Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack • Hacker News Board

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#471

Post by 8note » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

temp667 wrote: post #213

CharlesW wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in my experience, at least in the relatively-rare occasions where exceptions happen. I had an order which Amazon claimed to have been delivered but wasn't, and it took several days and multiple interactions to resolve. Just figuring out a way to talk to a human felt like an ARG.

I have had good support retail side (granted, I'm not expecting much on my $20 item). On AWS I've had very good support. Also paying user of google products and GSuite - support not great on the gsuite side, but retail order for Google Wifi etc pretty OK.

My support quality for a retail order from Google was 3 months of dead silence, followed by 10 of the replacement part all arriving at the same time

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#472

Post by 8note » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:41 AM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #179

codegladiator wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please stop with this meme ? meme is not tech first for whatever definitions of /tech first/ you have.

Tech first: Your main product is technology.

But then google is not a tech company either? Their main product is advertisements.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#473

Post by tlogan » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:42 AM UTC

thallium205 wrote: post #163

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google chat, lol. Which one? Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?

The one that is built into every GSuite/Workspace account. For free. Google Chat.

I would love to that you are right - but it not so easy.

I have two G Suite domains and I'm utterly and absolutely confused.

- in one domain I have "Chat" just under "Important" messages. But somehow I cannot send any chats. I see only chats from 2018 or so (when they shutdown Gmail Chat). The cool thing is that they look like read email messages. But I cannot send any chat.

- in other domain I have "Hangouts" but no Chat.

I hope this real world example illustrates why parent comment is correct when asking "Which one?".

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#474

Post by prepend » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:45 AM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #186

blackrock wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams suck. Google Chat? What’s that? I’ll stick with Slack.

Unpopular HN opinion: Teams doesn't suck. It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.

Teams just doesn’t seem very good for team collaboration outside of video/audio. Their client feels cramped and stifling and their web version is not feature complete. Basic stuff like just linking to a document or wiki page or tab in Teams doesn’t work well so you end up with stuff like “Open the Foo team, look in the Bar channel and click the second link in the header to see the dashboard.” instead of just adding a link to it.

The integration and embedding of office/powerbi/etc is neat, but it forces it into a Teams frame.

For some reason, some things launch SharePoint with its own bag of shit for trying to make its own version of web sites.

I’m in a big org with Teams for almost a year. We have thousands of employees who aren’t as active as hundred person free slack open source projects. People aren’t using it to communicate much with each other.

They keep emailing, or texting or IMing. I get more Skype IMs a day than Teams. And do you know how horrible Skype is?

Because of this, I think it sucks as a superset of Slack. Sure, it nominally has all those features, but in practice they aren’t usable.

I hope that MS just keeps iterating and it eventually gets better. I think it’s better now than a year ago.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#475

Post by jkaplowitz » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:45 AM UTC

andreareina wrote: post #432

TeMPOraL wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if and when the society will finally develop an immune response to this business pattern: a) get a large amount of people to tie their lives/businesses to a service you provide, b) sell out to a bigger fish, leaving these users high and dry.

What would that response be, other than refusing to use anything with mainstream adoption?

Maybe insisting that this type of core service get provided by charitable nonprofits, which inherently can't sell to for-profits?

...Yeah, I'm not expecting that to happen en masse either, honestly, as long as we live in capitalism.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#476

Post by prepend » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:48 AM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #302

djsumdog wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way rooms is organized is really annoying. It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet. The rooms also show what appears to be IMs for group chats (the style/UI) instead of a chatroom. The calendar integration is nice and the video chats are good, but The Linux version of their client just stops pulling audio all the time unless I do a `killall -9 pulseaudio` and restart…

> It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet. Yes, it's odd. For those who haven't used Teams, it defaults to showing you a team's channels you use most frequently (I guess? I never quite understood the logic) and then you have to click to see the full list. Maddening.

Clicking in every channel to see what’s new is insane. I’m in 15 “teams” and they each probably average 10 channels. I see the alerts that there are new messages but I would need to go into each one to check them out.

As a result, I ignore them all.

They need some sort of “feed” feature.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#477

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:49 AM UTC

schnevets wrote: post #272

brundolf wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack's main differentiator up until now was that it wasn't tied up in a tech giant. That meant it had great compatibility with everything, and that it was, as a product, the primary focus of its company (and not just an accessory). I think it could have survived on that alone, but this acquisition throws that entire story in the garbage. Now it'll just be "Teams but worse".

Slack saw the risks of being a "simple, elegant collaboration darling, and tried to pivot into operations and workflows over the past 3 years. I haven't looked into the feature set much, but I think most customers rejected the idea because it seemed robust and "un-Slack-y". I always thought the lack of adoption in this feature set was a marketing failure of Slack, but I'm now seeing it as bait for a Salesforce integr…

[deleted]

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#478

Post by prepend » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:50 AM UTC

trilinearnz wrote: post #336

blackrock wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams suck. Google Chat? What’s that? I’ll stick with Slack.

The thing I like about Teams is the way you can have collaboratively-editable documents localised to a particular channel by way of the Files tab, which is great for organisations that don't yet have an ingrained online Office 365 or Google Sheets culture. Apart from that, I find it clunky, unwieldy, and it has that unfortunate soullessness that permeates many 'productivity' applications (exemplified by the sterile s…

I don’t like this because I would like to store my doc in OneDrive or some other team and link them into a teams channel to edit.

So while the collab works well, it’s a lot of work to then organize the files so anything beyond literal ephemeral scratch pads sucks for “power users” and completely confuses regular users.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#479

Post by dleslie » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

colinmhayes wrote: post #151

stingraycharles wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: what is Google chat? I only know Hangouts, I did not know they had a Slack/Teams app as well? Or is this the very old app that was integrated into Gmail back in the day?

Yea, google has a competitor called chat. As other comments have said it doesn't really stack up with teams/slack, but the video system is pretty good. It works well enough, an has seen consistent improvements over the year. Doubt any company would specifically choose google chat, but I know that many that already have deals for g-suite are using it. The thing is pretty much every company has a contract for office or…

The video is good? Is that a joke?!

I have weekly Beaver meetings with my daughter using google chat and _every time_ nearly all the feeds are frozen.

Whereas my wife uses Zoom all day to talk to patients, with nary a hitch.

Google chat video is the worst I've ever used.

Re: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

#480

Post by ayyy » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 2:52 AM UTC

hackmiester wrote: post #457

easterncalculus wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Message threading would make it better though.

God please no. I would disable this in slack in an instant if I could. I dread the day it becomes available in any other platform I use.

Underrated opinion right here.

It's like they took IRC, saw it worked for businesses, and were like "how can we fuck this up, slowly, to destroy the very essence of what made chat channels useful in the first place?".