8 ms·

Unlike switching VM's or databases, switching from one front-end for a pseudo-irc-client to another is essentially simple, the migration is probably significant

by hurin 12y ago

Unlike switching VM's or databases, switching from one front-end for a pseudo-irc-client to another is essentially simple, the migration is probably significantly less painful, there are no proprietary formats in the way (.pdf .dwg). The actual costs / complexity involved in building a similar product are magnitudes less than the high valuation would suggest. So I'm not sure how much early success is really worth in this market.

serve_yay 12y ago
Well then I guess they'll just have to keep being better than their competitors. A shame, really.
- aetherson 12y ago
  Are they better than their competitors? In what way? I've been using Slack in a pretty casual way recently as my company switched to it. It seems, you know... fine. Like it has the same features that all the other messaging products have. What's the compelling feature of Slack?
  - dshanahan 12y ago
    We just left HipChat for Slack and love it. The file sharing includes previews, the drag and drop to upload immediately is great. Search includes the content of uploaded files. Search on HipChat is a joke, IMO. It's more fun to use, and more intuitive for non-technical people.
  - baddox 12y ago
    They're not. Between Slack and HipChat it's a wash. Both work reasonably well and have their own quirks. I'm more cognizant of Slack's quirks at the moment, because that's what I currently use. For instance, most URLs don't work on iOS Slack, because ampersands get HTML escaped into &. I sent feedback, and someone quickly responds that they know about and they intend to fix it.
    - stock_toaster 12y ago
      As a hipchat using company, we got a slack account to give it a test drive, and I was ... surprised how much of a wash it is vs hipchat. I had a "this is what all the fuss is about?" reaction. I actually seem to prefer the hipchat UI personally, and apparently so do many of my colleagues. The fact that hipchat is cheaper only made it clearer to us. note: only using and comparing the osx desktop app for both services.
      - baddox 12y ago
        Actually, it sounds small, but the biggest advantage of HipChat over Slack is that HipChat allows you to change the background color of bot messages (like incoming exceptions, deploys, etc.). It is incredibly frustrating that Slack can't allocate an engineer to just do this. Slack's custom message styling options are virtually nonexistent. Yeah, yeah, I know we programmers shouldn't say "it will only take a few minutes," but come on!
        indeed30 12y ago
        Although you can't change the bg color, you can certainly change the coloured left-border.
      - burger_moon 12y ago
        I've used both and currently use slack. I prefer the simple ui of hipchat to slack for sure. In my area slack seems to be becoming the more popular chat tool but maybe I just have too small of a pool to be accurate.
    - justsee 12y ago
      Slack executes so much better at every level that stating it's a wash between Slack and HipChat just doesn't compute. One key example is the multiple teams feature: the ability to have multiple accounts logged in at the same time, and the ability to easily swipe between them on iOS or toggle on desktop is a huge advantage. A quick look at HipChat indicates this still isn't possible [1]. Considering more and more people wear different startup / company / organisation hats not having this feature is a great way to limit participation / growth in a communications platform. That Slack had this feature at the outset for me meant I've already spread use of Slack to multiple orgs and participate in all of them at the same time. [1] https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions/suggestions/2716912-let-me-be-a-member-of-and-sign-in-to-multiple-acco https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions/suggestio...
  - serve_yay 12y ago
    I really liked it immediately upon using it, that almost never happens to me. If you want a feature checklist I'm afraid I won't be reciting one. It's well designed in my opinion, I care about that a lot. Other productivity tools like JIRA and Jive are awful, I enjoy using Slack. But if you're right, it's no good and there's no switching costs, then I guess they'll die. Right?
