9 ms·

OpenAI should build Slack

252 points by swyx 8mo ago

dbbk 8mo ago
[flagged]
henning 8mo ago
They'll just do what Anthropic does: let it Ralph Wiggum a pile of broken shit, and then say "wewwwww, doing pwogwamming is vewwy hawd, UwU >_<" when it won't build and fails at basic use cases that would be easy to test automatically
neom 8mo ago
They almost have, you could wrangle group projects + group chats together pretty easily and you'd be close-ish. The claude cowork experience backed by google drive with the openai group projects and group chat would, imo, be a really awesome way to work!
pwarner 8mo ago
> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success. Not sure if the author has used Teams. But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.
- spprashant 8mo ago
  Its a solid success if you squint just at the adoption numbers they achieved by cross selling it.
- Muromec 8mo ago
  I use teams at work and it's okay. Not the best, not the worst, but okay piece of software. At least I have both the calendar and the videocall things in one app and see when the call starts, so I don't accidentally ADHD myself into missing it.
  - simfree 8mo ago
    Exactly, no on is truly overjoyed with Teams. As shovelware goes it is passable, but that is a low bar
  - viraptor 8mo ago
    Anything that accepts webhook integrations will be able to do this. I've got the Google calendar and meeting notifications on Slack, but it would be trivial to replicate with any two systems that have APIs available.
    - PretzelPirate 8mo ago
      My company would never let me expose my calendar data to Slack. That's why they like M365, all the integration is there with less risk of oversharing data.
      - viraptor 8mo ago
        It would be less of an issue if they hosted it themselves.
- MattGaiser 8mo ago
  Yeah, I would be curious if there is anyone out there paying for Teams. Teams wins as Teams is free with your other Office stuff.
- tootie 8mo ago
  I guess I'm in the minority but I haven't noticed a significant variance in quality and features on any chat app I've used in the past 20 years. It seems like a thoroughly solved problem. Slack's "killer feature" was that they really streamlined onboarding which is feels neat the first time you do it. Otherwise, chat is chat. The biggest obstacle has always been getting everyone you need to talk to to agree on which platform to use.
- simfree 8mo ago
  Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often. Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability. The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...
  - icameron 8mo ago
    My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions
    - viraptor 8mo ago
      > That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.
      - anthonypasq96 8mo ago
        yeah, thats why people just use Teams
    - stonogo 8mo ago
      It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).
- MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
  What issues do you have with teams? It works well and there’s nothing I can think of that I want in it. It’s just a video and chat app.
  - 4nonverbal-alit 8mo ago
    Let me clear my cache after logging in twice to get the OOM fixed so I can finally login to show you what’s wrong with it over a teams call and hope it doesn’t logout and reload randomly during the call.
  - udfalkso 8mo ago
    Teams suffers from one giant problem. There is a totally odd, but understandable from tech debt perspective, segregation between “chats” and “teams” which makes it practically impossible to find everything. It’s a fatal flaw. Slack is beautifully simple and effective in comparison. Also, the reminder feature on slack is extremely useful to me personally and I miss it dearly in teams.
    - snowfield 8mo ago
      Yes, in a world of dynamic virtual teams and cross cooperation across teams. «Teams» is an ancient construct
  - vladvasiliu 8mo ago
    It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom. On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function. For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics. It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway. All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
- cj 8mo ago
  > I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.
  - figmert 8mo ago
    And it's worse than Teams
    - 2muchcoffeeman 8mo ago
      It’s fine if you want a barebones chat.
      - mvanbaak 8mo ago
        so is IRC
        olyjohn 8mo ago
        God please let me switch my company to an internal IRC server...
    - cj 8mo ago
      I used it for about a year with a small team. It worked well for what it does, but the functionality is definitely stripped down and barebones compared to Slack. I don't remember any performance or reliability issues.
    - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
      In no way is Gchat worse than teams. It's basic, but the basic functionality works... which is a lot more than you can say for teams.
    - ngrilly 8mo ago
      Hard disagree. We use both in my company. Google Chat is definitely better than Teams for actual collaboration: it's easier to track unread messages in "Home" (it's the "inbox"), and channels (called "spaces") are much better designed (they are conceptually closer to Slack's channels). Also, it's not crashing all the time. What's missing: the message editor doesn't support nested bulleted lists, we can't archive a space/channel.
- darth_avocado 8mo ago
  We are being forced to dump slack for Teams. The only people who like Teams is Sales and Marketing for some reason. Not a single engineer likes this, and it will break every engineering convenience that exists on Slack.
  - awesome_dude 8mo ago
    As an ENG - I REALLY dislike teams - but I also dislike Slack Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(
    - BoredPositron 8mo ago
      I hate unified inboxes with a burning passion.
      - awesome_dude 8mo ago
        Ha ha ha, it's agreed then - NOBODY TALKS TO ENG
      - rpdillon 8mo ago
        Yeah, I mean the first thing we all do when we get one giant unified inbox is write a bunch of rules to break it back out to a set of folders so that we can triage it appropriately. Slack channels just do this from the get go.
- e12e 8mo ago
  Google gave us Wave - surely that's enough? /s
  - outofpaper 8mo ago
    Lol it aas an admirable attempt at something new. I loved the interesting blend of messaging and document creation. It the code still lives on as an archived open project btw. https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave
- steeleduncan 8mo ago
  Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
  - glerk 8mo ago
    Discord is a solid product. They just need to launch a simple business-friendly alternative UI without the teenager gamer aesthetics. I’m surprised they never tried going after the enterprise market.
    - roncesvalles 8mo ago
      Enterprise doesn't buy chat/meeting products without PSTN interop (dial-in dial-out to traditional phone line). Discord would probably need to double their dev team to add PSTN. Building something like Slack or Teams to the level that a F500 company would make it their primary videoconferencing solution is a multi-thousand-employee project. It's not a little skunkworks project for 15-20 people in some corner of the office. That's why TFA is hilariously flawed. When Altman says "tell us what we should build, we'll probably build it!", he's talking about driveways and backyard pools, not the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like asking mall Santa for a summer home in the Hamptons.
      - redserk 8mo ago
        There’s a size of enterprise where you can get away without PSTN integration but do need an answer for SSO and account provisioning/deprovisioning.
      - glerk 8mo ago
        > multi-thousand-employee project I know absolutely nothing about PSTN interop and I'm sure it's very complex to implement. However, at the end of the day, this is just software we're talking about right? Software is cheap and easy to produce these days and I doubt you need thousands of people to implement something that syncs your meeting's audio stream to a phone line especially given that it's a problem that has been solved before.
- dgxyz 8mo ago
  Sod it all. Just give me a decent email client again. Business instant messaging is electric shoulder tapping and that makes me want to punch people. I literally feel Slack drains me every day.
- miki123211 8mo ago
  Teams is definitely a solid success. It is by no means a good app. Those two things aren't the same. Slack started with an aggressive "bottom up" approach, they made something actually good and got to worrying about the sales part later. You don't need sales as much when companies come to you, begging you for an actual contract that fulfills their enterprise requirements, knowing that rooting you out is almost impossible. Teams went the other way, in typical Microsoft style. Microsoft sells it bundled with all the other Microsoft things it sells. Most companies want a Microsoft contract anyway, and have an established sales relationship with MS, so adopting Teams is a lot less compliance, integration and procurement work than adopting anything else. You don't need good UI if your sales strategy isn't predicated on users choosing you for UI. And then there's Discord, which really isn't a bad work comms app if you're small enough not to need the compliance stuff. It gives you almost everything the big apps do for free, including unlimited calls, an advanced RBAC system, as many channels / messages as you want, a decent bot API (including media streaming), good notification management, multi-server / cross-organization support etc. They're actively disinterested in selling to businesses (which is what makes them so good, the features they paywall are the features needed by gamers, not serious professionals), but that also means you'll need to eventually migrate off of it when compliance requirements set in.
  - lovich 8mo ago
    I thought Slack started as a failed game and they only pivoted when their in game chat proved popular. They still have game assets around like their 404 page iirc.
    - mjcl 8mo ago
      Not quite, they built Slack as an internal communication tool while building the game Glitch (RIP) and after the game failed they decided to productize Slack.
  - moribunda 8mo ago
    Slack was a sluggish version of IRC... And somehow the world bought it.
deleted 8mo ago
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CuriouslyC 8mo ago
There are already a ton of slack alternatives. Slack connect is the main thing that is blocking a lot of people from moving off slack, otherwise chat is a commodity.
- Ancalagon 8mo ago
