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Slack Platform Launch

slackhq.com

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Re: Slack Platform Launch

#171

Post by splatcollision »

Xylakant wrote: post #140
stanleydrew wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 workin…

Realtime threaded conversations is a need?

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#172

Post by yoz-y »

FatalBaboon wrote: post #168
babuskov wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why you were down-voted. It's the truth. Now, to answer why is it so hard to understand? Many people here are programmers/engineers and fail to understand how marketing and nice packaging can sell. Especially if they are old enough to know how IRC works. To extend what you wrote, I'd compare Slack with iPhone. All the tech. to build the iPhone was there, but Apple managed to put it all together in beau…

I think you're missing cromwellian's point: you could have made the same thing while upholding open values. For example if it was a rich client based on IRC, I could join in on a chat without being a slack customer. I could also be a customer of a competitor that would offer something similar, but more tailored to my usage. Now that would move the chat ecosystem further. But that is not happening, because Slack's bus…

But then you would need to handle all the trouble that come from multiple clients. What if somebody makes a CLI client that does not support file transfers? The experience of official client's users would be worse because now they can't be sure that the other side can do the same things they do.

If the protocol were to be upgraded then one would have to wait for all of the vendors to support the new features or we would end up working with the common denominator. Real world examples are hardly scarce, we see this thing in the open web with myriad (semi-) proprietary extensions. Samsung has also hard time getting developer support for their unique features.

In the end, the end users would suffer because of inconsistencies. Open platforms are good, but in my opinion they will always lag in user experience behind well executed proprietary solutions.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#174

Post by wstrange »

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…

I see Google using Slack for things like the Dart and Kubernetes projects. I understand the ease of use aspect (Slack is quite nice) - but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable.

Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#176

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

beyondcompute wrote: post #101

Why not fix all the bugs that are there before lunching new products/features?

Something that's in the middle between a bug and a missing feature (imho) is that Slack's failure to support Github-style markdown.

GitHub does a great job with markdown, especially with programming-language-specific highlighting. And even things like strike-though text and URL's, which aren't specific to software development.

It's one of the few aspects of Slack that has me open to alternative services.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#178

Post by brightball »

I summarize Slack this way generally:

- If you've never used Hipchat, Slack is completely revolutionary. - If you've used Hipchat, Slack is still cool...and then you see the price comparison and ponder...WHY?

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#179

Post by asbromberg »

Interesting, could this be the beginning of something like WeChat for businesses, where every business function you think of can just be completed on Slack? I doubt there's anything about the U.S. market that makes these non-open / corporation controlled platforms undesirable (as some other comments suggest); after all, Windows dominates the business landscape. Its just a question of whether Slack can go from convincing start ups x,y and z to use these apps, to convincing Fortune 500 companies to take the plunge.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#180

Post by oddvar »

dvdplm wrote: post #159
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…

> a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. As a startup founder – chatlio.com – betting on the Slack "platform" I have to say that it feels pretty great to know that they are not planning on cutting us off tomorrow morning... :) Might happen anyway of course, but this announcement means we can work somewhat more serenely for a while longer. I see this as a kind of "stability ple…

Hey, have you looked at https://matrix.org? If you build on us, you don't have to fear ever being cut off - we're completely open source and free! We do also have a slack-bridge, and we're building more bridges - our goal is interoperability rather than isolated silos!
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