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OpenAI should build Slack

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Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#191

Post by darkwater »

guax wrote: post #170
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.

But hey Google is (was?) a search engine! The best search engine! Obviously the primare UX must always involve searching!

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#192

Post by haute_cuisine »

moomoo11 wrote: post #146
amelius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and, why is that?

ever realized that its only incompetent people who could never build a product (what problem are you solving?) who ask for silly things like this? it doesn't work irl, and if you don't understand that then keep asking this question in 10 years, or even 100 years.

email works, not everything has to be run by corporate greed

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#193

Post by austin-cheney »

I have never understood slack. It’s basically a very expensive solution for a generation who are scared of command terminals and too prideful, or clearly narcissistic, to admit fear.

Slack is based on IRC. IRC is free and there are multiple browser clients for it. Knowing that completely takes the air out of a commercial vanity tool.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#194

Post by darkwater »

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 search and summarization is good enough, and you basically write down automatically by default all your "tribal knowledge" in your chat app, using wikis or documentation systems starts to be redundant.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#195

Post by _zoltan_ »

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…

a lot of knowledge lives in our slack history.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#196

Post by light_hue_1 »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #165
light_hue_1 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

By market cap? Is the money using slack?

Company size when you're talking about tools for humans makes no sense in terms of market cap.

Plenty of companies with many more employees than Google use slack.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#197

Post by _zoltan_ »

austin-cheney wrote: post #193

I have never understood slack. It’s basically a very expensive solution for a generation who are scared of command terminals and too prideful, or clearly narcissistic, to admit fear. Slack is based on IRC. IRC is free and there are multiple browser clients for it. Knowing that completely takes the air out of a commercial vanity tool.

can't send gifs on irc :-)

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#198

Post by moffkalast »

yellow_lead wrote: post #125

There's already Zulip, Mattermost, and many others. Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO. A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.

Zulip is pretty weird compared to the rest, it's always hard to tell what's even going on with threads within threads within threads. Far more experimental than all others which are basically all the same.

There's also Discord of course, but they've recently announced their impending implosion.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#199

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

echelon wrote: post #161
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

> 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.

Depends of how you see it. At the moment, if you want a good productivity suit of tools, you have Microsoft or Microsoft because Google is hampered by their lackluster chat client.

People would like some competition.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#200

Post by killerstorm »

molsongolden wrote: post #127
yellow_lead wrote: post #125

There's already Zulip, Mattermost, and many others. Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO. A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.

Zulip is awesome \m/

We've been using Zulip for ~5 years, I won't describe it as awesome.

E.g. it takes a minute to open a chat on mobile, but only few seconds on the web. No idea how it's possible if they use same underlying DB.

In fact a full text search over years worth of communication is faster than loading latest DM from a specific person in a mobile app!

And not much improvement over years: few things became nicer. But mobile app was always dogshit.

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