  Agreed. Every productivity software and their mother has chat.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- gempir 8mo ago
  I have used Slack Connect once in my 8 years of using slack. I agree it can be a moat, but that's not the case for everyone. Slack doesn't have one "main thing" it's doing perfect. They have just all around great product, with some weaknesses here and there. - Solid mobile app - very good API with good SDKs - easy to build very rich slack bots, with good building blocks - Good notification management - Workflows for non technical people that make automation easy - Good level of customization - Good enough performance - Video/Audio calls are good enough So when a company is questioning what tool to use Slack is an easy go-to. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" type of tool. Can you live without it? yeah. But do you really wanna focus on what chat platform your company should be using or just focus on your product?
spprashant 8mo ago
My personal experience with using Slack as just a in-company chat app has been fine. I enjoy using Slack more than Teams or Discord. All their integrations kinda suck though, and its not uncommon for integrations to randomly break with no discernible changes elsewhere.
- giancarlostoro 8mo ago
  We used to have a local devs slack and any time someone came up with a random slash command one guy would add a new php script to power that command. I assume a lot of it is just an abandoned API that nobody cares about anymore because Microsoft forced Teams into Office so it took over corporate America in waves. I cant remember the last place I worked at that didnt just use Teams.
  - rafark 8mo ago
    Speaking of php slack was built with php until they followed Facebook with Hack (which is essentially a modern flavor of php)
- Hamuko 8mo ago
  I hate how Slack has no syntax highlighting for code blocks. Even Discord has it.
  - dr_kiszonka 8mo ago
    On the desktop, you can share snippets, but this is not inline.
- FranklinJabar 8mo ago
  > I enjoy using Slack more than Teams or Discord. Surely we can raise the bar for team chat out of hell....
alienbaby 8mo ago
Is it me or does the article mix characters with different fonts weights through the text?
- swyx 8mo ago
  just you. i use default substack font with some bolding
FergusArgyll 8mo ago
OT latent space podcast is great, most recently interview with jeff dean. Worth a listen
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- swyx 8mo ago
  thank you for listening!! team works hard on it. Jeff was an absolute bucket list GOAT to have on the show and to launch the pod with the new Deep Think is just icing on the cake. Every 3-4 months people remember that Google (and Jeff) has low key been accumulating basically every advantage under the sun that all the other AI majors are struggling to pull together themselves.... and then constrained by bigcorp politics. it seems like they are figuring things out though.
CrzyLngPwd 8mo ago
I use Slack every day, and I love it. Integrations are simple and reliable, giving us useful information about critical things. Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.
- amelius 8mo ago
  Electron?
- ltbarcly3 8mo ago
  But it's so unreasonably slow. It lacks basic features like syntax highlighting on ``` blocks. It's basically become a super expensive and painful to use while Discord continues to be a joy. And the 'start a thread' nazis are just too much to bear. Prediction: they will add subthreads within 3 years.
  - viraptor 8mo ago
    > And the 'start a thread' nazis Social issues can't be solved by technical means. Just slightly incentivised in some direction (like discord's "this is the third reply, would you like a thread instead?") But for the resource usage, ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ already proved you can have a capable client which is super light and fast if you care. This was made by a single person and in many ways is better than the official client.
  - dpkirchner 8mo ago
    Prediction 2: companies will hire full-time Slack Cops whose whole job is shaming coworkers and talking about threads (the #1 Slack anti-feature). Well, this was my prediction pre-easy-to-use LLMs, anyway.
  - kcrwfrd_ 8mo ago
    I really wish they would add the ability to reply or thread, like Discord does. Along with syntax highlighting.
  - wiseowise 8mo ago
    Use threads, bozo, stop polluting feeds.
orthodonticjake 8mo ago
Slack's software quality has been in absolute freefall over the past couple of months.
orthodonticjake 8mo ago
Does anyone use Mattermost? I remember thinking it wasn't too bad, and I guess it's open source.
- neom 8mo ago
  I mentioned them last week and per the comments I got, not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901946
  - viraptor 8mo ago
    There's the mostlymatter fork which restores the proper oss behaviour https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
psanford 8mo ago
> Developers routinely complain about Slack’s API costs and permissions What? What API costs is the op talking about?
- snowfield 8mo ago
  Developers will always hate to ask the system owner for changes to permissions don’t think you can just fix that. If the company has enough grc red tape, integrating with slack can become almost impossible I can imagine
  - psanford 8mo ago
    The API is free. The statement in the article is not about corporate friction
amelius 8mo ago
Why not ask for a federated slack?
- igravious 8mo ago
  for the same reason why not a federated <insert-the-tool-you-would-love-to-see-federated-here>
  - amelius 8mo ago
    and, why is that?
    - viraptor 8mo ago
      It works in communities, not corporations. Every federation seems to die when enough millions are connected to it. Facebook used xmpp for chat. Google chat could federate too. Apple promised iMessage and then hid behind a silly excuse. It's extremely against company interests to federate.
      - amelius 8mo ago
        I mean, it's not a hard requirement that you ask a company to build it.
    - moomoo11 8mo ago
      ever realized that its only incompetent people who could never build a product (what problem are you solving?) who ask for silly things like this? it doesn't work irl, and if you don't understand that then keep asking this question in 10 years, or even 100 years.
      - haute_cuisine 8mo ago
        email works, not everything has to be run by corporate greed
mcintyre1994 8mo ago
We use Slack at work, and everyone we work with uses Slack, and we all work together with Slack Connect. I suspect if we moved to a competitor that’s pretty much the main impact we’d see, and it wouldn’t be good unless everyone else work with moved too. I think that network effect is probably the only meaningful differentiation in that space.
- mbreese 8mo ago
  You could also look at it as: in order for a Slack competitor to compete with Slack's network effects, the new program will need to offer an easy way to extend chat workspaces with external collaborators. It's not impossible, but it does make Slack's moat explicitly clear.
  - haute_cuisine 8mo ago
    The problem here is that companies artificially limit integrations, so it's impossible to exchange messages between different providers like how email works.
    - SoftTalker 8mo ago
      We really need some legal requirements similar to "right to repair" for machinery. We need "right to integrate" for software. I don't know how you'd pull it off, or how much support for integrations would be "enough" but it would allow competitors to cross these network effect lock-in moats that large players are able to build.
    - mbreese 8mo ago
      I’ve always thought that the proper competitor to Slack/Twitter/etc… was a protocol not another service. Protocols enable competition, services just shift the market to another service.
deleted 8mo ago
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rbbydotdev 8mo ago
Funny, didn’t even mention using the massive amount of compute available to them to build it! A prompt ran through a Wiggum loop over the course of a week/month and viola
timfsu 8mo ago
I for one would love this - if it’s done well - except that it would presumably be locked in to OpenAI agents
daxfohl 8mo ago
I'd rather it build docs. Or at least have a feature in chatgpt that lets you highlight something and start a comment thread, rather than a multi-page essay response as a continuation of the chat itself.
hokkos 8mo ago
If AI is soo productive why do they even sell it and don't hoard it for themselves to build a competing offer to everything ?
- solumunus 8mo ago
  No one is claiming that level of productivity.
  - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
    Oh yes they are. People are claiming 100x improvements, which is completely insane. But they do claim it.
    - solumunus 8mo ago
      OK sure, there are always lunatics on the fringe, but OP is casting that argument out as if they’re attacking a mainstream opinion.
dabinat 8mo ago
What evidence is there that OpenAI will be more benevolent than Salesforce? Perhaps we shouldn’t give large corporations more opportunities for data mining.
gradus_ad 8mo ago
> OpenAI spends time and money building a slack competitor, because they've apparently run out of good ideas > Slack uses AI to improve the existing product > Slack is still marginally better, so businesses continue paying for it > OpenAI now on the hook for maintaining one of many cheap slack clones > Investors are left scratching their heads... Late stage bubble behavior
fassssst 8mo ago
I hate Slack. Total information overload. I’d prefer a tool that encourages people to think more before hitting send.
- SonorousGarden 8mo ago
  Funnily enough, from Slack's own testing they could make it that tool tomorrow by changing the input box from a single line to a multi-line input. A la the Hacker News input box we are all typing into right now. You got me thinking about whether a pre-send message that could theoretically appear: "Given the channel that you are currently in, this might not be an appropriate message. Would you like to reword it, have AI reword it, or send it anyways?" This presumably would feel absolutely terrible to use, but it might be a way to nudge towards community consensus for how certain spaces would work.
riazrizvi 8mo ago
One of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. A company with the premier LLM, asking companies to outsource the platform running all internal communications. What does OP think we are all doing here in business? This is the Ycombinator community edition of Rodney King's famous "Why can't we all just get along".
- bee_rider 8mo ago
  Seems like a fantastic idea of OpenAI other than, like, why would anybody else go along with it? It would be like giving all our emails to an ad company or something.
  - FactolSarin 8mo ago