    - aetherson 12y ago
      You're ascribing agenda to me that's not there -- and maybe conflating me with my GP poster. I'm asking an honest question. I don't dislike Slack and I'm open to there being something that they genuinely do really well, I just haven't noticed such a thing as a casual user.
  - taternuts 12y ago
    I've only used Slack, not some of the alternatives like HipChat, and I really like it. I'd be interested in hearing about how some of the competitors stack up feature-wise
  - pbreit 12y ago
    Not a Slack defender but if you are unable to see that it is better crafted, you're just not looking very hard.
  - lmm 12y ago
    It's not an advantage in features, it's just that little bit more polished than everything else. Everything works, and works how you'd expect it to. The UI subtly guides you towards doing the right thing. There's nothing you can't do in other clients, but everything's just that little bit better.
- aabajian 12y ago
  We also just switched from HipChat to Slack. We use JIRA and BitBucket, but had a difficult time with HipChat. It would sometimes drop messages and/or spontaneously disconnect. I find it amusing whenever I drive by their Office Space bill board on the freeway and think to myself, "How many times will I have to send that memo through HipChat before the message gets through?"
- JimmyL 12y ago
  Do you find them that much better? We're a small HipChat-using company who moved three teams over for a month, and the communal response was "eh?". It's no-doubt prettier and easier to write integrations, but for the core competency of chatting, the two were very similar (and most people preferred the native HipChat apps to the Slack browser one). It's big selling point for us was integration with Google Docs, and in testing we found that it didn't work that well. It's also 3.5x more expensive. In absolute terms that's not much (<$400 a month), but no one could point to $400 of incremental value in it. If we fully embraced it and turned off emails for those teams, would we see it? Maybe, but we'd still need emails to deal with external vendors, and there's no way that we'd get non-developers to see it as an email replacement.
vskarine 12y ago
They are trying to replace all of corporate internal communication channels which includes email so there is some merit to it. While cost of switching is low for a smaller company, it is extremely high for larger corporation especially if they use all sorts of integrations with other products within slack. The more integrations they have the harder it is for competing product to catch up in larger corporations market, which probably provide most of the revenue for the product.
cmp0 12y ago
I agree that the switching costs aren't technical. Maybe for small teams in a startup it's easy to relearn a new product, but don't underestimate the stickiness with large groups of people all using and relying on it. Just think about how many large (& small) organizations still use email even though it's terrible for intra company communication.
- themartorana 12y ago
  Don't underestimate the stickiness to small teams. We did switch to Slack from HipChat (which was fine) and we love Slack. I imagine a deal of disappointment among the 6 people in our company if we switched to something else - especially something almost Slack. Slack is one of the first companies walking around with a billion dollar valuation that makes me go... "Yeah, maybe..." We use it. We love it. It's mature, well designed, gets improved constantly, and is used by more local businesses I know than not. It provides real, actual benefit to our small organization above and beyond what we pay for it. Slack, to me, is a real product, with a real revenue stream and real value to teams. I really hope they never get bought and acquired or rolled in to a larger organization. The app is a constant joy to use - I can only say that about one other program I use daily.
  - JimmyL 12y ago
    Can you highlight a few of the reasons you love it, in comparison to HipChat? When we ended our trial month and announced we were going back to HipChat, the biggest reactions was "OK".
    - lobster_johnson 12y ago
