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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#461

Post by u801e »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #308
briandear wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Dro…

I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences." The parent comment really captures the additional use-cases which make Slack much more productive for developers discussing code.

> I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences."

Most IRC clients support unicode. Also, I've never had an issue just using an internal pastebin to share code-snippets with other devs. If we needed to work on code together, we would use an application like remote desktop or a shared screen session.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#462

Post by halostatue »

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…

Hipchat actually outperformed Slack for my team in every respect, with three exceptions (all of which were supposed to be solved by Stride):

1. No markdown support and half-assed code highlighting support. 2. No (real) message editing. 3. Silly parenthesis based emoji.

Its search is better than Slack’s; its performance is better than Slack’s; its integrations are better than Slack’s; its client memory and CPU usage are better than Slack’s (whether in a tab or as a real, native app); its group video chat is better than Slack’s (does Slack even have video chat integrated, with screen sharing?). Most importantly for us, its price was 4x better than Slack’s all while offering better features, performance, etc. The only thing it didn’t win out on was hype. (It should also be noted that HipChat could also be bought in a self-hosted configuration, which allowed for HIPAA compliance, something that Slack won’t even bother competing on. I didn’t need it, but hey, it matters to some people.)

Slack is an overpriced distraction monkey. They’re selling it like it’s the whole enchilada, but it’s a damned feature bullet. I personally cannot wait until Slack is dead, because it’s the worst chat service I’ve ever used (and I love full-featured integrations).

Now, I have to find a replacement for HipChat that won’t cost us US$200 per month for our office (if we pay a year in advance, more if we don’t).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#463

Post by denimnerd »

tigershark wrote: post #385
Thkejehd wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you used Linux? I installed Ubuntu on a Dell lappy provided by work, everything just worked and it required less tweaking than osx would have for serious SWE work.

I heard the same luring song for the last 20 or so years. If Linux works for you then enjoy it. Don’t even try to suggest that Linux is easier than Mac OS X because I don’t like liars.

it's easier for development. os x sucks, I use it to surf the web on my ouch. my real dev machine is in my office with linux

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#464

Post by u801e »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #186
__sr__ wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setup an old faishoned IRC server?

One of the main benefits of Slack (to me, at least) is persistence, which you don't get from IRC. If I'm not connected to Slack, or even a member of a Slack channel - I can connect/join the channel and be able to get all of the history back to the beginning of the channel (or whatever Slack's limitation is). This makes it very easy to jump into the middle of a conversation and not worry you've missed some important c…

Years ago, my company used an internally hosted XMPP server. When you joined a group chat from another client, it would replay messages that were sent while you weren't connected (or possibly some fixed time period of messages).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#465

Post by tiny-dancer »

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…

Not a slack user but an avid fan of our persistent chat tool for a central place on with alerting and deployment approvals where you can immediately dive into meaningful conversations about either.

Slacks API and number of systems with built in integrations blows the competition away.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#466

Post by ghein »

solatic wrote: post #233
ghein wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the only way to run a business. Everyone has different needs, different existing environments, different service expectations+++ So you can't effectively stick to one price for the "large" tier. Given the differences in complexity and capacity consultants are needed. Startups can't build in-house service teams - the economics are misaligned. Not that you can get away from consultants if you buy from Salesforce,…

See my response to sparkling. Part of what enabled Atlassian to get as big as they have is transparent pricing. A customer can always negotiate down from a list price, can always negotiate for additional support during setup and migration. But that transparent pricing establishes a price ceiling that drives a lot of internal discussion and decision over which solution gets the first move in terms of reaching out to s…

The challenge in building Enterprise SaaS is that you don't know what the right price ceiling is or how to differentiate your customers & products. You need to charge enough to have a business and not too much to scare people away.

Since there aren't that many true enterprises that will allow you to test public prices like you can with consumer and SMB products, you have to go private.

The political dynamics you mention apply to developer pull products but you can easily fix that by calling or sending an email. In many Enterprise cases you want to talk to a VP or CXO for a full deployment and the free and medium offers cover the developer pull demand. If you really don't want to talk to sales AND you can spend $500k+ a year, you're a very rare case.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#467

Post by sams99 »

jawilson2 wrote: post #258
apple4ever wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already). We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.

For us at Discourse we find Mattermost perfectly acceptable as a chat program.

10 second load times and slow/wrong notifications have not been a problem for us at all.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#468

Post by Lazare »

csydas wrote: post #80
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.

I mean this without being tongue in cheek, but Teams itself is anti-competitive. It's a horrible product which is basically only in use because it's bundled into Office 365. Absolutely nothing in Teams is not done better in other products, including Microsoft's own products such as Skype for Business or plain old Skype. Business chats in general are just completely incongruent with what users are expecting from end-u…

> Absolutely nothing in Teams is not done better in other products, including Microsoft's own products such as Skype for Business or plain old Skype.

I haven't tried Teams yet, but I struggle to imagine how anything could be worse than the current state of Skype for Business and still function even minimally.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#469

Post by mtremsal »

tabbott wrote: post #414
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…

Because just about every technical team needs the ability to do some sort of real-time communication, and Slack's UI is obviously better polished than the products that predate it (HipChat/IRC/etc). If you're looking for a product built by top MIT engineers who spent years thinking about how to make chat actually productive, check out Zulip. I'm one of those MIT engineers, and I agree that Slack is a huge waste of ti…

A Julia Evans cartoon is high praise indeed. Good for you!

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#470

Post by tommoor »

alienreborn wrote: post #220
core-questions wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this: - Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it. - Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from…

Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use wha…

We've been working on an open source solution for this, if you're interested - markdown or wysiwygy based editing with a hosted option – http://getoutline.com/
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