    I see what you did there
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
altcunn 8mo ago
[dead]
bionhoward 8mo ago
signal should just add better API / bot stuff and then we could all use that. there's no way OpenAI would be trustworthy for this; slack certainly isn't
- blackqueeriroh 8mo ago
  The Signal protocol can’t support large groups of people.
philipwhiuk 8mo ago
Wait the two problems are apparently the price, and the reliability? And you're asking a company famously burning money building a tool that is used for vibe-coding (aka unreliable software development) to build a replacement? Idk man.
codingdave 8mo ago
> Slack has been on a slow rachet up in prices and has struggled to introduce compelling new AI features I can think of a few reasons that Slack could be improved upon. But a lack of AI features is not on that list. Slack is effective for async communication between humans. We don't need AI features to accomplish that, and most AI would just be annoying slop. If you are using Slack for something else, maybe AI features would help those other uses, but you also might be stretching the cases for which Slack is a good thing.
evbogue 8mo ago
I'd like to speculate, with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw, that perhaps IRC could be the future of AI-enabled chat rooms?
- wiseowise 8mo ago
  > with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw Clown emoji.
  - evbogue 8mo ago
    So you disagree?
    - wiseowise 8mo ago
      Agree with what? It doesn’t exist outside of twitter schizos minds.
cmullaparthi 8mo ago
FWIW, we've been working on building a chat application. Still very much in beta stage, but trying to build something useful. https://joinbackchannel.chat https://joinbackchannel.chat
- haute_cuisine 8mo ago
  Is landing page generated by AI?
simianwords 8mo ago
I can't read the article, but I feel people are missing the point here. Slack is a really really good product because it is simple enough and works nice - performant, has just enough features but not too many and the UX/UI is good. Its not a power tool but it gets the job done without getting in the way. You would know what I mean if you have used teams/ google chat etc. Sure you can criticise slack for being a bit slow, not having nested threads. For context: slack is the main app I use at work and spend a * lot * of time there. But OpenAI _can_ beat Slack at these things if they have the technical acumen. But real differentiator comes in having an all in one platform that can help you run workflows. Recall that ChatGPT UI is fundamentally a chat box. If ChatGPT can integrate common workflows like - send an email to a colleague for something - schedule a meeting at a certain time - deploy to production - approve leaves - create quick code changes with natural language like "change threshold to 50 in my repo" - integration with observability and alerting Then you don't have to leave this tool at all. There's a lot of potential here. I frequently want to just tag GPT when using slack. Like "hey take this jira task and create a quick pull request" and it will link the pull request in the thread. Or when my colleague asks me for a meeting, I can tag GPT with something like "hey schedule a meeting later in the day when we both have time".
jedberg 8mo ago
I'm more interested in the fact that disclaimer at the top makes me think the entire article is written by AI as a summary of a bunch of reddit posts and tweets and discord topics? Is that what the top says?
- erlicai 8mo ago
  Most of the article was written by AI I guess, but I think there's some human editing to it and the OP is the editor
  - swyx 8mo ago
    author here, entire editorial is entirely human written
    - jedberg 8mo ago
      Then what did the (now removed) disclaimer refer to?
mrcwinn 8mo ago
Oh yes please let us hand over all of our real time communications to Sam Altman’s company. I’m as excited about that as I am to use their browser.
peterlk 8mo ago
Shameless plug. We’re working on something like this. thismachine.ai. It’s still early, but interested to get feedback. The slack/chat part is still behind a feature flag. Let me know if you want to use it
keithwhor 8mo ago
A friend and I are working on something like this. It’s more Slack-adjacent; the problem we’re tackling is, “what does a future where agents seamlessly integrate with day to day communication look like?” We’re a little more focused on the developer platform. We’re embarrassingly early and haven’t “launched” yet but I guess there’s some value in sharing with an audience who might be interested! We call it “Superuser” [0], the social hub for agent tools. There’s more of a focus on the developer platform, but warning: major WIP! We are shipping huge changes and our docs are out of date... [0] https://superuser.app https://superuser.app
sharts 8mo ago
Bring back IRC
- Gormo 8mo ago
  Bringing it back would require it to have first gone away.
catchmeifyoucan 8mo ago
I think a slack clone with better message search, a company knowledgebase, and a personal “auto-responder” could be a winner
czhu12 8mo ago
Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use google chat everyday, so its not just a "UI looks ugly thing". Literally nothing you think should work works. Ex: inviting outside collaborators to a shared channel, converting a private DM group into a channel, having public channels for community & private channels for internal work. Goes on and on.
- uptownfunk 8mo ago
  Totally it is the biggest missing piece of their ecosystem and would complete their offering so nicely. Get a pm and 3 engineers and vibe it out
  - overfeed 8mo ago
    > Get a pm and 3 engineers and vibe it out Google has been stuck in exactly this loop for over a decade without going all-in on a single application. They seem to launch a new chat app every couple of years with not quite as many features as the prior chat application, and slowly add features until it's time for it to be replaced by newer one still.
    - surajrmal 8mo ago
      The current chat app is decidedly the victor. It's been around since 2021 and there is no sign of a replacement. Google messages remains separate for person chat, but arguably texting and work chats occupy different spaces, just as Whatsapp and Slack do. Folks joke about chat features also making their way into YouTube and Google Photos, but the fact they are not forcing you into the other chat ecosystems is something a lot of users strongly prefer. The 2010s was definitely an awkward period for Google but arguably that was just watching them fumble through social via Google+ and everything else was a reaction to that. 2020s has been a lot more focused with strategy actually focusing on existing products instead of spinning up new ones (outside of AI)
YarickR2 8mo ago
Orthogonal: OpenAI should build decent mobile and desktop Jabber/XMPP clients.
yellow_lead 8mo ago
There's already Zulip, Mattermost, and many others. Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO. A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.
- molsongolden 8mo ago
  Zulip is awesome \m/
  - killerstorm 8mo ago
    We've been using Zulip for ~5 years, I won't describe it as awesome. E.g. it takes a minute to open a chat on mobile, but only few seconds on the web. No idea how it's possible if they use same underlying DB. In fact a full text search over years worth of communication is faster than loading latest DM from a specific person in a mobile app! And not much improvement over years: few things became nicer. But mobile app was always dogshit.
    - Davidzheng 8mo ago
      Yes! I also don't know why losing zulip is so insanely slow!
  - IgorPartola 8mo ago
    I recently started looking into Zulip and while I can see that it is a complete product its mobile UI is so cluttered and funky I don’t understand how anyone could use it. The desktop web UI seems OK but try this on your phone: https://zulip.com/new/demo/ https://zulip.com/new/demo/ They have the iOS Safari problem with the keyboard and body scroll, tiny icons, super busy UI. I was hoping to help some folks move off Discord to something else and Zulip is not what I would volunteer to do support for when the users are not techies. Heck, as a techie my eyes glaze over looking at it. I really wish it was slicker and more usable but it simply isn’t.
gaigalas 8mo ago
> Everything could be better That is a fascinating observation. We supposedly just unlocked the prometean fire, why aren't everyday things everyone uses getting better?
cipehr 8mo ago
If you haven't tried the new slackbot you should... I've been using it at work and I'm blown away at what it can do with the context it has on you and your teams from slack. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/01/13/slackbot-announcement/ https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/01/13/sl...
villgax 8mo ago
Should fix being unable to scale mailing lists in microsoft outlook first LOL
kittbuilds 8mo ago
[dead]
otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
Sounds like something they should vibecode over a weekend, amirite.
block_dagger 8mo ago
In my experience building a couple ChatGPT apps and, through colleagues, working with OpenAI folks, I'm not sure they should be building anything in their current state. Seems quite disorganized over there.
- hgo 8mo ago
  If they had OpenAI Slack, maybe it would get better organized.
  - 1f60c 8mo ago
    FWIW, they do: https://openai.enterprise.slack.com/ https://openai.enterprise.slack.com/
    - Maxious 8mo ago
      And as per the article it is heavily used and customised
- Aldipower 8mo ago
  This. Also building a MCP app for ChatGPT right now, and man, things break here and there without notice. Seems very unorganized over all there. They should glue a Beta or Alpha badge on it.
nuker 8mo ago
Apple should build Google search. Google should build Windows. Microsoft should just die.
- wiseowise 8mo ago
  Open source Windows and die, amen.
devcraft_ai 8mo ago
[flagged]
sgt 8mo ago
It's funny how people complain about Slack pricing but I've been using it for our company (nearly 100 people) for nearly a decade without paying a dime. The only thing we're not getting is history (and you really shouldn't save valuable info on chat anyway, we have other data repositories for that such as Wiki and git). So for me, we're getting tremendous value out of Slack and not once have they bothered to ask us to pay.
- OJFord 8mo ago
  If you get big enough for Slack to care about, your history will be impractically short.
  - navane 8mo ago
    History is three months now, regardless of data used.
- darkwater 8mo ago
  If search and summarization is good enough, and you basically write down automatically by default all your "tribal knowledge" in your chat app, using wikis or documentation systems starts to be redundant.
