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

611–620 of 730 posts

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#611

Post by nyconyco »

arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #607
nyconyco wrote: post #580

Hey all here, So I observe that lots of team chat users seem lost and don't what to do anymore. The problem with alternative Open Source team chats attempts is that they are just another silo, or walled garden. Instances do not talk to each other. A private island cannot join continent. Even within the same organisations plenty of incompatible team chats are used competitively, fragmenting the workforces. We propose…

Your landing page takes five hundred years to load. If you cannot do well such a simple thing as landing page, how do you have any courage to promote your actual product, which is much, much more complex than a single page? If anything, all your marketing pamphlets are now working against you, not increasing confidence in your product, but rather decreasing it. Perhaps you should do your best first, then hijack threa…

Yes, you are right, thanks for noticing and reporting, the landing page is slow these days, because under load, you guessed ;-)

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#612

Post by nyconyco »

brey wrote: post #557
it33 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mattermost CEO here. We're thinking of offering a special package for HipChat customers who want to stay on-prem using Mattermost. It's perhaps a mix of services, migration/import assistance and possibly a discount to our commercial version. Would such a package be interesting? For anyone who'd like to discuss outside of HN, please feel free to mail us at info at mattermost.com

Yes, I'd be interested. We're evaluating Slack, MS Teams and Mattermost as a successor to Hipchat. Something to move the needle commercially in favour of on-premise would be helpful in that evaluation.

You will be soon able to evaluate Nayego as well: https://nayego.net/ you can subscribe if you want to see the preview.

Nayego is an open source and open standard team chat, that is federated/distributed/decentralised.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#613

Post by derefr »

solatic wrote: post #107

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 thi…

> 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?

Ahem:

    Bond: You expect me to [use RocketChat or Matrix]?

    Atlassian: No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to die.
If Atlassian are killing this "wing" of their HipChat business, it must have not been a very large money-maker for them. The market for this kind of product is dying, in other words. Along with the companies who refuse to re-evaluate the threat-surface of moving their communications to the cloud.

Look at it this way: IBM uses Slack. That means that 1. they researched the security threat model and were okay with using it for their own internal data; and 2. they managed to convince all their clients that those clients' internal data, and those clients' customers' PII, would be fine being passed over Slack. That's a pretty large argument, in my mind, for the idea that there's nothing about Slack that disqualifies it from even the crustiest dinosaur of a corporation's requirements. To mangle a phrase: "Nobody ever offended a conservative regulator by copying IBM's choices."

Or do you have security requirements that IBM—in its professional-services interactions with a whole ecosystem of clients, including banks and government agencies—doesn't? If so, maybe you need something on-prem.

Even then, though, you realize that you can just not put the critical stuff directly into Slack, without much impact on your workflow, right? If you're e.g. an investment firm, doing BI and quantitative analysis over tons of data, you can still talk over Slack while keeping the actual data to your Intranet. When you want to refer to the data in the chat, you paste the link to the (Intranet-hosted) data into the channel. Slack can't visit the link, but you can. Isn't that enough for... pretty much any use-case?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#614

Post by paulie_a »

rb808 wrote: post #277
solatic wrote: post #107

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 thi…

Skype for Business, works on prem. Matrix is probably good too. Confluence can be installed on prem already.

I consider Skype to be a dead product at this point.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#616

Post by paulie_a »

philwelch wrote: post #200
mmanfrin wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

Email has unfortunately become "I don't check it or care anymore"

I am flooded with automated notifications that basically are "who gives a shit". I think the main reason I use email is for password reset. When you receive 1-2 thousand emails of non-spam but still unimportant cruft, it gets ignored or overlooked.

Email is pretty much dead to me as a meaningful way to communicate.

Sidenote: the term "ping me" needs to go away.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#617

Post by yoz-y »

tozeur wrote: post #588
tabbott wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you really have to mention your “MIT” education twice to convince us that you solved a relatively simple UI problem?

I don't think it is a simple problem. Much like TODOs, everybody has their opinion about how a chat app should behave. Zulip seems fine, but it's not that unique either, there is also Twist and I can imagine that many of the other competitors do too. Note that Slack has threads too but they are different, Google Chat also has threads but they are not named.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#618

Post by qaq »

ghein wrote: post #466
solatic wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ment…

500K a year on chat is not a very common case

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#619

Post by haggy »

rimliu wrote: post #558
std_throwaway wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shows one strength of open source where you have the option to fork and maintain your own solution in the case the project heads the wrong way. Unfortunately the whole world seems to be heading the wrong way with cloud based "everything as a service" where you control nothing. If the provider or cloud goes down you have nothing. Even if they just take your keys you have nothing. It's quick and easy to setup and…

Forking and managing has a cost associated with it too. If your own DC burns down you also have nothing. There is no "wrong way" just a different ways to evaluate risks-benefits and choosing whatever works best for your case.

100% this. As soon as you fork a project, you are now responsible for the evolution of it (even if that's just merging in upstream changes). It puts a large burden on engineering teams to track changes and maintain the fork.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#620

Post by qaq »

davnn wrote: post #533
solatic wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing. Because enterprise sales have such a long sales cycle, that transparent pricing gave people inside their enterprises the confidence to push for a product they knew their budget could afford, rather than spend large amounts of internal political capital getting colleagues to rally behind a solution that wasn't affordable for them t…

> And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing. Who knows if that had any influence on their success?

Hmm "everyone" for many "Enterprise" shops the spend on sales team is bigger than on software eng. so one of the reasons Atlassian was always profitable is they didn't have a sales team until they were huge.
Post reply on HN