* slack gets paid to take hipchat off atlassian's hands
Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
51–60 of 730 posts
Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
#52What options are left for self-hosted chat systems with comparable features? We've been using self-hosted Hipchat at our company and there is zero chance we will ever use a cloud solution.
A Matrix.org server?
How easy it is to administer channels on Matrix? Like making team-private channels that can't be joined without approval?
Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
#53Hipchat took standard IRC, and added some interface fluff, youtube links, and emojis. They achieved great market footprint. Then Slack starts up later - makes literally the same exact product, and manages to surpass, and eventually subsume Hipchat. Crazy.
HipChat had some major uptime issues. I have friends who experienced whole day outages at their companies.
I hear a lot of people on HN say it was "Just IRC" and I'm always surprised by that. If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off? Why did Slack have a meteoric rise? It can't be for no good reason.
I think the answer is that the interface fluff they added is actually extremely important and valuable. They made it dead simple, and fun to use for EVERYONE. My limited experience with IRC was honestly not great (please don't kill me, I'm sorry). Where is the mobile app? How do I get notified when I'm not online? What is EFNet/Freenode/etc? I use a slash command and paste my password in plain text to login? I can't just paste an image?
Social apps are extremely difficult to get right. People seem to discount "silly" things like Emoji reactions. Honestly it DOES sound silly to say this, but it really is a great way to express and communicate. This is especially true for our large and diverse team. It also cuts down a TON of message spam ("Congrats!", "Yay!" etc)
Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
#54Am I the only one who sees this as anti-competitive? This is basically collusion - Atlassian agreeing not to compete in chat in return for a payment from Slack. It almost seems like we're intent on making literally every mistake we made with traditional businesses, but with electronic products.
Despite slack being quite popular and truly a good product, Microsoft still has the upper hand. If you have the "Microsoft Suite" you get everything, access to all their products. Slack is fighting an uphill battle against Microsoft and eliminating Atlassian will help.
Dividing those who aren't diehard Microsoft fans won't help.
How is anything aside from legal infiltration going to make the playing field any less competitive? If we're all still playing by the same rules, there is still competition.
Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
#55Am I the only one who sees this as anti-competitive? This is basically collusion - Atlassian agreeing not to compete in chat in return for a payment from Slack. It almost seems like we're intent on making literally every mistake we made with traditional businesses, but with electronic products.
It's certainly IS anticompetitive.
Anticompetitive practices aren't illegal though. They are only illegal if a company has a monopoly or has significant market power.
Now, the question we have to ask is is Slack a near monopoly in it's marketspace? Maybe. I could see the argument go either way.
Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
#56What options are left for self-hosted chat systems with comparable features? We've been using self-hosted Hipchat at our company and there is zero chance we will ever use a cloud solution.
Out of interest, why would you guys never use a cloud solution? Sensitive conversations? Server reliability?
Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
#57I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.
What would you recommend instead of Jira?
Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
#58It's a smart move from Atlassian, Slack is a superior product with an huge mind-share. Most of the time companies stick with their own products as if they were a sacred cow no matter the costs.
Well, I wouldn't say Slack is a superior product necessarily. Stride had some really great ideas, like focus management and designating decisions out of discussions.
Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
#59Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
#60Of course, in an ideal world, the obvious technical flaws in chat products would easily enable competitors to “take on” the broken ones. Why does it seem so hard to get chat right? Heck, Yahoo Messenger had lots of features in about year 2000 that we still lack or struggle with in newer products?
Hi there, I'm currently building out some chat-based groupware and also feel like we've gone backwards since 2000.
Can you humor me with some nostalgia and tell me what features of Yahoo Messenger you used?