- _zoltan_ 8mo ago
  a lot of knowledge lives in our slack history.
  - sgt 8mo ago
    But that's chaotic chat messages, you should really have proper docs in place and standard operating procedures etc.
    - SoftTalker 8mo ago
      Yeah I have never experienced Slack so maybe it works, but it's just hard for me to imagine relying on chat history (or, even email) as a source of institutional knowledge.
snowfield 8mo ago
Just vibe code it bros
halbgut 8mo ago
I'd agree if OpenAI seemed any good at building apps. They're a frontier AI lab and not operating like a product company. A lot of great and interesting things come from that, but not refined products. Their MacOS app really sucks. For months now, it's been eating up 100% CPU with some zombie process occasionally, their helpful global shortcut layover often doesn't autofocus, and their UX has never felt like it gets a lot of attention. They lack user obsession. Altman talks a lot about going above and beyond RLHFing to get the tone just right. But it's never felt right to me.
- wiseowise 8mo ago
  It is still way ahead of its competition, at least when it comes to mobile app.
_pferreir_ 8mo ago
Maybe I'm living in a parallel reality, but there are plenty of Slack alternatives and plenty of companies using Slack clones such as Mattermost and Zulip, among others. And yes, they work just fine.
- crabmusket 8mo ago
  Zulip was first released in 2012, Slack in 2013. Definitely not a clone.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
austin-cheney 8mo ago
I have never understood slack. It’s basically a very expensive solution for a generation who are scared of command terminals and too prideful, or clearly narcissistic, to admit fear. Slack is based on IRC. IRC is free and there are multiple browser clients for it. Knowing that completely takes the air out of a commercial vanity tool.
- _zoltan_ 8mo ago
  can't send gifs on irc :-)
  - kgeist 8mo ago
    Technically, clients could simply upload images to S3 and render them inline whenever they encounter an image URL in a message - no protocol or server changes required. And if you're using an older IRC client, you can still just click the link. The main problem with IRC is that messages aren't stored anywhere. The classic IRC protocol simply broadcasts new messages to whoever is currently present in the channel. When you rejoin, messages are typically not replayed. In theory, a modified server could handle this, and a supported client could recognize that it's receiving playback and present it as channel history. I wonder why we don't extend the IRC protocol in these backward-compatible ways instead of inventing new messengers/protocols.
    - Gormo 8mo ago
      Check out The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat https://thelounge.chat) and Convos (https://convos.chat https://convos.chat), web-based IRC clients with media previews, session persistence, and all the modern bells and whistles.
- FranklinJabar 8mo ago
  It's enterprise. You can shove active directory up its ass and spy on all your employees. That's its entire draw
KronisLV 8mo ago
I'd take even a smaller self-hostable "Hey, here's a really cool project that can be made with Codex and our other tools, ain't it great PR?" program that's not built for some crazy scale, but that I can put on a VPS somewhere - and would support the basic features of Slack and Discord. Think a Node.js app or something similar, PostgreSQL, maybe RabbitMQ/Redis, a SPA with React or whatever. Basic but consistent styling and features. So, workspaces, channels, threads, voice and video calls, screen sharing, file sharing, polls/reactions to messages. Especially given the current situation with Discord. If such a thing could even be built with any tools and mostly/partially vibe coded, then it'd reflect really positively on the state of the tools! The problem is that if they'd try that and mess up, it'd be like Unity's own Gigaya project, which was really bad PR: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/vz1b43/gigaya_has_been_canceled/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/vz1b43/gigaya_has_...
itomato 8mo ago
Can we go back to IRC now? Slack took what we were already doing with IRC, replaced the duct tape and firewalks, packaged up the key functionality (channels, file sharing, access) with a purple UI and mobile app and went to market. The days of a single company maintaining a grip on something like workplace chat (and the inherent data) are numbered now. We're not building a C compiler. Time will come when their subscription fee competes directly with another spend that can generate bespoke but commonplace business tools like chat with no data egress (or better yet, a demonstration that what you now keep and can act on what you previously paid Salesforce to steal.) Soon.
coolThingsFirst 8mo ago
Why stop at Slack, we need better software for tons of things. Even a better OS is something which we would do if we had the AI productivity gains that people pretend we do. Just let the agents spin. But it's not that easy, is it. Someone that will tackle this will be competing against B dollar companies and extravagant level of features and integration. It's not as simple as a chatroom with people in it.
FranklinJabar 8mo ago
hello whoever this is this is your lawer speaking. I am advising you today to please keep posting this shit
plaidfuji 8mo ago
Interesting idea. I do feel one of the major barriers to mass replacement of white collar workers is lack of direct integration between email/slack and LLMs. A human still needs to distill organizational needs from multiple stakeholders to write a prompt. At the same time, I would be very surprised if companies are lining up to hand over all of their internal comms to OpenAI. Would need really strong privacy guarantees, and I’m not sure OpenAI has the goodwill to be convincing on that front. Also, doesn’t MS still nominally have some stake in OpenAI? Would be surprised if they were chill with another competitor to Teams getting built.
- aunty_helen 8mo ago
  Openclaw has that ability. Read emails, take actions. Also, from the sounds of it the Ms OAI deal is in its last days.
lowsong 8mo ago
You'd be out of your mind to trust an OpenAI built Slack competitor. Slack, for all of it's many faults, is two things: - Reliable, both in terms of "service uptime" and in terms of "Slack isn't going to rugpull your features" - Secure. Slack don't have a history of major breaches or data exposure. Both of these means that people feel comfortable relying on it. Who would possibly trust OpenAI with data security, or that their app will still be around in 3 years.
gcanyon 8mo ago
If Google had stuck with Wave, and applied proper product management to it to refine the design feature set, it would be Slack+Notion today and I'd enthusiastically be using it.
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  IIRC around that time a lot of people were on Jabber. At least that was the case where I worked. We ran our own Jabber server but management made us shut it down because it wasn't a "core contributing technology" or something like that. Google Chat in the early years worked with Jabber clients. Maybe with Wave they changed the protocol? That killed any interest in Google's chat technologies for me. Still haven't ever used Slack. My office uses Teams now. It works but it's pretty unpleasant. Gets the basic task done I guess.
  - fatfox 8mo ago
    XMPP / Jabber would be more than enough for many small companies. Slack is bloat!
nivcmo 8mo ago
[dead]
rootnod3 8mo ago
Sorry, but why should they? What makes OpenAI better at making Slack than....Slack? Sure, Slack can be improved, but why the fuck should that be done by OpenAI? Shouldn't OpenAI concentrate on...I don't know....AI?! And first try to break even on that promise and actually generate revenue on that shitty promise?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
dmezzetti 8mo ago
Why keep relying on API services? If you'd like your own local AI integration with open providers like Rocket.Chat and Mattermost, check out txtchat (https://github.com/neuml/txtchat https://github.com/neuml/txtchat).
rob_c 8mo ago
Just for reference, teams is not an astounding success it's forced on the workforce by management who want to pay less. It's a classic management square peg into workforce round hole. Yes I understand sometimes something is better than nothing but teams is _so_ bad it causes user communities to fracture when they would previously congregate on the same platform. Sure if deployed correctly and not by ape sysadmins with a thump of "deny everything in terms of security" I'm sure teams is a reasonable product, but in the real world, no, it's a nightmare.
dnautics 8mo ago
You should just build your own slack for your company
moat 8mo ago
Seems like a better fit for Anthropic. They’re the ones doubling down on work.
brianjking 8mo ago
Butterfield should bring Glitch back, that's for sure.
siliconc0w 8mo ago
Most SaaS companies eventually veer towards the heavy enterprise which results in them raising prices and excessively complicating their app. So there is opportunity for a competitor but I'm not sure OpenAI is in a good position and it'd cement the view that they will eventually use your data to compete with you.
yolostar1 8mo ago
ByteDance already built Slack and it works perfectly fine. Zoom out.
aavci 8mo ago
Should they be a model company or a product company? What do you think is the best way forward for them? Apple went with Google as their model choice while OpenAI was looking into new products to build.
- swyx 8mo ago
  they are actually 4 companies in one. planning to ask him about that when he comes on the pod
BobbyTables2 8mo ago
Mirabilis should have built Slack…
make3 8mo ago
I would never use Slack by OpenAI lol
antonyh 8mo ago
I don't think the world needs another protocol, we need to leverage the ones we have. This space (text-based real-time messaging with media attachments) is feature complete, there's nothing left to add. The remaining value-adds are exactly that; optional extensions for productivities suites and integrating SaaS tools. Pricing and Privacy are another two concerns, and personally for the latter I'd like human chat to be as far away from AI as possible. I use Google Chat, only because my clients use it. Network effects matter. Personally I think it's terrible, but I wasn't a fan of Slack either but I'm not entirely sure why as it's pretty much just sending text. Maybe the opportunity to innovate in this space is UI/UX, and performance/reliability (Signal has been slow/flaky recently for us).
lunias 8mo ago
If I worked exclusively with technical people, then I wouldn't need to use Slack (or Teams, Webex, Jabber, etc). I can't ever see myself paying for an application like that.