      Multi-team support is a big one. HipChat doesn't let you participate in multiple organizations. When you're doing B2B stuff, or contracting work, or just interfacing with some external team (eg., designers), being able to chat in the same room without having to jump through a bunch of hoops is super important. For me, there is also a bunch of minor detail where Slack wins. Slack just looks better, behaves better with choppy connections, and has better code pasting support. It also does much better with automatic link extraction (HipChat's Linky is annoying and won't let you remove the automatic description). Lastly, Slack has integration playbooks that automatically uses APIs to configure stuff or (when that's not possible) gives you the recipe; for example, the Github and Zendesk integrations will automatically register the app and webhooks for you, almost no manual setup needed. HipChat is all manual. And for the love of God, HipChat, fix your inane emojis. Immature 4Chan memes (trollface etc.) have no place in a business, not even among developers.
stock_toaster 12y ago
The only way I can make sense of it is using logic similar to [this][1]. If I assume VC's consider slack a "force multiplier" for startups, then I can see it raising investments far above the value it provides when viewed standalone. The fact that they already have a popular competitor in the space (hipchat) would normally make such a high valuation seemingly more confusing, but if viewed using the force multiplier logic, maybe less so? There could be concern that having only a single frequently used tool would make it too easy for someone to "own" a startup's lifeblood, so better to have more than one. (similar to github and bitbucket?) I guess the alternative is that slack has some investor specific info about their product pipline where they are pitching other companion tools that work well together, and/or compete more directly with other popular services. Like atlassian/jira or something. [1]: http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm
- fnord123 12y ago
  Maybe investors are allowed to act as a fly on the wall in conversations. That would explain the value.
mikeg8 12y ago
Switching databases is significantly more painful for a _small_ portion of an organization. Getting a large organization to switch messaging platforms across all team functions probably wouldn't be a seamless as you'd like to imagine.
- eitally 12y ago
  Indeed. It took us about 4 years after officially switching from AIM to Skype to kill AIM, and then with Gtalk/Hangouts we're just now starting to try to kill Skype.
- patmcc 12y ago
  Incredibly true; for something as simple and necessary as messaging, the company I work for has: 1. A company-wide and approved solution (proprietary) that's very buggy. 2. A jabber server someone threw together so everyone could use their client or choice. 3. Google chat (through various clients). 4. MSN messenger / Skype. And they all get used by different people for different things. It's very frustrating. Switching to a new thing would be a non-starter, probably (and we couldn't move to Slack anyway, but that's another issue).
- SatvikBeri 12y ago
  Even at a 100 person company I knew, half the organization used gchat and half used jabber/webex connect. Each side had champions that spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to convert everyone to one platform, and last I checked they still hadn't succeeded.
  - hurin 12y ago
    There are gui clients that support both protocols (i.e. I think Pidgin does) - why not just write a plugin that allows to cross-communicate between the two?
    - nemothekid 12y ago
      As time goes on I get more and more disillusioned with solutions that begin with "why not just write". Nothing excites me more than having to think about supporting yet another codebase deployed to non-technical people who will undoubtedly cause more bugs than thought possible and open more JIRA tickets about it with increasingly vague title names. At some point Slack or [integration of choice] is cheaper than having an internal engineering team to write half-baked communication solutions.
mooreds 12y ago
I think that it would be tough to move away from slack because of: Ui knowledge Inertia History. The last is most important--if cultural knowledge over years gets embedded in slack, it will be easy to justify the modest ongoing costs.

