Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#651

Post by noirbot » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 1:55 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #504

wheels wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really wanted to not use Slack. We really wanted something self-hosted. After weeks of wasting time trying a half-dozen alternatives, we bit the bullet and now use Slack too. I too thought, "Chat isn't that hard -- why wouldn't we self host?" Things we were looking for: - Separate work / personal accounts (i.e. not just Skype, Telegram, etc.) - Decent native apps for macOS, Android and iOS, bonus points for Linux…

Same here. Mobile apps and notifications are super hard - especially when you pair them with email notifications (in case you don't see a chat). Hipchat did this amazingly well. There was a strong guarantee that a notification would be delivered - either email or app. I don't think a lot of others do it well. It seems that everyone is mucking about threads and UI and emojis.

I'd argue that Hipchat had the exact opposite problem with notifications. It was _too_ aggressive about notifying everywhere.

I've had many times where I was looking at a DM room with someone in Hipchat, with the window focused, and it was still sending me emails with every message from them like I was AFK. This is especially common on the mobile apps, both Android and iOS. I'd often be chatting on my phone at lunch, and come back to my computer to find 50-100 emails of every reply I'd gotten in Hipchat.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#652

Post by grantlmiller » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 1:57 PM UTC

sqldba wrote: post #551

halostatue wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

The lack of Slack on-prem over HipChat is a deal killer for major Enterprise. You can justify "cloud" when Microsoft is running it and has millions of dollars to put into feasibility and security studies and audits. Letting a strappy upstart have access to that data is a completely different story.

This point is spot on, but often overlooked.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#653

Post by fireblade87 » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 1:57 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #573

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…

On premise is apparently not big enough as a market for Atlassian. This does not surprise me: it needs a lot of hand holding; and saas gets you revenue much cheaper because you get economies of scale and much less support headaches. On top of that people get stuck on old versions of your product, which you then need to support as well because they payed you a premium for it. With SAAS you just have one version to wor…

Agree with this. On premise doesn't seem to be an attractive value proposition for most vendors. Most of them seem to be moving away from that model. Even customer requests around this seem to have reduced. We used to get a lot of requests around on premise in the initial conferences where we pitched our Flock messaging product, but that number has been steadily decreasing over a period of time

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#654

Post by walterbell » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 2:05 PM UTC

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?

This is widely accepted because they did not spend money on an enterprise sales team in their early years, yet saw enterprise adoption.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#655

Post by wolfi1 » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 2:07 PM UTC

used both, hipchat and slack. both underwhelmed me. I still don't understand the hype around them, both provide their full functionality only in the browser, their clients having quite a few deficits. zulip. mentioned in another thread, looks promising, don't know if it can keep its promises

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#656

Post by treespace8 » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #573

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…

On premise is apparently not big enough as a market for Atlassian. This does not surprise me: it needs a lot of hand holding; and saas gets you revenue much cheaper because you get economies of scale and much less support headaches. On top of that people get stuck on old versions of your product, which you then need to support as well because they payed you a premium for it. With SAAS you just have one version to wor…

> Compliance issues can be addressed in the cloud as well.

How can I guarantee the security of my customers data, if it's not hosted on equipment I control?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#657

Post by thedangler » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

gms wrote: post #24

thedangler wrote: post #7

We were using hipchat, worked fine with our custom integrations and workflow. Stopped working when they switched to stride ( had to do with version of jira we are on) Now that my integrations are all most working again I have to probably look at using mattermost. We don't want to use slack.

Why not?

Pricing mostly Can't host it ourselves, not really an issue now that we have a new boss and he doesn't care as much about hosting everything ourselves. Thats why moving to stride was in the works. I tried testing slack with a sub section of our team and they didn't like it at all.

I've been toying switching to mattermost for a year now though. See how it goes.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#658

Post by grantlmiller » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 2:15 PM UTC

jrs95 wrote: post #439

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…

At this point I don’t think any company should be relying on on-prem solutions remaining on-prem which aren’t open source. There’s too much to be gained from a cloud + SaaS business model. If you want to be either on prem or just avoid cloud lock in, open source is the way to go. The user just has much more power in the context of OSS than they do proprietary software. That being said, it’s unfortunate that OSS in ma…

Your first point sort of misses the idea that multi-tenant SaaS applications could and have shut down their service overnight (see Smyte https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17371074). At least with HipChat On-prem the customers who are running that version can migrate on their schedule instead of just having the service turned off.

You can always make the argument that for this reason we should only write our own internal tools and use OSS. However, it is just as easy for an OSS project to be abandoned or neglected. Often times enterprise contracts will have a source code escrow clause that provide the enterprise with the source code in the event of a shut down (the same capabilities as a fork & take over maintenance anyway).

We don't actually know the plan for HipChat On-prem yet (do we?). Slack and Atlassian are both known for being customer centric so they will probably follow what Facebook did with Parse. Open source the entire thing, sunset the operations and development over the course of a year or two with minimal security updates/patches and no feature dev. This could be what the investment from Atlassian was tagged for... to make sure their customers are taken care of while most migrate to Slack.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#659

Post by emilfihlman » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 2:22 PM UTC

it33 wrote: post #509

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…

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

Hey I tried looking into setting up webhooks (inbound and outbound) on Mattermost (we are running our own instance) but your technical documentation is quite spread out and thin. If you could improve that I'd be super grateful!

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#660

Post by grantlmiller » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #573

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…

On premise is apparently not big enough as a market for Atlassian. This does not surprise me: it needs a lot of hand holding; and saas gets you revenue much cheaper because you get economies of scale and much less support headaches. On top of that people get stuck on old versions of your product, which you then need to support as well because they payed you a premium for it. With SAAS you just have one version to wor…

On-prem isn't the problem, building a crappy product is the problem. Atlassian's other products (Jira etc) over 50% of the revenue comes from on-prem customers. Same is true for GitHub: https://medium.com/@moritzplassnig/github-is-doing-much-bett.... It just turns out that offering an on-prem version is not enough to close the gap created by all of the other features, integrations and UX that their competitor had. On-prem is a great feature, but it isn't a silver bullet. Nothing is.