252 points by swyx 8mo ago

dbbk 8mo ago

[flagged]

They'll just do what Anthropic does: let it Ralph Wiggum a pile of broken shit, and then say "wewwwww, doing pwogwamming is vewwy hawd, UwU >_<" when it won't build and fails at basic use cases that would be easy to test automatically

neom 8mo ago

They almost have, you could wrangle group projects + group chats together pretty easily and you'd be close-ish. The claude cowork experience backed by google drive with the openai group projects and group chat would, imo, be a really awesome way to work!

pwarner 8mo ago

> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success. Not sure if the author has used Teams. But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.

spprashant 8mo ago
Its a solid success if you squint just at the adoption numbers they achieved by cross selling it.
Muromec 8mo ago
I use teams at work and it's okay. Not the best, not the worst, but okay piece of software. At least I have both the calendar and the videocall things in one app and see when the call starts, so I don't accidentally ADHD myself into missing it.
- simfree 8mo ago
  Exactly, no on is truly overjoyed with Teams. As shovelware goes it is passable, but that is a low bar
- viraptor 8mo ago
  Anything that accepts webhook integrations will be able to do this. I've got the Google calendar and meeting notifications on Slack, but it would be trivial to replicate with any two systems that have APIs available.
  - PretzelPirate 8mo ago
    My company would never let me expose my calendar data to Slack. That's why they like M365, all the integration is there with less risk of oversharing data.
    - viraptor 8mo ago
      It would be less of an issue if they hosted it themselves.
MattGaiser 8mo ago
Yeah, I would be curious if there is anyone out there paying for Teams. Teams wins as Teams is free with your other Office stuff.
tootie 8mo ago
I guess I'm in the minority but I haven't noticed a significant variance in quality and features on any chat app I've used in the past 20 years. It seems like a thoroughly solved problem. Slack's "killer feature" was that they really streamlined onboarding which is feels neat the first time you do it. Otherwise, chat is chat. The biggest obstacle has always been getting everyone you need to talk to to agree on which platform to use.
simfree 8mo ago
Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often. Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability. The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...
- icameron 8mo ago
  My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions
  - viraptor 8mo ago
    > That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.
    - anthonypasq96 8mo ago
      yeah, thats why people just use Teams
  - stonogo 8mo ago
    It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).
MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
What issues do you have with teams? It works well and there’s nothing I can think of that I want in it. It’s just a video and chat app.
- 4nonverbal-alit 8mo ago
  Let me clear my cache after logging in twice to get the OOM fixed so I can finally login to show you what’s wrong with it over a teams call and hope it doesn’t logout and reload randomly during the call.
- udfalkso 8mo ago
  Teams suffers from one giant problem. There is a totally odd, but understandable from tech debt perspective, segregation between “chats” and “teams” which makes it practically impossible to find everything. It’s a fatal flaw. Slack is beautifully simple and effective in comparison. Also, the reminder feature on slack is extremely useful to me personally and I miss it dearly in teams.
  - snowfield 8mo ago
    Yes, in a world of dynamic virtual teams and cross cooperation across teams. «Teams» is an ancient construct
- vladvasiliu 8mo ago
  It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom. On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function. For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics. It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway. All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
cj 8mo ago
> I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.
- figmert 8mo ago
  And it's worse than Teams
  - 2muchcoffeeman 8mo ago
    It’s fine if you want a barebones chat.
    - mvanbaak 8mo ago
      so is IRC
      - olyjohn 8mo ago
        God please let me switch my company to an internal IRC server...
  - cj 8mo ago
    I used it for about a year with a small team. It worked well for what it does, but the functionality is definitely stripped down and barebones compared to Slack. I don't remember any performance or reliability issues.
  - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
    In no way is Gchat worse than teams. It's basic, but the basic functionality works... which is a lot more than you can say for teams.
  - ngrilly 8mo ago
    Hard disagree. We use both in my company. Google Chat is definitely better than Teams for actual collaboration: it's easier to track unread messages in "Home" (it's the "inbox"), and channels (called "spaces") are much better designed (they are conceptually closer to Slack's channels). Also, it's not crashing all the time. What's missing: the message editor doesn't support nested bulleted lists, we can't archive a space/channel.
darth_avocado 8mo ago
We are being forced to dump slack for Teams. The only people who like Teams is Sales and Marketing for some reason. Not a single engineer likes this, and it will break every engineering convenience that exists on Slack.
- awesome_dude 8mo ago
  As an ENG - I REALLY dislike teams - but I also dislike Slack Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(
  - BoredPositron 8mo ago
    I hate unified inboxes with a burning passion.
    - awesome_dude 8mo ago
      Ha ha ha, it's agreed then - NOBODY TALKS TO ENG
    - rpdillon 8mo ago
      Yeah, I mean the first thing we all do when we get one giant unified inbox is write a bunch of rules to break it back out to a set of folders so that we can triage it appropriately. Slack channels just do this from the get go.
e12e 8mo ago
Google gave us Wave - surely that's enough? /s
- outofpaper 8mo ago
  Lol it aas an admirable attempt at something new. I loved the interesting blend of messaging and document creation. It the code still lives on as an archived open project btw. https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave
steeleduncan 8mo ago
Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
- glerk 8mo ago
  Discord is a solid product. They just need to launch a simple business-friendly alternative UI without the teenager gamer aesthetics. I’m surprised they never tried going after the enterprise market.
  - roncesvalles 8mo ago
    Enterprise doesn't buy chat/meeting products without PSTN interop (dial-in dial-out to traditional phone line). Discord would probably need to double their dev team to add PSTN. Building something like Slack or Teams to the level that a F500 company would make it their primary videoconferencing solution is a multi-thousand-employee project. It's not a little skunkworks project for 15-20 people in some corner of the office. That's why TFA is hilariously flawed. When Altman says "tell us what we should build, we'll probably build it!", he's talking about driveways and backyard pools, not the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like asking mall Santa for a summer home in the Hamptons.
    - redserk 8mo ago
      There’s a size of enterprise where you can get away without PSTN integration but do need an answer for SSO and account provisioning/deprovisioning.
    - glerk 8mo ago
      > multi-thousand-employee project I know absolutely nothing about PSTN interop and I'm sure it's very complex to implement. However, at the end of the day, this is just software we're talking about right? Software is cheap and easy to produce these days and I doubt you need thousands of people to implement something that syncs your meeting's audio stream to a phone line especially given that it's a problem that has been solved before.
dgxyz 8mo ago
Sod it all. Just give me a decent email client again. Business instant messaging is electric shoulder tapping and that makes me want to punch people. I literally feel Slack drains me every day.
miki123211 8mo ago
Teams is definitely a solid success. It is by no means a good app. Those two things aren't the same. Slack started with an aggressive "bottom up" approach, they made something actually good and got to worrying about the sales part later. You don't need sales as much when companies come to you, begging you for an actual contract that fulfills their enterprise requirements, knowing that rooting you out is almost impossible. Teams went the other way, in typical Microsoft style. Microsoft sells it bundled with all the other Microsoft things it sells. Most companies want a Microsoft contract anyway, and have an established sales relationship with MS, so adopting Teams is a lot less compliance, integration and procurement work than adopting anything else. You don't need good UI if your sales strategy isn't predicated on users choosing you for UI. And then there's Discord, which really isn't a bad work comms app if you're small enough not to need the compliance stuff. It gives you almost everything the big apps do for free, including unlimited calls, an advanced RBAC system, as many channels / messages as you want, a decent bot API (including media streaming), good notification management, multi-server / cross-organization support etc. They're actively disinterested in selling to businesses (which is what makes them so good, the features they paywall are the features needed by gamers, not serious professionals), but that also means you'll need to eventually migrate off of it when compliance requirements set in.
- lovich 8mo ago
  I thought Slack started as a failed game and they only pivoted when their in game chat proved popular. They still have game assets around like their 404 page iirc.
  - mjcl 8mo ago
    Not quite, they built Slack as an internal communication tool while building the game Glitch (RIP) and after the game failed they decided to productize Slack.
- moribunda 8mo ago
  Slack was a sluggish version of IRC... And somehow the world bought it.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

CuriouslyC 8mo ago

There are already a ton of slack alternatives. Slack connect is the main thing that is blocking a lot of people from moving off slack, otherwise chat is a commodity.

