The fund is a great play for Slack to become the next enterprise app store. A welcome alternate to the Salesforce AppExchange IMO.
Slack Platform Launch
51–60 of 226 posts
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#522 points: 1. Remember when Dropbox was dumb, because rsync? (Bunch of naysayers here citing fee alternatives). From what I'm seeing, bots and integrations are great and here to stay. Businesses will gladly pay money in exchange for time and complexity not spent rolling your own. 2. This seems like a boon for us happy slack users!
Will somebody please explain the use cases for slack bots to me? If they are basically glorified command line scripts, the I get it. But are there genuine and important use cases that require/can benefit from a richer dialogue?
There's a pretty good talk on "chatops" by the guys at GitHub[0]. Basically, it provides a dialog around a "shared command-line" where developers from learn from each other by simply watching chat. I think it's more beneficial to distributed companies.
However, my question for those using chatops is basically how do you keep the repository for the bot "tame"? It needs access to _everything_ if you want it to be useful, which means having lots of secrets exposed to the bot.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#53The fund is a great play for Slack to become the next enterprise app store. A welcome alternate to the Salesforce AppExchange IMO.
Interesting idea. I love the thought of integrating everything over to a text chat interface as opposed to salesforce's godawful web UI.
I really like! I'm imagining, say accounting integrations which are cryptographically signed by the accounting software and go into a channel.
I bet I'll be paying for an enterprise inside-the-firewall version of slack in the next few years, or wrestling with some competitor that's not quite as good, one way or the other.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less than 30 minutes for your tech team. 1) Install Sandstorm (curl https://install.sandstorm.io | bash) 2) Install Rocket Chat (one click) 3) Set up a domain. Done Regarding maintenance: I set it up 2 months ago and it's still running smoothly.
This is how long it takes to spin something like this up, but you're forgetting maintenance, domain knowledge, internal documentation, etc. People underestimate the costs of "rolling your own" or even going FOSS. It's absolutely never "set it and forget it." Most of these services that charge nominal fees ($5 - $100/mo) are interesting because you don't have to control your own support procedure and ostensibly they'r…
> It's absolutely never "set it and forget it."
Have you tried Sandstorm? It is in fact designed to be "set it and forget it" -- that's a major goal of the project. Everything auto-updates, you never have to edit config files, it can configure DNS and fetch/renew SSL certificates automatically, installing new apps takes one click, etc.
(Disclosure: I'm the lead developer.)
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine question -- how how is it been a revelation? It seems to be very similar to HipChat, which was just an iteration on previous chat systems.
The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot. The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
"Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company..."
Why would you ever want to entrust a log of everything in your company to a third party service? Honestly curious.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#562 points: 1. Remember when Dropbox was dumb, because rsync? (Bunch of naysayers here citing fee alternatives). From what I'm seeing, bots and integrations are great and here to stay. Businesses will gladly pay money in exchange for time and complexity not spent rolling your own. 2. This seems like a boon for us happy slack users!
Will somebody please explain the use cases for slack bots to me? If they are basically glorified command line scripts, the I get it. But are there genuine and important use cases that require/can benefit from a richer dialogue?
Some of it is contexual, at my last office, everyone was on slack even though we weren't a software company. The execs used a bot (Birdly maybe? I wasn't that involved) to track their expenses. Previously it was up to each exec to keep paper receipts, input them manually into a spreadsheet and submit it to our accounting department. Afterwards, they just shot a picture of each expense and let the slackbot manage it, submit for approvals for big expense and deliver it to accounting at the end of every month.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#57I don't think it's reasonable to say we're in a bubble because of a $80M fund around developing for a new platform. Few companies truly become platforms, and it's a misnomer to call it a bubble if this only happens to one company. It takes a lot of money or momentum to develop one. Facebook had by far the most compelling one in the last ten years, and the obvious incentive there was it's >300M users at the time. The case is less compelling for a B2B platform like Slack, but it makes sense as many of these investors also invest in B2B startups that can gain huge visibility through the Slack platform.
By having six investors in the fund, each fund can mitigate risk of Slack's platform not getting traction while lowering the barrier for developers to enter. This slideshow by A16Z outlines why the venture capitalists (including some on the list of Slack fund contributors) are tightening their belts around investing and telling companies like Slack to generate reliable business models rather than IPO prematurely.
This premature IPO behavior was the reason for the last bubble, and I think this investment fund is proof that we are NOT in a bubble. The new strategy for these investment funds is to allow their startups to generate revenue on a much more stable basis without the need to go public (and get cash for equity) for this to happen. Most B2B companies would eventually benefit from a recurring-fees model built around the Slack platform, and this enables smaller, fledging companies to scale much more quickly towards long-term cashflow positivity.
In all, the kings of tech companies are those that find some sort of platform or natural monopoly. Slack may be next in line to follow Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, and Google respectively. Overall, by allowing a method to build these platforms while not going public, investors increase returns for their companies in the short AND LONG term while maintaining a course of innovation!
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slack makes a ton of money and it is unimaginable to me (and many others) that it's not going to be a massive force. It has been a revelation to literally every entrepreneur I know - and I'm from Virginia not SV (although I recently moved to NYC - same deal). Now that it has established itself beyond almost any doubt, its INVESTORS have established an $80M bet around those who make the company a core component of the…
Genuine question -- how how is it been a revelation? It seems to be very similar to HipChat, which was just an iteration on previous chat systems.
For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire.
Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always works how I want. I don't know if I'd call it a "revelation", but it's way better than any comparable product I've used.
[0] - I think HipChat recently added support for more granular notification settings, but I don't use it anymore. Also, it took over 3 years of this being their 1st or 2nd most requested feature before they addressed it, so I don't give them any credit for having it now.
[1] - They might get an email depending on their settings, but the HipChat app would never give a notification.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#592 points: 1. Remember when Dropbox was dumb, because rsync? (Bunch of naysayers here citing fee alternatives). From what I'm seeing, bots and integrations are great and here to stay. Businesses will gladly pay money in exchange for time and complexity not spent rolling your own. 2. This seems like a boon for us happy slack users!
I hear that about Dropbox all the time, but honestly I don't remember a lot of nay-saying when it first came out. What I DO remember is the crap sync-ware before it, around 2000-2001.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hipchat is awful and Slack is phenomenal. I mean I know that probably isn't what you want to hear but it's so hard to describe it any other way. UX/integrations/apps/speed/etc might all be the answer but it was visceral for me.
At least on Windows slack has pretty terrible performance. I wish i could go back to hipchat. I regularly experience perceptible lag when typing, which doesn't happen anywhere else. EDIT: This is a fairly recent problem. A month or two ago, I had never experienced this.
Not recent. May have gotten worse, but last I tried it was heavier than hangouts; yeah, text chat chewing up more cpu than streaming video. Pretty rough.
Folks on Macs had no idea what I was complaining about though. Go fig.