191–200 of 301 posts
I've been using skype for text messaging pretty constantly for the last 3 years, and I'm not sure why people hate it so. it has groups, 1-1 chat and video. Searching history can be a bit of a pain, but everything else seems to be there. Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing.
Doesn't really give an edge to Slack since their search is awful as well.
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> I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. This reminds me a lot of HN dismissing Dropbox on the original show HN or something: "We have git, rsync, FTP. We can hack something like this together in an afternoon." Except that was before Dropbox went ahead to become a huge success. This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]
It's not about what can be done, it's about prior art. I've used xmpp chats with a couple of clients since well before slack and I'd struggle to think of a feature in slack that I hadn't used before.
When Steve Jobs "Welcomed IBM" with a full page ad, it was fun. It fit the vibe of who he was and the slightly rebellious marketing campaigns Apple was running. Slack's "Welcome Microsoft" letter felt weird. It felt disconnected from the company and product many of us love and use every day. Might have been stronger to silently add a feature to Slack that lets you communicate with Microsoft Team's members.
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Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love…
> Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I wouldn't even credit them with that. 20 minutes ago I yet again pressed up-arrow to scroll up one line to see a message off the top of the page and yet again it dropped me into an editing prompt for my last message. What? And then there's the click-click-click of jumping between channels to see the latest messages, instead of having some form of summary.…
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Have you ever looked at Discord? Slack isn't the only choice if you want a nice UI that works on all of your devices. https://discordapp.com/
No, but from looking at it now that's likely because they've targeted themselves towards more informal (game) voice chat. It actually looks like it could be a good contender in this space if they decided to not only compare themselves to voice chat systems[1] (Skype, Ventrilo, Teamspeak), and didn't specifically market to gamers. That is, assuming the service is good, since I haven't tried it. 1: https://discordapp.c…
They still need some polishing, but once they fix some bugs and add good support for history and searching, I think it'll be fantastic.
Our entire company switched to Slack within basically a day. While that's a big selling point for Slack's ease of use, it also means it'd be easy to switch away to a competitor within a day too.
It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995. Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need l…
The fun thing is that Microsoft bought the product back in 2007 and sold it again pretty quickly but not before taking a bunch of the code and using it in their own group chat product (never as effectively as the original app, perhaps until now Slack have come along and shown them how valuable a product like that can be...)
It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995. Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need l…
Not only that, on those days doing an IRC like server and chat client was a common programming exercise at the network programming classes on the university I attending.
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They provided a ton of value by bringing things together, by making everything easy and work intuatively. I guess my point is I think too many people are indeed dismissing slack as being lucky, or just pushing with heavy marketing, when I think they actually did something of value we can learn from.
But what would you say about HipChat or other competitors? Why didn't HipChat win? Was there a critical feature they missed or botched? Providing value is not the whole story. That's why I begin looking for alternative factors -- like luck and circumstance.
The thing keeping HipChat going in the face of Slack is that Slack can't be used on-premises, which is HUGE for an extremely large percentage of business.
HipChat hasn't improved as fast as Slack because they haven't needed to-- since no HIPAA-compliant business (to give just one example) can use Slack at all, the two products don't really compete with each other currently.
That doesn't apply to this new Microsoft solution, which will probably kill-off HipChat long before it kills off Slack. Unless Atlassian really gets their butt moving and starts improving their product.
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>What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I don't think they even do that well, it's a complete nightmare finding anything on slack beyond the last 24 hours. What Slack did well was branding and marketing.
I haven't met a single person (unless they were ~really~ non technical) that enjoyed using slack. It never works the way I expect it to work, and very simple things that you can do within IRC takes multiple steps in Slack.
I am also a remote software engineer who have been working on distributed teams for the past 8 years. I've tried a bunch of different things to collaborate remotely, including IRC. Your mileage may vary.