Ancalagon 8mo ago
Agreed. Every productivity software and their mother has chat.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
gempir 8mo ago
I have used Slack Connect once in my 8 years of using slack. I agree it can be a moat, but that's not the case for everyone. Slack doesn't have one "main thing" it's doing perfect. They have just all around great product, with some weaknesses here and there. - Solid mobile app - very good API with good SDKs - easy to build very rich slack bots, with good building blocks - Good notification management - Workflows for non technical people that make automation easy - Good level of customization - Good enough performance - Video/Audio calls are good enough So when a company is questioning what tool to use Slack is an easy go-to. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" type of tool. Can you live without it? yeah. But do you really wanna focus on what chat platform your company should be using or just focus on your product?

spprashant 8mo ago

My personal experience with using Slack as just a in-company chat app has been fine. I enjoy using Slack more than Teams or Discord. All their integrations kinda suck though, and its not uncommon for integrations to randomly break with no discernible changes elsewhere.

giancarlostoro 8mo ago
We used to have a local devs slack and any time someone came up with a random slash command one guy would add a new php script to power that command. I assume a lot of it is just an abandoned API that nobody cares about anymore because Microsoft forced Teams into Office so it took over corporate America in waves. I cant remember the last place I worked at that didnt just use Teams.
- rafark 8mo ago
  Speaking of php slack was built with php until they followed Facebook with Hack (which is essentially a modern flavor of php)
Hamuko 8mo ago
I hate how Slack has no syntax highlighting for code blocks. Even Discord has it.
- dr_kiszonka 8mo ago
  On the desktop, you can share snippets, but this is not inline.
FranklinJabar 8mo ago
> I enjoy using Slack more than Teams or Discord. Surely we can raise the bar for team chat out of hell....

alienbaby 8mo ago

Is it me or does the article mix characters with different fonts weights through the text?

swyx 8mo ago
just you. i use default substack font with some bolding

FergusArgyll 8mo ago

OT latent space podcast is great, most recently interview with jeff dean. Worth a listen

deleted 8mo ago
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swyx 8mo ago
thank you for listening!! team works hard on it. Jeff was an absolute bucket list GOAT to have on the show and to launch the pod with the new Deep Think is just icing on the cake. Every 3-4 months people remember that Google (and Jeff) has low key been accumulating basically every advantage under the sun that all the other AI majors are struggling to pull together themselves.... and then constrained by bigcorp politics. it seems like they are figuring things out though.

CrzyLngPwd 8mo ago

I use Slack every day, and I love it. Integrations are simple and reliable, giving us useful information about critical things. Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.

amelius 8mo ago
Electron?
ltbarcly3 8mo ago
But it's so unreasonably slow. It lacks basic features like syntax highlighting on ``` blocks. It's basically become a super expensive and painful to use while Discord continues to be a joy. And the 'start a thread' nazis are just too much to bear. Prediction: they will add subthreads within 3 years.
- viraptor 8mo ago
  > And the 'start a thread' nazis Social issues can't be solved by technical means. Just slightly incentivised in some direction (like discord's "this is the third reply, would you like a thread instead?") But for the resource usage, ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ already proved you can have a capable client which is super light and fast if you care. This was made by a single person and in many ways is better than the official client.
- dpkirchner 8mo ago
  Prediction 2: companies will hire full-time Slack Cops whose whole job is shaming coworkers and talking about threads (the #1 Slack anti-feature). Well, this was my prediction pre-easy-to-use LLMs, anyway.
- kcrwfrd_ 8mo ago
  I really wish they would add the ability to reply or thread, like Discord does. Along with syntax highlighting.
- wiseowise 8mo ago
  Use threads, bozo, stop polluting feeds.

orthodonticjake 8mo ago

Slack's software quality has been in absolute freefall over the past couple of months.

orthodonticjake 8mo ago

Does anyone use Mattermost? I remember thinking it wasn't too bad, and I guess it's open source.

neom 8mo ago
I mentioned them last week and per the comments I got, not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901946
- viraptor 8mo ago
  There's the mostlymatter fork which restores the proper oss behaviour https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

psanford 8mo ago

> Developers routinely complain about Slack’s API costs and permissions What? What API costs is the op talking about?

snowfield 8mo ago
Developers will always hate to ask the system owner for changes to permissions don’t think you can just fix that. If the company has enough grc red tape, integrating with slack can become almost impossible I can imagine
- psanford 8mo ago
  The API is free. The statement in the article is not about corporate friction

amelius 8mo ago

Why not ask for a federated slack?

igravious 8mo ago
for the same reason why not a federated <insert-the-tool-you-would-love-to-see-federated-here>
- amelius 8mo ago
  and, why is that?
  - viraptor 8mo ago
    It works in communities, not corporations. Every federation seems to die when enough millions are connected to it. Facebook used xmpp for chat. Google chat could federate too. Apple promised iMessage and then hid behind a silly excuse. It's extremely against company interests to federate.
    - amelius 8mo ago
      I mean, it's not a hard requirement that you ask a company to build it.
  - moomoo11 8mo ago
    ever realized that its only incompetent people who could never build a product (what problem are you solving?) who ask for silly things like this? it doesn't work irl, and if you don't understand that then keep asking this question in 10 years, or even 100 years.
    - haute_cuisine 8mo ago
      email works, not everything has to be run by corporate greed

mcintyre1994 8mo ago

We use Slack at work, and everyone we work with uses Slack, and we all work together with Slack Connect. I suspect if we moved to a competitor that’s pretty much the main impact we’d see, and it wouldn’t be good unless everyone else work with moved too. I think that network effect is probably the only meaningful differentiation in that space.

mbreese 8mo ago
You could also look at it as: in order for a Slack competitor to compete with Slack's network effects, the new program will need to offer an easy way to extend chat workspaces with external collaborators. It's not impossible, but it does make Slack's moat explicitly clear.
- haute_cuisine 8mo ago
  The problem here is that companies artificially limit integrations, so it's impossible to exchange messages between different providers like how email works.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    We really need some legal requirements similar to "right to repair" for machinery. We need "right to integrate" for software. I don't know how you'd pull it off, or how much support for integrations would be "enough" but it would allow competitors to cross these network effect lock-in moats that large players are able to build.
  - mbreese 8mo ago
    I’ve always thought that the proper competitor to Slack/Twitter/etc… was a protocol not another service. Protocols enable competition, services just shift the market to another service.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

rbbydotdev 8mo ago

Funny, didn’t even mention using the massive amount of compute available to them to build it! A prompt ran through a Wiggum loop over the course of a week/month and viola

timfsu 8mo ago

I for one would love this - if it’s done well - except that it would presumably be locked in to OpenAI agents

daxfohl 8mo ago

I'd rather it build docs. Or at least have a feature in chatgpt that lets you highlight something and start a comment thread, rather than a multi-page essay response as a continuation of the chat itself.

hokkos 8mo ago

If AI is soo productive why do they even sell it and don't hoard it for themselves to build a competing offer to everything ?

solumunus 8mo ago
No one is claiming that level of productivity.
- bigstrat2003 8mo ago
  Oh yes they are. People are claiming 100x improvements, which is completely insane. But they do claim it.
  - solumunus 8mo ago
    OK sure, there are always lunatics on the fringe, but OP is casting that argument out as if they’re attacking a mainstream opinion.

dabinat 8mo ago

What evidence is there that OpenAI will be more benevolent than Salesforce? Perhaps we shouldn’t give large corporations more opportunities for data mining.

gradus_ad 8mo ago

> OpenAI spends time and money building a slack competitor, because they've apparently run out of good ideas > Slack uses AI to improve the existing product > Slack is still marginally better, so businesses continue paying for it > OpenAI now on the hook for maintaining one of many cheap slack clones > Investors are left scratching their heads... Late stage bubble behavior

fassssst 8mo ago

I hate Slack. Total information overload. I’d prefer a tool that encourages people to think more before hitting send.

