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OpenAI should build Slack

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Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#161

Post by echelon »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #147
czhu12 wrote: post #121

Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use…

While the current incarnation of Google Chat has indeed been steadily improving, Google has a lot, and I mean a lot , to make up for: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... (2021, as the URL says) And it's not just messaging. Google has a decades-long history of abandoning apps that don't make them billions, which means no-one with memory trusts them. Especially in their current "AI-everythin…

I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.

The praise for this monopoly is misdirected. Every single one of you, unless you're a significant GOOG shareholder, should be wanting for antitrust breakup of Google. They're putting pressure on your wages and other investments, and they're contributing to a ceiling for other startups and companies.

Google engineers are brilliant, but the corporation itself needs to be horizontally dismantled into several Googles that all compete with one another. (Not simply a vertical breakup along product lines, but rather the old-school "Ma Bell" style breakup that creates companies that then have to compete on the same offerings.)

A breakup would be good for GOOG investors too, because there's far more value locked up in the company and far too many opportunities left by the wayside.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#162

Post by light_hue_1 »

ssivark wrote: post #151
czhu12 wrote: post #121

Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use…

Google Chat is definitely a product that could use more love, but it is situated in a specific internal landscape, and grows out of it. Slack is built for a very different context, and I doubt Google would build something like that. Google simply doesn't see the world the way someone who likes Slack would (and I also doubt a large co like Google could operate out of Slack).

> and I also doubt a large co like Google could operate out of Slack

Plenty of corporations much larger than Google operate out of Slack.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#163

Post by operatingthetan »

glerk wrote: post #81
steeleduncan wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Discord is a solid product. They just need to launch a simple business-friendly alternative UI without the teenager gamer aesthetics. I’m surprised they never tried going after the enterprise market.

Discord seems to be heavily inspired by Slack in UX.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#164

Post by mbreese »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #29

We use Slack at work, and everyone we work with uses Slack, and we all work together with Slack Connect. I suspect if we moved to a competitor that’s pretty much the main impact we’d see, and it wouldn’t be good unless everyone else work with moved too. I think that network effect is probably the only meaningful differentiation in that space.

You could also look at it as: in order for a Slack competitor to compete with Slack's network effects, the new program will need to offer an easy way to extend chat workspaces with external collaborators. It's not impossible, but it does make Slack's moat explicitly clear.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#165

Post by shawabawa3 »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #162
ssivark wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Chat is definitely a product that could use more love, but it is situated in a specific internal landscape, and grows out of it. Slack is built for a very different context, and I doubt Google would build something like that. Google simply doesn't see the world the way someone who likes Slack would (and I also doubt a large co like Google could operate out of Slack).

> and I also doubt a large co like Google could operate out of Slack Plenty of corporations much larger than Google operate out of Slack.

"plenty of corporations much larger than Google"?

Google is the third largest company by market cap in the world. I suppose by "much larger" you mean number of employees? Walmart maybe?

I doubt there's many out there using slack

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#166

Post by mbreese »

czhu12 wrote: post #121

Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use…

There might be an institutional block in Google due to the way that Google Wave was received. Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work. It's never quite lived up to expectations (or hype in the case of Wave). Knowing their history, I can see why they'd want to avoid trying to take on that market again. It's difficult to get enough traction with users to make it a successful product.

Not impossible, but it's not like they haven't tried before in the past.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#168

Post by sgt »

It's funny how people complain about Slack pricing but I've been using it for our company (nearly 100 people) for nearly a decade without paying a dime. The only thing we're not getting is history (and you really shouldn't save valuable info on chat anyway, we have other data repositories for that such as Wiki and git).

So for me, we're getting tremendous value out of Slack and not once have they bothered to ask us to pay.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#169

Post by OJFord »

sgt wrote: post #168

It's funny how people complain about Slack pricing but I've been using it for our company (nearly 100 people) for nearly a decade without paying a dime. The only thing we're not getting is history (and you really shouldn't save valuable info on chat anyway, we have other data repositories for that such as Wiki and git). So for me, we're getting tremendous value out of Slack and not once have they bothered to ask us t…

If you get big enough for Slack to care about, your history will be impractically short.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#170

Post by guax »

czhu12 wrote: post #121

Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use…

I remember using google chat prior to slack arrival and it always bothered me that google seemed allergic to letting me organize the freaking contact list.

The insistence on choosing who shows up where by algorithm and "intelligence" made it impossible to create muscle memory, you had to look and/or search every time.

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