181–190 of 301 posts
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Agreed, they may have done it better than most or marketed their product better but nothing compelling here. > Slack could have done what most companies do when a competitor rips them off, and said nothing. Someone competing in your space is NOT ripping you off.
But does copying the UI is ripping someone off?
It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995. Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need l…
Your absolutely right. There is really nothing innovative here. But never underestimate the power of eye-candy. Think about apple products. You could throw your hands up and say "but there's nothing innovative here! they just built a pretty UI on top of BSD and people have been using Unix operating systems for 50 years!". True, but it's the pretty UI that connects it to the masses. Slack took a concept that has been…
Fear of missing out or FoMO is "a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent".[2] This social angst[3] is characterized by "a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
Slack has this to it, a team gets using Slack for their own purposes, the initiative started by someone that wonders why the company/team use Skype still.
Then other teams in the company want to be in on it, there is a party on Slack and they want to know all the gossip that goes down. Plus the Giphy memes.
The next thing is that you then find that it is no longer a private chat room, the guys in HR are reading this too so no longer can some things be said in the banter. So then you move your important chats off Slack and onto WhatsApp or somewhere where whomever the bad guys are, e.g. HR, will not be reading. Obviously Slack then becomes something that your manager uses to tell you what to do and no longer becomes a channel for convo for things peripheral to the tasks in hand. This is how I see Slack shaping up in the long term, it might as well be a MS product and you might as well get the MS product since it is better integrated to Office things.
I've been using skype for text messaging pretty constantly for the last 3 years, and I'm not sure why people hate it so. it has groups, 1-1 chat and video. Searching history can be a bit of a pain, but everything else seems to be there. Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing.
Wow... So if I understand correctly : 1) They decided to mess with a company having $500B in-cash 2) Which decided to attack their low barrier-to-entry market 3) And took the unusual revealing step of building its own instead of buying 4) And is playing in its comfort zone (productivity tools, Office, API, cloud-scale integration points : azure, azure marketplace etc...) 5) While having a pool of 90M trustful paying…
My prior experience with some of the now leadership of Slack indicates that they don't have sufficient moral authority for this kind of commentary anyway.
It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995. Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need l…
I'm really weirded out that people can't see the value Slack added. Having your messages stored while you are offline is hugely valuable. If I have been out of signal range on a train, I want to be able to look at history on my phone once I'm back in range of a cell tower. Beyond that, a well made UI for web, desktop and phone that is consistent is valuable. 'Adding a pretty UI' isn't a zero-effort or skill thing. No…
I don't think people are hating on slack here, it's just that what they do isn't nearly as hard to u.plement as they seem to think it is, so a letter like this just comes off as pompous.
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>What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I don't think they even do that well, it's a complete nightmare finding anything on slack beyond the last 24 hours. What Slack did well was branding and marketing.
I haven't met a single person (unless they were ~really~ non technical) that enjoyed using slack. It never works the way I expect it to work, and very simple things that you can do within IRC takes multiple steps in Slack.
How does an instant messaging app not have threaded conversations?
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Adding a backlog to IRC is something that has been around almost as long as IRC. Bots to sit in channels to passively log; bots which act to send messages to people who are presently offline, at the time at which they come online again; and so on. Adding a log to IRC isn't particularly innovative. Slack's value is almost entirely in its user engagement, not its technology.
As far as I know, all the pieces to make Slack have been around for a while. But nobody ever put them together properly. So the fact that all the pieces existed doesn't count for very much in the end. Nor was it obvious that if someone put it together properly it would achieve commercial success. I was theoretically in the right place at the right time to have put together something like Slack at my job, but there wa…
Not marketing, or features or UX - price was key for us.
I still hope Slack wins, but MS is a very serious threat. In the end its best for us, users - prices will drop, new features will be added, support will be awesome all thanks to competition.
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It sounds a lot like all the people that bash StackOverflow - "It's just posts and a voting system, I could write that in a week!", ignoring all the complexity and design behind it, operating at scale and cultivating the environment. If people need something to be 'amazing' not to put it down, and 'amazing' doesn't include doing the right things to be highly successful... If no one else did it, was it really so obvio…
Microsoft has a well regarded developer network and Q&A system regarding Microsoft technologies, at least in my (limited to primarily Azure) experience. Similarly, Microsoft has already operated a widely used integrated chat, profile, and community system at scale. Given their recent pushes, it wouldn't be entirely surprising for them to bring back similar platforms for business users integrated with LinkedIn. That w…