by hurin 12y ago

serve_yay 12y ago

Well then I guess they'll just have to keep being better than their competitors. A shame, really.

aetherson 12y ago
Are they better than their competitors? In what way? I've been using Slack in a pretty casual way recently as my company switched to it. It seems, you know... fine. Like it has the same features that all the other messaging products have. What's the compelling feature of Slack?
- dshanahan 12y ago
  We just left HipChat for Slack and love it. The file sharing includes previews, the drag and drop to upload immediately is great. Search includes the content of uploaded files. Search on HipChat is a joke, IMO. It's more fun to use, and more intuitive for non-technical people.
- baddox 12y ago
  They're not. Between Slack and HipChat it's a wash. Both work reasonably well and have their own quirks. I'm more cognizant of Slack's quirks at the moment, because that's what I currently use. For instance, most URLs don't work on iOS Slack, because ampersands get HTML escaped into &. I sent feedback, and someone quickly responds that they know about and they intend to fix it.
  - stock_toaster 12y ago
    As a hipchat using company, we got a slack account to give it a test drive, and I was ... surprised how much of a wash it is vs hipchat. I had a "this is what all the fuss is about?" reaction. I actually seem to prefer the hipchat UI personally, and apparently so do many of my colleagues. The fact that hipchat is cheaper only made it clearer to us. note: only using and comparing the osx desktop app for both services.
    - baddox 12y ago
      Actually, it sounds small, but the biggest advantage of HipChat over Slack is that HipChat allows you to change the background color of bot messages (like incoming exceptions, deploys, etc.). It is incredibly frustrating that Slack can't allocate an engineer to just do this. Slack's custom message styling options are virtually nonexistent. Yeah, yeah, I know we programmers shouldn't say "it will only take a few minutes," but come on!
      - indeed30 12y ago
        Although you can't change the bg color, you can certainly change the coloured left-border.
    - burger_moon 12y ago
      I've used both and currently use slack. I prefer the simple ui of hipchat to slack for sure. In my area slack seems to be becoming the more popular chat tool but maybe I just have too small of a pool to be accurate.
  - justsee 12y ago
    Slack executes so much better at every level that stating it's a wash between Slack and HipChat just doesn't compute. One key example is the multiple teams feature: the ability to have multiple accounts logged in at the same time, and the ability to easily swipe between them on iOS or toggle on desktop is a huge advantage. A quick look at HipChat indicates this still isn't possible [1]. Considering more and more people wear different startup / company / organisation hats not having this feature is a great way to limit participation / growth in a communications platform. That Slack had this feature at the outset for me meant I've already spread use of Slack to multiple orgs and participate in all of them at the same time. [1] https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions/suggestions/2716912-let-me-be-a-member-of-and-sign-in-to-multiple-acco https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions/suggestio...
- serve_yay 12y ago
  I really liked it immediately upon using it, that almost never happens to me. If you want a feature checklist I'm afraid I won't be reciting one. It's well designed in my opinion, I care about that a lot. Other productivity tools like JIRA and Jive are awful, I enjoy using Slack. But if you're right, it's no good and there's no switching costs, then I guess they'll die. Right?
  - aetherson 12y ago
    You're ascribing agenda to me that's not there -- and maybe conflating me with my GP poster. I'm asking an honest question. I don't dislike Slack and I'm open to there being something that they genuinely do really well, I just haven't noticed such a thing as a casual user.
- taternuts 12y ago
  I've only used Slack, not some of the alternatives like HipChat, and I really like it. I'd be interested in hearing about how some of the competitors stack up feature-wise
- pbreit 12y ago
  Not a Slack defender but if you are unable to see that it is better crafted, you're just not looking very hard.
- lmm 12y ago
  It's not an advantage in features, it's just that little bit more polished than everything else. Everything works, and works how you'd expect it to. The UI subtly guides you towards doing the right thing. There's nothing you can't do in other clients, but everything's just that little bit better.
aabajian 12y ago
We also just switched from HipChat to Slack. We use JIRA and BitBucket, but had a difficult time with HipChat. It would sometimes drop messages and/or spontaneously disconnect. I find it amusing whenever I drive by their Office Space bill board on the freeway and think to myself, "How many times will I have to send that memo through HipChat before the message gets through?"
JimmyL 12y ago
Do you find them that much better? We're a small HipChat-using company who moved three teams over for a month, and the communal response was "eh?". It's no-doubt prettier and easier to write integrations, but for the core competency of chatting, the two were very similar (and most people preferred the native HipChat apps to the Slack browser one). It's big selling point for us was integration with Google Docs, and in testing we found that it didn't work that well. It's also 3.5x more expensive. In absolute terms that's not much (<$400 a month), but no one could point to $400 of incremental value in it. If we fully embraced it and turned off emails for those teams, would we see it? Maybe, but we'd still need emails to deal with external vendors, and there's no way that we'd get non-developers to see it as an email replacement.

vskarine 12y ago

They are trying to replace all of corporate internal communication channels which includes email so there is some merit to it. While cost of switching is low for a smaller company, it is extremely high for larger corporation especially if they use all sorts of integrations with other products within slack. The more integrations they have the harder it is for competing product to catch up in larger corporations market, which probably provide most of the revenue for the product.

cmp0 12y ago

I agree that the switching costs aren't technical. Maybe for small teams in a startup it's easy to relearn a new product, but don't underestimate the stickiness with large groups of people all using and relying on it. Just think about how many large (& small) organizations still use email even though it's terrible for intra company communication.

