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Slack Platform Launch

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Re: Slack Platform Launch

#131

Post by tedivm »

rfrank wrote: post #55
radlad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are right, a lot of companies would walk away from that pretty quickly as long as it's a third party thing. Github launching it's self hosted enterprise is what really enabled it to reach the larger companies, as they tend not to trust their valuable data to exist outside of their control.

Slack has said before that they're going to release a self hosted version at some point, so they have to know this is true. I think it makes sense for them to focus on the larger market (personal use and the SMB sector) for now though, even though the enterprise market will really make them money, because it's a much lower pressure space where they can afford to experiment.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#132

Post by lwf »

rfrank wrote: post #118
bobjordan wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a contract manufacturing company in China, had similar concerns. We implemented an open source Slack alternative that runs on our own server. Project is called Zulip --> https://github.com/zulip/zulip

I feel like I came across that as I was weighing the various options for us to try haha. Zulip is the kind of thing I'd love to give a shot, but I have to take into account people who won't be tech savvy enough to use something like that. Therein lies Slack's value to us. At the end of the day, Slack is really useful, but I just don't see its use getting expanded much. At least for us. There's lots of stuff that just…

(Zulip committer here) Definitely agree that user onboarding could use some work, feel free to send feedback.

hn-username @zulip.org , or https://groups.google.com/group/zulip-devel

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#133

Post by kentonv »

deathanatos wrote: post #119
kentonv wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

The "How It works" wasn't bad. But nonetheless: does it distribute itself (and my data) to multiple VMs? If it needs a kernel patch, does it appropriately plan downtimes and/or shed load from that VM before applying the patch and rebooting the instance? Does it handle machine failure?

We actually have tools to do all of that -- high-availability / fault tolerance / load balancing, entirely transparent to users, admins, and apps -- which we use to run Sandstorm Oasis, our paid managed hosting service. We are working on productizing these tools to sell to "enterprise" customers.

For individual users and small companies, single-machine Sandstorm is pretty reliable, but it's true we don't automate kernel updates yet (which will require scheduling reboots for off-hours). We'll add that eventually.

(Sorry for all the vaporware.)

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#134

Post by chinathrow »

danmaz74 wrote: post #110
stanleydrew wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upvoted, but I don't think I agree. There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is proprietary. Twilio is proprietary. It's not as if it's hard to find examples. And so what if some small team implements an auto responder bot and gets a couple hundred thousand in investment?

One difference is that with AWS you're the paying customer and have leverage. With FB or Slack, you're a non-paying "partner" and your leverage is almost null.

Same as with Twitter; remember Meerkat and firehose access as examples.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#135

Post by oskarth »

cromwellian wrote: post #104

Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because…

While you are right that it's very similar to IRC etc you are completely missing the fundamental reason Slack et al are popular: user experience, especially for non-technical people.

Not everyone grew up on IRC with bouncers, irssi on a remote server, and their own server where they could upload attachments to in a single keystroke.

Now it's true that there are new alternatives for non-technical people such as IRCCloud, but (a) it costs money for individuals (b) it's frankly not as good, UX-wise. Hence not as popular.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#136

Post by Freak_NL »

chopete wrote: post #112

It is yammer all over again http://i.imgur.com/DKODqy3.png I can't help but post this based on my experience pitching to vendors to join an app store. Slack CEO: Yammer made $1.2B. We need to make $12B. For that I need to make a hit song with 10,000 background dancers with me on the stage. Board: How much can you pay each dancer?. CEO: $10/hr Board: Ok. Announce an App Store. You are already a hero and there are hund…

We were looking at a company communication channel to replace Yammer and Google Chat a while back, and briefly played with Slack. In the end trading in one cloud service for another seemed unwise.

Because we already used self-hosted GitLab when they announced the inclusion of MatterMost (FOSS self-hosted alternative to Slack) we simply activated that and have been quite satisfied with it.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#137

Post by jclulow »

stanleydrew wrote: post #127
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not making fair comparisons. FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere. AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and othe…

Fair enough. See my sibling comment about Salesforce and Github which I think are better examples. Or the iOS and Android platforms. My point is that we have certain implicit biases (I too hate FB and Salesforce as platforms) but those biases aren't really based on some kind of general principle that "proprietary platforms are always bad and dangerous". Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and…

A trustworthy company is always one "being acquired by Oracle" away from becoming an untrustworthy, belligerent rent-seeker. Any dependency on another company for your own business must be considered a risk to be managed.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#138

Post by ex3ndr »

stanleydrew wrote: post #128
cromwellian wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store. The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time. If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IR…

Yeah it's a shame XMPP turned out to be unable to keep up with the shift from desktop to mobile. Maybe we should take a crack at a more modern alternative?

We are trying to make so at Actor (https://actor.im).

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#139

Post by wh-uws »

oskarth wrote: post #135
cromwellian wrote: post #104

Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because…

While you are right that it's very similar to IRC etc you are completely missing the fundamental reason Slack et al are popular: user experience, especially for non-technical people. Not everyone grew up on IRC with bouncers, irssi on a remote server, and their own server where they could upload attachments to in a single keystroke. Now it's true that there are new alternatives for non-technical people such as IRCClo…

THANK YOU. This is why slack is winning. They took many of the concepts of what makes irc great abd put a much better user experience on top.

Why is that so hard for people to understand?

This happens over and over again.

- Google wasn't the first search engine. - Facebook wasn't the first social network. - Microsoft didn't build the first operating system.

They all just did it in a way that appealed to mass amounts of users.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#140

Post by Xylakant »

stanleydrew wrote: post #120
gkop wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am bullish on Slack and am with you right until "wiped out email." I've heard this said about Slack before and don't get it. Asana is a real email killer in that it's both realtime (instant) and structured (i.e. it wholly replaces email threads ). On a meta level, why is it that it's so important for Slack's marketing that they "replace email"? Why isn't it enough for them to "go beyond email" (which is totally…

I don't know whether it's important for Slack's marketing to claim they are replacing email. What I can tell you is that it factually has wiped out internal email for our team at Charge. And I think that's pretty common for most teams that have used it. Why write a slow clunky old email when a Slack message will do?

> Why write a slow clunky old email when a Slack message will do?

Because email is threaded conversations, while slack is not. I can write 5 different emails and respond to each thread individually, but I can't do that in slack: I can write 5 messages, but my peer(s) can't answer each one individually - they can just write 5 messages and I have to figure out what they respond to.

Email has the added benefit of working nicely when you're on a connection that's not always available (mobile, traveling, etc.) I can write the message and have it sent later, download all messages and read (and answer) them without a connection. Slack (and other chat applications) just falls flat on it's face when the connection drops from time to time.

Now, all of that might be properties that you don't need because you're never traveling and always on the same schedule, so that you're able to answer questions in real time - but don't assume that's true for everyone.

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