Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#101

Post by certifiedloud » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 8:59 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #66

Well, thanks to this today I learned that Microsoft had a product called Teams. I didn't see anybody using it but I saw plenty of people using Slack. Maybe is Team addressed to big companies? My customers are all medium or small. Does anyone here have some experience using Teams? Is it really in competition with Slack?

I use Teams at work. Rumor has it that we are switching (back) to Slack, and I cannot wait. Teams is terrible. The UI is sluggish, and the UX is unintuitive to the point that it almost feels intentionally confusing.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#102

Post by fernandotakai » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #27

kidfiji wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't have a problem with it, but a lot of people have a problem with it taking up a bit of system resources, primarily ram.

Thanks! The only Electron app I use is Visual Studio Code and it works great so was curious. (Crazy btw that I get downvoted to oblivion within seconds for asking an honest question.)

an example -- i currently have 3 workspaces on my slack client (on linux) and it's currently using 500mb of RAM, which is insane for a chat client. the only thing using more ram is firefox with literally 25 tabs, including gmail's inbox and pocketcasts playing a podcast (~1gb).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#103

Post by ggg9990 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #12

slivym wrote: post #4

Am 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.

"Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.”"

Really surprised that a CEO would make a comment like that on the record.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#104

Post by ggg9990 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #55

slivym wrote: post #4

Am 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.

Not really, Teams is half as large and growing much faster because it’s glued to the side of Office 365.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#105

Post by freehunter » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

badbug wrote: post #65

mehblahwhatevs wrote: post #3

> Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.” Strange quote.

Yeah, a rare glimpse into how these execs actually think. I'm suprised the pr people let this through their filters.

I agree completely, that's a terrible statement for an executive to make and PR should have stopped that. But on the other hand, I can almost see the logic in it. I'm making a huge leap here, but I remember back in the early 2000s, I had some friends who used AIM. I had some friends who used MSN. I had some friends who used ICQ. I had some friends who used Yahoo. These different chat services were really all exactly the same, the only difference is you can't chat between AIM and MSN. I don't care which chat service "wins", I just want all my friends using one so I don't have to sign into fifteen different services just to communicate.

In that situation, Adium or Trillian or various third party clients were basically required if you had any sizable group of friends. Just standardizing on one chat platform would have been better than everyone making their own, since they weren't really competing to make anything better. They just existed, and all did exactly the same thing and were incompatible with each other.

The question is, does Slack differ from Hipchat differ from Teams in any meaningful way, and does Hipchat disappearing actually make a difference when Slack exists? I honestly don't know the answer.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#106

Post by hiccuphippo » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

mdeeks wrote: post #53

optimusclimb wrote: post #5

Hipchat 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. Th…

My Linux user group used to hangout in IRC until 3 or 4 years ago when little by little we stopped joining the channel. Some of us tried IRC clients for smartphone and it was a lousy experience.

Until one day someone created a Telegram group. Now we are all there, the conversation might not be as fluid as IRC, each is in their own timezone, but it is there.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#107

Post by solatic » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate.

Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path?

Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thing to sell off Stride, it isn't doing well, work with Slack to have some kind of automated migration made available and let customers flip the switch. Maybe if Slack were to keep supporting Hipchat on-prem, or provide a migration path to a new Slack on-prem product, that'd be fine. But to leave HipChat on-prem customers out in the cold?

What's the next Atlassian on-prem product to get thrown under the bus? Bamboo for sure, it's been unpopular relative to Jenkins almost since its beginning. It's definitely surprising that Fisheye/Crucible get any support any more, or Crowd for that matter. But why not Confluence on-prem too? Do we have to worry that Atlassian will stop supporting Confluence on-prem in eight months because Office 365 keeps gaining marketshare?

Atlassian's continued long-term support for minor on-prem products was one of the signals that said, if you pay up for HipChat on-prem, we'll support you long-term, you'll be fine. Atlassian completely shattered that with this announcement and eroded a lot of trust that enterprises were putting in them. Big shot in the foot here.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#108

Post by janwh » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

Gosh, I hope there will be a #MovingToMattermost movement coming. This feels like a dangerous move to me, and bad for the market, competitiveness, and users. One more thing the tech world does not need right now, is even further increasing its reliance on a single service (and even more so one with a mediocre track record of uptime).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#109

Post by qznc » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 9:02 PM UTC

andreineculau wrote: post #77

qabqabaca wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you recommend instead of Jira?

Stick to github issues or similar. Whatever is closer to the real work and gives you the biggest bang for the buck. Not the most wet dream. You do not need a gazillion of workflows and checks and stories and epics and boards etc. "Keep it simple, stupid"

What I like is to specify dependencies. Unfortunately, the simple ones (Github, Gitlab, Trac) don't have that feature.

The Jira we use at work has gone overboard. There is too many ways to specify and people are confused. For example, we have "blocks" (B cannot be finished without A closed) and "follows" (B cannot be started without A closed).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#110

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

dawhizkid wrote: post #85

Interesting. I worked at a healthcare tech startup last year and the reason why we had to use Hipchat is because the self-hosted Hipchat Server was HIPAA-compliant and Slack does not have a HIPAA-compliant self-hosted option. Have no idea what they're going to do (or anyone who needs to comply with stricter regulatory guidelines that prevents use of cloud-based messaging apps).

[deleted]