SonorousGarden 8mo ago
Funnily enough, from Slack's own testing they could make it that tool tomorrow by changing the input box from a single line to a multi-line input. A la the Hacker News input box we are all typing into right now. You got me thinking about whether a pre-send message that could theoretically appear: "Given the channel that you are currently in, this might not be an appropriate message. Would you like to reword it, have AI reword it, or send it anyways?" This presumably would feel absolutely terrible to use, but it might be a way to nudge towards community consensus for how certain spaces would work.

riazrizvi 8mo ago

One of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. A company with the premier LLM, asking companies to outsource the platform running all internal communications. What does OP think we are all doing here in business? This is the Ycombinator community edition of Rodney King's famous "Why can't we all just get along".

bee_rider 8mo ago
Seems like a fantastic idea of OpenAI other than, like, why would anybody else go along with it? It would be like giving all our emails to an ad company or something.
- FactolSarin 8mo ago
  I see what you did there
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

altcunn 8mo ago

[dead]

bionhoward 8mo ago

signal should just add better API / bot stuff and then we could all use that. there's no way OpenAI would be trustworthy for this; slack certainly isn't

blackqueeriroh 8mo ago
The Signal protocol can’t support large groups of people.

philipwhiuk 8mo ago

Wait the two problems are apparently the price, and the reliability? And you're asking a company famously burning money building a tool that is used for vibe-coding (aka unreliable software development) to build a replacement? Idk man.

codingdave 8mo ago

> Slack has been on a slow rachet up in prices and has struggled to introduce compelling new AI features I can think of a few reasons that Slack could be improved upon. But a lack of AI features is not on that list. Slack is effective for async communication between humans. We don't need AI features to accomplish that, and most AI would just be annoying slop. If you are using Slack for something else, maybe AI features would help those other uses, but you also might be stretching the cases for which Slack is a good thing.

evbogue 8mo ago

I'd like to speculate, with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw, that perhaps IRC could be the future of AI-enabled chat rooms?

wiseowise 8mo ago
> with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw Clown emoji.
- evbogue 8mo ago
  So you disagree?
  - wiseowise 8mo ago
    Agree with what? It doesn’t exist outside of twitter schizos minds.

cmullaparthi 8mo ago

FWIW, we've been working on building a chat application. Still very much in beta stage, but trying to build something useful. https://joinbackchannel.chat https://joinbackchannel.chat

haute_cuisine 8mo ago
Is landing page generated by AI?

simianwords 8mo ago

I can't read the article, but I feel people are missing the point here. Slack is a really really good product because it is simple enough and works nice - performant, has just enough features but not too many and the UX/UI is good. Its not a power tool but it gets the job done without getting in the way. You would know what I mean if you have used teams/ google chat etc. Sure you can criticise slack for being a bit slow, not having nested threads. For context: slack is the main app I use at work and spend a * lot * of time there. But OpenAI _can_ beat Slack at these things if they have the technical acumen. But real differentiator comes in having an all in one platform that can help you run workflows. Recall that ChatGPT UI is fundamentally a chat box. If ChatGPT can integrate common workflows like - send an email to a colleague for something - schedule a meeting at a certain time - deploy to production - approve leaves - create quick code changes with natural language like "change threshold to 50 in my repo" - integration with observability and alerting Then you don't have to leave this tool at all. There's a lot of potential here. I frequently want to just tag GPT when using slack. Like "hey take this jira task and create a quick pull request" and it will link the pull request in the thread. Or when my colleague asks me for a meeting, I can tag GPT with something like "hey schedule a meeting later in the day when we both have time".

jedberg 8mo ago

I'm more interested in the fact that disclaimer at the top makes me think the entire article is written by AI as a summary of a bunch of reddit posts and tweets and discord topics? Is that what the top says?

erlicai 8mo ago
Most of the article was written by AI I guess, but I think there's some human editing to it and the OP is the editor
- swyx 8mo ago
  author here, entire editorial is entirely human written
  - jedberg 8mo ago
    Then what did the (now removed) disclaimer refer to?

mrcwinn 8mo ago

Oh yes please let us hand over all of our real time communications to Sam Altman’s company. I’m as excited about that as I am to use their browser.

peterlk 8mo ago

Shameless plug. We’re working on something like this. thismachine.ai. It’s still early, but interested to get feedback. The slack/chat part is still behind a feature flag. Let me know if you want to use it

keithwhor 8mo ago

A friend and I are working on something like this. It’s more Slack-adjacent; the problem we’re tackling is, “what does a future where agents seamlessly integrate with day to day communication look like?” We’re a little more focused on the developer platform. We’re embarrassingly early and haven’t “launched” yet but I guess there’s some value in sharing with an audience who might be interested! We call it “Superuser” [0], the social hub for agent tools. There’s more of a focus on the developer platform, but warning: major WIP! We are shipping huge changes and our docs are out of date... [0] https://superuser.app https://superuser.app

sharts 8mo ago

Bring back IRC

Gormo 8mo ago
Bringing it back would require it to have first gone away.

catchmeifyoucan 8mo ago

I think a slack clone with better message search, a company knowledgebase, and a personal “auto-responder” could be a winner

czhu12 8mo ago

Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use google chat everyday, so its not just a "UI looks ugly thing". Literally nothing you think should work works. Ex: inviting outside collaborators to a shared channel, converting a private DM group into a channel, having public channels for community & private channels for internal work. Goes on and on.

uptownfunk 8mo ago
Totally it is the biggest missing piece of their ecosystem and would complete their offering so nicely. Get a pm and 3 engineers and vibe it out
- overfeed 8mo ago
  > Get a pm and 3 engineers and vibe it out Google has been stuck in exactly this loop for over a decade without going all-in on a single application. They seem to launch a new chat app every couple of years with not quite as many features as the prior chat application, and slowly add features until it's time for it to be replaced by newer one still.
  - surajrmal 8mo ago
    The current chat app is decidedly the victor. It's been around since 2021 and there is no sign of a replacement. Google messages remains separate for person chat, but arguably texting and work chats occupy different spaces, just as Whatsapp and Slack do. Folks joke about chat features also making their way into YouTube and Google Photos, but the fact they are not forcing you into the other chat ecosystems is something a lot of users strongly prefer. The 2010s was definitely an awkward period for Google but arguably that was just watching them fumble through social via Google+ and everything else was a reaction to that. 2020s has been a lot more focused with strategy actually focusing on existing products instead of spinning up new ones (outside of AI)

YarickR2 8mo ago

Orthogonal: OpenAI should build decent mobile and desktop Jabber/XMPP clients.

yellow_lead 8mo ago

There's already Zulip, Mattermost, and many others. Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO. A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.

molsongolden 8mo ago
Zulip is awesome \m/
- killerstorm 8mo ago
  We've been using Zulip for ~5 years, I won't describe it as awesome. E.g. it takes a minute to open a chat on mobile, but only few seconds on the web. No idea how it's possible if they use same underlying DB. In fact a full text search over years worth of communication is faster than loading latest DM from a specific person in a mobile app! And not much improvement over years: few things became nicer. But mobile app was always dogshit.
  - Davidzheng 8mo ago
    Yes! I also don't know why losing zulip is so insanely slow!
- IgorPartola 8mo ago
  I recently started looking into Zulip and while I can see that it is a complete product its mobile UI is so cluttered and funky I don’t understand how anyone could use it. The desktop web UI seems OK but try this on your phone: https://zulip.com/new/demo/ https://zulip.com/new/demo/ They have the iOS Safari problem with the keyboard and body scroll, tiny icons, super busy UI. I was hoping to help some folks move off Discord to something else and Zulip is not what I would volunteer to do support for when the users are not techies. Heck, as a techie my eyes glaze over looking at it. I really wish it was slicker and more usable but it simply isn’t.

gaigalas 8mo ago

> Everything could be better That is a fascinating observation. We supposedly just unlocked the prometean fire, why aren't everyday things everyone uses getting better?

cipehr 8mo ago

If you haven't tried the new slackbot you should... I've been using it at work and I'm blown away at what it can do with the context it has on you and your teams from slack. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/01/13/slackbot-announcement/ https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/01/13/sl...

villgax 8mo ago

Should fix being unable to scale mailing lists in microsoft outlook first LOL

kittbuilds 8mo ago

[dead]

otabdeveloper4 8mo ago

Sounds like something they should vibecode over a weekend, amirite.

block_dagger 8mo ago

In my experience building a couple ChatGPT apps and, through colleagues, working with OpenAI folks, I'm not sure they should be building anything in their current state. Seems quite disorganized over there.

hgo 8mo ago
If they had OpenAI Slack, maybe it would get better organized.
- 1f60c 8mo ago
  FWIW, they do: https://openai.enterprise.slack.com/ https://openai.enterprise.slack.com/
  - Maxious 8mo ago
    And as per the article it is heavily used and customised
Aldipower 8mo ago
This. Also building a MCP app for ChatGPT right now, and man, things break here and there without notice. Seems very unorganized over all there. They should glue a Beta or Alpha badge on it.

nuker 8mo ago

Apple should build Google search. Google should build Windows. Microsoft should just die.

wiseowise 8mo ago
Open source Windows and die, amen.

devcraft_ai 8mo ago

[flagged]

sgt 8mo ago

It's funny how people complain about Slack pricing but I've been using it for our company (nearly 100 people) for nearly a decade without paying a dime. The only thing we're not getting is history (and you really shouldn't save valuable info on chat anyway, we have other data repositories for that such as Wiki and git). So for me, we're getting tremendous value out of Slack and not once have they bothered to ask us to pay.

