is taught in business schools. That Microsoft did such a bad job is stunning to me. And Teams is darn near unusable due to interface weirdness, but Windows 11 integration gives me hope that this problem can be fixed.
- OedipusRex 5y ago
  Teams is the worst UI I’ve ever used in an application.
  - kleiba 5y ago
    Seconded, yet my university chose it as the collaboration app for all employees.
    - briffle 5y ago
      For the same reason as most others: "its included for free in our existing subscription. Is your other tool free?"
      - kleiba 5y ago
        Aren't there tons of free or even open-source tools?
        skeeter2020 5y ago
        Teams is not free, it's a free addition to the subscriptions that almost every IT department buys already. So you can think of it as a subsidized moat, or a loss-leader for new clients. Any competitor needs to figure out how to cover the not insignificant costs of running this service, plus to give them their due, Microsoft support is better than almost everyone else in the enterprise setting.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

I was on a team that was on HipChat that switched over to Slack shortly after it came out. One simple reason: reliability. At that time HipChat had frequent outages. It's certainly all over HN when Slack goes down but I think that's partly because it actually is down quite rarely, and because of this reliability people have built more and more mission critical integrations into Slack, like ChatOps.

shoto_io 5y ago

Great insights. Any hypothesis on why they could pull this off? Better sales? Better product? Both?

odiroot 5y ago

HipChat had probably the best native desktop chat client for Linux. I really miss it.