Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI should build Slack

latent.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 349 posts

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#71

Post by phatfish »

icameron wrote: post #33
simfree wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often. Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability. The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support…

My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phon…

[flagged]

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#73

Post by steeleduncan »

pwarner wrote: post #4

> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success. Not sure if the author has used Teams. But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.

Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives

Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#74

Post by simianwords »

I can't read the article, but I feel people are missing the point here.

Slack is a really really good product because it is simple enough and works nice - performant, has just enough features but not too many and the UX/UI is good.

Its not a power tool but it gets the job done without getting in the way. You would know what I mean if you have used teams/ google chat etc.

Sure you can criticise slack for being a bit slow, not having nested threads.

For context: slack is the main app I use at work and spend a * lot * of time there.

But OpenAI _can_ beat Slack at these things if they have the technical acumen. But real differentiator comes in having an all in one platform that can help you run workflows. Recall that ChatGPT UI is fundamentally a chat box. If ChatGPT can integrate common workflows like

- send an email to a colleague for something

- schedule a meeting at a certain time

- deploy to production

- approve leaves

- create quick code changes with natural language like "change threshold to 50 in my repo"

- integration with observability and alerting

Then you don't have to leave this tool at all. There's a lot of potential here.

I frequently want to just tag GPT when using slack. Like "hey take this jira task and create a quick pull request" and it will link the pull request in the thread.

Or when my colleague asks me for a meeting, I can tag GPT with something like "hey schedule a meeting later in the day when we both have time".

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#76

Post by jedberg »

I'm more interested in the fact that disclaimer at the top makes me think the entire article is written by AI as a summary of a bunch of reddit posts and tweets and discord topics?

Is that what the top says?

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#78

Post by bsaul »

phatfish wrote: post #71
icameron wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phon…

[flagged]

still no way to check your email from teams though.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#79

Post by dpkirchner »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #39
CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #20

I use Slack every day, and I love it. Integrations are simple and reliable, giving us useful information about critical things. Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.

But it's so unreasonably slow. It lacks basic features like syntax highlighting on ``` blocks. It's basically become a super expensive and painful to use while Discord continues to be a joy. And the 'start a thread' nazis are just too much to bear. Prediction: they will add subthreads within 3 years.

Prediction 2: companies will hire full-time Slack Cops whose whole job is shaming coworkers and talking about threads (the #1 Slack anti-feature).

Well, this was my prediction pre-easy-to-use LLMs, anyway.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#80

Post by awesome_dude »

darth_avocado wrote: post #48
pwarner wrote: post #4

> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success. Not sure if the author has used Teams. But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.

We are being forced to dump slack for Teams. The only people who like Teams is Sales and Marketing for some reason. Not a single engineer likes this, and it will break every engineering convenience that exists on Slack.

As an ENG - I REALLY dislike teams - but I also dislike Slack

Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(

Post reply on HN