OJFord 8mo ago
If you get big enough for Slack to care about, your history will be impractically short.
- navane 8mo ago
  History is three months now, regardless of data used.
darkwater 8mo ago
If search and summarization is good enough, and you basically write down automatically by default all your "tribal knowledge" in your chat app, using wikis or documentation systems starts to be redundant.
_zoltan_ 8mo ago
a lot of knowledge lives in our slack history.
- sgt 8mo ago
  But that's chaotic chat messages, you should really have proper docs in place and standard operating procedures etc.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    Yeah I have never experienced Slack so maybe it works, but it's just hard for me to imagine relying on chat history (or, even email) as a source of institutional knowledge.

snowfield 8mo ago

Just vibe code it bros

halbgut 8mo ago

I'd agree if OpenAI seemed any good at building apps. They're a frontier AI lab and not operating like a product company. A lot of great and interesting things come from that, but not refined products. Their MacOS app really sucks. For months now, it's been eating up 100% CPU with some zombie process occasionally, their helpful global shortcut layover often doesn't autofocus, and their UX has never felt like it gets a lot of attention. They lack user obsession. Altman talks a lot about going above and beyond RLHFing to get the tone just right. But it's never felt right to me.

wiseowise 8mo ago
It is still way ahead of its competition, at least when it comes to mobile app.

_pferreir_ 8mo ago

Maybe I'm living in a parallel reality, but there are plenty of Slack alternatives and plenty of companies using Slack clones such as Mattermost and Zulip, among others. And yes, they work just fine.

crabmusket 8mo ago
Zulip was first released in 2012, Slack in 2013. Definitely not a clone.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

austin-cheney 8mo ago

I have never understood slack. It’s basically a very expensive solution for a generation who are scared of command terminals and too prideful, or clearly narcissistic, to admit fear. Slack is based on IRC. IRC is free and there are multiple browser clients for it. Knowing that completely takes the air out of a commercial vanity tool.

_zoltan_ 8mo ago
can't send gifs on irc :-)
- kgeist 8mo ago
  Technically, clients could simply upload images to S3 and render them inline whenever they encounter an image URL in a message - no protocol or server changes required. And if you're using an older IRC client, you can still just click the link. The main problem with IRC is that messages aren't stored anywhere. The classic IRC protocol simply broadcasts new messages to whoever is currently present in the channel. When you rejoin, messages are typically not replayed. In theory, a modified server could handle this, and a supported client could recognize that it's receiving playback and present it as channel history. I wonder why we don't extend the IRC protocol in these backward-compatible ways instead of inventing new messengers/protocols.
  - Gormo 8mo ago
    Check out The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat https://thelounge.chat) and Convos (https://convos.chat https://convos.chat), web-based IRC clients with media previews, session persistence, and all the modern bells and whistles.
FranklinJabar 8mo ago
It's enterprise. You can shove active directory up its ass and spy on all your employees. That's its entire draw

KronisLV 8mo ago

I'd take even a smaller self-hostable "Hey, here's a really cool project that can be made with Codex and our other tools, ain't it great PR?" program that's not built for some crazy scale, but that I can put on a VPS somewhere - and would support the basic features of Slack and Discord. Think a Node.js app or something similar, PostgreSQL, maybe RabbitMQ/Redis, a SPA with React or whatever. Basic but consistent styling and features. So, workspaces, channels, threads, voice and video calls, screen sharing, file sharing, polls/reactions to messages. Especially given the current situation with Discord. If such a thing could even be built with any tools and mostly/partially vibe coded, then it'd reflect really positively on the state of the tools! The problem is that if they'd try that and mess up, it'd be like Unity's own Gigaya project, which was really bad PR: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/vz1b43/gigaya_has_been_canceled/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/vz1b43/gigaya_has_...

itomato 8mo ago

Can we go back to IRC now? Slack took what we were already doing with IRC, replaced the duct tape and firewalks, packaged up the key functionality (channels, file sharing, access) with a purple UI and mobile app and went to market. The days of a single company maintaining a grip on something like workplace chat (and the inherent data) are numbered now. We're not building a C compiler. Time will come when their subscription fee competes directly with another spend that can generate bespoke but commonplace business tools like chat with no data egress (or better yet, a demonstration that what you now keep and can act on what you previously paid Salesforce to steal.) Soon.

coolThingsFirst 8mo ago

Why stop at Slack, we need better software for tons of things. Even a better OS is something which we would do if we had the AI productivity gains that people pretend we do. Just let the agents spin. But it's not that easy, is it. Someone that will tackle this will be competing against B dollar companies and extravagant level of features and integration. It's not as simple as a chatroom with people in it.

FranklinJabar 8mo ago

hello whoever this is this is your lawer speaking. I am advising you today to please keep posting this shit

plaidfuji 8mo ago

Interesting idea. I do feel one of the major barriers to mass replacement of white collar workers is lack of direct integration between email/slack and LLMs. A human still needs to distill organizational needs from multiple stakeholders to write a prompt. At the same time, I would be very surprised if companies are lining up to hand over all of their internal comms to OpenAI. Would need really strong privacy guarantees, and I’m not sure OpenAI has the goodwill to be convincing on that front. Also, doesn’t MS still nominally have some stake in OpenAI? Would be surprised if they were chill with another competitor to Teams getting built.

aunty_helen 8mo ago
Openclaw has that ability. Read emails, take actions. Also, from the sounds of it the Ms OAI deal is in its last days.

lowsong 8mo ago

You'd be out of your mind to trust an OpenAI built Slack competitor. Slack, for all of it's many faults, is two things: - Reliable, both in terms of "service uptime" and in terms of "Slack isn't going to rugpull your features" - Secure. Slack don't have a history of major breaches or data exposure. Both of these means that people feel comfortable relying on it. Who would possibly trust OpenAI with data security, or that their app will still be around in 3 years.

gcanyon 8mo ago

If Google had stuck with Wave, and applied proper product management to it to refine the design feature set, it would be Slack+Notion today and I'd enthusiastically be using it.

SoftTalker 8mo ago
IIRC around that time a lot of people were on Jabber. At least that was the case where I worked. We ran our own Jabber server but management made us shut it down because it wasn't a "core contributing technology" or something like that. Google Chat in the early years worked with Jabber clients. Maybe with Wave they changed the protocol? That killed any interest in Google's chat technologies for me. Still haven't ever used Slack. My office uses Teams now. It works but it's pretty unpleasant. Gets the basic task done I guess.
- fatfox 8mo ago
  XMPP / Jabber would be more than enough for many small companies. Slack is bloat!

nivcmo 8mo ago

[dead]

rootnod3 8mo ago

Sorry, but why should they? What makes OpenAI better at making Slack than....Slack? Sure, Slack can be improved, but why the fuck should that be done by OpenAI? Shouldn't OpenAI concentrate on...I don't know....AI?! And first try to break even on that promise and actually generate revenue on that shitty promise?

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

dmezzetti 8mo ago

Why keep relying on API services? If you'd like your own local AI integration with open providers like Rocket.Chat and Mattermost, check out txtchat (https://github.com/neuml/txtchat https://github.com/neuml/txtchat).

rob_c 8mo ago

Just for reference, teams is not an astounding success it's forced on the workforce by management who want to pay less. It's a classic management square peg into workforce round hole. Yes I understand sometimes something is better than nothing but teams is _so_ bad it causes user communities to fracture when they would previously congregate on the same platform. Sure if deployed correctly and not by ape sysadmins with a thump of "deny everything in terms of security" I'm sure teams is a reasonable product, but in the real world, no, it's a nightmare.

dnautics 8mo ago

You should just build your own slack for your company

moat 8mo ago

Seems like a better fit for Anthropic. They’re the ones doubling down on work.

brianjking 8mo ago

Butterfield should bring Glitch back, that's for sure.

siliconc0w 8mo ago

Most SaaS companies eventually veer towards the heavy enterprise which results in them raising prices and excessively complicating their app. So there is opportunity for a competitor but I'm not sure OpenAI is in a good position and it'd cement the view that they will eventually use your data to compete with you.

yolostar1 8mo ago

ByteDance already built Slack and it works perfectly fine. Zoom out.

aavci 8mo ago

Should they be a model company or a product company? What do you think is the best way forward for them? Apple went with Google as their model choice while OpenAI was looking into new products to build.

swyx 8mo ago
they are actually 4 companies in one. planning to ask him about that when he comes on the pod

BobbyTables2 8mo ago

Mirabilis should have built Slack…

make3 8mo ago

I would never use Slack by OpenAI lol

antonyh 8mo ago

I don't think the world needs another protocol, we need to leverage the ones we have. This space (text-based real-time messaging with media attachments) is feature complete, there's nothing left to add. The remaining value-adds are exactly that; optional extensions for productivities suites and integrating SaaS tools. Pricing and Privacy are another two concerns, and personally for the latter I'd like human chat to be as far away from AI as possible. I use Google Chat, only because my clients use it. Network effects matter. Personally I think it's terrible, but I wasn't a fan of Slack either but I'm not entirely sure why as it's pretty much just sending text. Maybe the opportunity to innovate in this space is UI/UX, and performance/reliability (Signal has been slow/flaky recently for us).

lunias 8mo ago

If I worked exclusively with technical people, then I wouldn't need to use Slack (or Teams, Webex, Jabber, etc). I can't ever see myself paying for an application like that.