181–190 of 208 posts
How come Slack is worth $7.1B? I can't imagine they produce that much value or have a high enough revenue to warrant this valuation.
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And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...
Video performance is a LOT harder than you think. At another company, I watched an five person team, half of whom had related PhDs, the other half over a dozen years of video engineering experience, make incremental improvements to the WebRTC stack. After a year, was it better? The metrics said it was somewhat better, but the customers still complained all the time.
But it's been done. Skype video calls worked on far inferior hardware and networks back in the day.
It seems to me that Slack is very vulnerable. Their core product isn't all that innovative and already has credible competitors who could probably beat their price. In fact, I don't understand how they beat HipChat so soundly. I wonder if their next tack will be to start digging a moat of proprietary tooling now that they have a critical mass of adoption.
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No, it's pretty warranted. The 100% I was referring to _was_ just for the clientside. To rewrite that natively (since today it's in js on Electron) is not going to take a couple of months with five engineers.
I don't think it's entirely out of the realm of possibility that could be done, and a couple of months with five engineers was a conservative estimate. $375.000 for twice the devs or twice the number of months is still a shockingly low price to pay. Hell, throw a few million at it and I can't see why Slack can't be implemented natively on at least iOS, MacOS and Android (especially if parts can still fallback on webv…
There is absolutely no way in hell that even ten engineers for a couple of months could replicate all of Slack's functionality. Even ten times that much would be a stretch.
They could maybe make a decent chat app prototype in that amount of time. If they are very talented, they might even be able to make a decent chat app MVP that would get some actual users, but there is absolutely no way that they could replicate all of Slack's functionality.
Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.
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Start with Mac, find some good metrics that indicate that a lot of your users are on Mac and go from there. (parse your user agents for instance) Once it's proven itself, you can try Windows and some other options as needed (probably mobile).
Why would someone start with a minor platform? Mac is consistently 5-6 percentage of the market and has been for decades. They honestly have never been a player.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...
You can think a 5-person team can build highly performant native apps for a number of different platforms in a matter of months?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video performance is a LOT harder than you think. At another company, I watched an five person team, half of whom had related PhDs, the other half over a dozen years of video engineering experience, make incremental improvements to the WebRTC stack. After a year, was it better? The metrics said it was somewhat better, but the customers still complained all the time.
Ship a Mac client without video. Add video next year once you've proven that people actually use a native Mac client. Some companies call this 'agile' - it's a strange concept.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would someone start with a minor platform? Mac is consistently 5-6 percentage of the market and has been for decades. They honestly have never been a player.
Because mac users have been the most concerned about native look and feel for decades, most windows users probably couldn't tell you what the native look and feel is because even MS don't don't don't follow one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Start with Mac, find some good metrics that indicate that a lot of your users are on Mac and go from there. (parse your user agents for instance) Once it's proven itself, you can try Windows and some other options as needed (probably mobile).
Why would someone start with a minor platform? Mac is consistently 5-6 percentage of the market and has been for decades. They honestly have never been a player.