Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 730 posts

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#281

Post by meowface »

jchung wrote: post #271
ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

> When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? I challenge you to consider whether your perspective applies to the 99% of people who use Slack that are not developers writing software. For those people, email is often not a place where well-argued discussions happen. It's usually a place where chat-like communication happens, slowly, and in an ill-fitting interface. For non-developers, let's take a operations assoc…

From my experience, in most office jobs, email is primarily used for serious and well-argued discussions concerning projects, business goals, technical details, etc. Software developers really don't use email any differently from IT support, accountants, HR managers, or salespeople. Non-developers generally reserve chit-chat for chat software, just like developers do.

Not sure what it is about HN assuming software devs are somehow intellectually and professionally superior to others.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#282

Post by briandear »

wuliwong wrote: post #265
karlkatzke wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use HipChat. It’s terrible, and it has been a frequent comment that having Slack would help us build better communication culture, because people avoid using hipchat (and use Skype or other platforms instead).

I don't think I've ever used HipChat. What don't you guys like about it?

Sync. I have three computers and an iPhone. If I check a message on one device, it still shows unread on the other devices. It's total crap.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#283

Post by amorphid »

mmanfrin wrote: post #196
ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to…

I don't see any compelling reason to adopt IRC. It does nothing that I care about that Slack doesn't do. If Slack completely implodes, I would search for Slack alternative. If IRC really was my only option, I'd use it just long enough to write a basic alternative myself that replaced or extended IRC w/ the features I really want.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#284

Post by emodendroket »

ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

> I would expect 2018 to be the year where people start questioning the utility of "Slack everywhere" and not blindly jump on the Slack bandwagon because that's what great startups do.

I would not hold my breath.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#285

Post by themagician »

ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

There are two other thing that have happened in the past few years:

• Gchat was effectively deprecated

• AIM is gone

You might be surprised how many companies now use Slack that have NOTHING to do with IT an/or software: everything form PR agencies to manufacturing.

I wouldn't be surprised if half of Slacks user base is now people who were using Gchat or AIM. All the major players who offered free chat basically got out, and Slack was kind of the cheapest cross-platform alternative. Even at the end of it's life million of people still used AIM daily for work, and then it suddenly went kaput.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#286

Post by emodendroket »

mmanfrin wrote: post #196
ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to…

It seems he is in a different camp, specifically the one where you aren't on a chat application all day

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#287

Post by emodendroket »

tomnipotent wrote: post #274
toomuchtodo wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s too bad most of those workflows don’t apply to business use cases. Is it a chat client? A knowledge base? A conference call? A command line? Who knows!

> It’s too bad most of those workflows don’t apply to business use cases. Which is totally why Slack isn't popular with businesses. /s Just because you personally haven't found it useful, doesn't mean hundreds of thousands of other business users haven't.

Businesses pay for a lot of stuff that doesn't work. Simply saying everyone else is doing it is not necessarily convincing.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#289

Post by briandear »

lossolo wrote: post #261
ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

We do not use Slack, we use IRC for direct and fast communication. We do not use it for things that need RFCs and technical specifications, for that we use gitlab and other tools. IRC is great and I am using it for 14+ years already. It's stable, fast, efficient and secure with lots of options. I've written a lot of IRC bots in many languages because protocol is so easy and every language have library/bot for IRC tha…

Can you share an image inline? Can you rapidly search the history? Can you customize alerts? Does it work reliably on mobile? You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC? Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?

Slack is great. I don't need to waste time writing bots because all of the tools I use already have simple integrations: GitHub, Box, DropBox, Intercom, etc. Doing all of that within IRC is a pain. For example: responding to an Intercom conversation from within Slack. I can set up Slack for an org in literally minutes. With IRC? Not literally minutes.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#290

Post by keithnz »

alanfranzoni wrote: post #260
gregmac wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm firmly in the "email has no place in internal discussions whatsoever" camp. Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). E-mail might kick some of this off, or be used to schedule, but that should be it. The problem I think most people run into with the realtim…

Your suggestions may work inside a company. E-mail is the only federated system we've left. If you need to contact somebody outside it, you're screwed. XMPP/Jabber could have solved some of this, but it's pretty dead right now.

I generally agree with greg, and that covers 90% of the cases, for the times where Email is used with external entities, it usually gets dumped into issue tracking / wiki

Most work communication is usually within our issue tracking system

We use slack very lightly,

- most of our conversations are face to face but anumber of remote employees, and slack is used instead of face to face. Often for video calls

- copy pasting things to other people

- a sort of mini internal HN where links are posted to interesting things in the dev world and we discuss

- prodding people "Oi, my PR is still waiting .... " "did you setup ... ?" etc

- telling people where we went to lunch so they can find us.

Post reply on HN