themartorana 12y ago
Don't underestimate the stickiness to small teams. We did switch to Slack from HipChat (which was fine) and we love Slack. I imagine a deal of disappointment among the 6 people in our company if we switched to something else - especially something almost Slack. Slack is one of the first companies walking around with a billion dollar valuation that makes me go... "Yeah, maybe..." We use it. We love it. It's mature, well designed, gets improved constantly, and is used by more local businesses I know than not. It provides real, actual benefit to our small organization above and beyond what we pay for it. Slack, to me, is a real product, with a real revenue stream and real value to teams. I really hope they never get bought and acquired or rolled in to a larger organization. The app is a constant joy to use - I can only say that about one other program I use daily.
- JimmyL 12y ago
  Can you highlight a few of the reasons you love it, in comparison to HipChat? When we ended our trial month and announced we were going back to HipChat, the biggest reactions was "OK".
  - lobster_johnson 12y ago
    Multi-team support is a big one. HipChat doesn't let you participate in multiple organizations. When you're doing B2B stuff, or contracting work, or just interfacing with some external team (eg., designers), being able to chat in the same room without having to jump through a bunch of hoops is super important. For me, there is also a bunch of minor detail where Slack wins. Slack just looks better, behaves better with choppy connections, and has better code pasting support. It also does much better with automatic link extraction (HipChat's Linky is annoying and won't let you remove the automatic description). Lastly, Slack has integration playbooks that automatically uses APIs to configure stuff or (when that's not possible) gives you the recipe; for example, the Github and Zendesk integrations will automatically register the app and webhooks for you, almost no manual setup needed. HipChat is all manual. And for the love of God, HipChat, fix your inane emojis. Immature 4Chan memes (trollface etc.) have no place in a business, not even among developers.

stock_toaster 12y ago

The only way I can make sense of it is using logic similar to [this][1]. If I assume VC's consider slack a "force multiplier" for startups, then I can see it raising investments far above the value it provides when viewed standalone. The fact that they already have a popular competitor in the space (hipchat) would normally make such a high valuation seemingly more confusing, but if viewed using the force multiplier logic, maybe less so? There could be concern that having only a single frequently used tool would make it too easy for someone to "own" a startup's lifeblood, so better to have more than one. (similar to github and bitbucket?) I guess the alternative is that slack has some investor specific info about their product pipline where they are pitching other companion tools that work well together, and/or compete more directly with other popular services. Like atlassian/jira or something. [1]: http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm

fnord123 12y ago
Maybe investors are allowed to act as a fly on the wall in conversations. That would explain the value.

mikeg8 12y ago

Switching databases is significantly more painful for a _small_ portion of an organization. Getting a large organization to switch messaging platforms across all team functions probably wouldn't be a seamless as you'd like to imagine.

eitally 12y ago
Indeed. It took us about 4 years after officially switching from AIM to Skype to kill AIM, and then with Gtalk/Hangouts we're just now starting to try to kill Skype.
patmcc 12y ago
Incredibly true; for something as simple and necessary as messaging, the company I work for has: 1. A company-wide and approved solution (proprietary) that's very buggy. 2. A jabber server someone threw together so everyone could use their client or choice. 3. Google chat (through various clients). 4. MSN messenger / Skype. And they all get used by different people for different things. It's very frustrating. Switching to a new thing would be a non-starter, probably (and we couldn't move to Slack anyway, but that's another issue).
SatvikBeri 12y ago
Even at a 100 person company I knew, half the organization used gchat and half used jabber/webex connect. Each side had champions that spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to convert everyone to one platform, and last I checked they still hadn't succeeded.
- hurin 12y ago
  There are gui clients that support both protocols (i.e. I think Pidgin does) - why not just write a plugin that allows to cross-communicate between the two?
  - nemothekid 12y ago
    As time goes on I get more and more disillusioned with solutions that begin with "why not just write". Nothing excites me more than having to think about supporting yet another codebase deployed to non-technical people who will undoubtedly cause more bugs than thought possible and open more JIRA tickets about it with increasingly vague title names. At some point Slack or [integration of choice] is cheaper than having an internal engineering team to write half-baked communication solutions.

mooreds 12y ago

I think that it would be tough to move away from slack because of: Ui knowledge Inertia History. The last is most important--if cultural knowledge over years gets embedded in slack, it will be easy to justify the modest ongoing costs.