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

Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#21

Post by wheelerwj »

cmahler7 wrote: post #18

I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.

I had this thought the other day, even though I doubt it's original, and it seems like income inequality is growing to be so massive that its impossible, or at least much harder, to build a business anymore. If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants. Even bigger, more established companies like slack or NYT find themselves between a rock and hard place. Look at whats happening with journalism, it's geting wrecked by social, how can they possibly compete?

All of the services used by the majority of people have been consolidated by just a few companies. This is terrible for both quality and personal provacy, not to mention pricing.

The world is in a weird place these days.

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#23

Post by code4tee »

750 employees? I don't get it.

Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company.

That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueless about the situation they are now in.

UPDATE: Some saying it's not super easy to copy Slack. I see what you are saying but the truth is that it's easily to copy Slack to a "good enough" state. If you think the "best" and "most brilliant" software wins the enterprise market then you don't understand the enterprise market. Wish it wasn't like that, but it is and that's Slack's challenge (and what the article is saying).

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#24

Post by csydas »

cmahler7 wrote: post #18

I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.

I like(d) slack as much as the next person when my last workplace used it, but we used it over gchat for some reason, right around when Hangouts had just been early released for Google Business/Apps for Education Users. Slack was slick, nice, and definitely fun, but we already had a chat system that more-or-less did the same thing.

I don't think that Slack's issue is so much that other companies are just copying it, it's that they were a nuisance in an already existing space (collaborative chat) and they hit on a few key features that devs liked. While the Slack features are great, and the slack-team is great [1], [edited content: it's yet another item to keep track of], and that's a hard sell when you're an org of 100+ employees and you already have stuff like Lync or Hangouts or Skype around as part of the standard employee loadout.

I hope the best for Slack and sincerely think they'll be able to dazzle people with their support and with good responses to user feedback.

[1] http://imgur.com/a/6vPcn It's small, but this sense of humor and fast response time from the support team is just hard to hate.

Edit: Removed comment on extra account as below comments pointed out Slack has SAML SSO, which I was not aware of as it was not in use at my last place of employment. Changed it to current text, as I still feel that the idea that it's Yet Another Chat that users have to decide on, but definitely a plus that it's not another account.

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#25

Post by amorphid »

cmahler7 wrote: post #18

I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.

I'm not sure that's true. Copying a product that is doing well isn't a new idea. How many auction sites have tried to copy eBay? As far as I can tell, it's still the king of that market. Once something is sufficiently useful, there's no compelling reason to switch from it to something else.

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#26

Post by senko »

csydas wrote: post #24
cmahler7 wrote: post #18

I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.

I like(d) slack as much as the next person when my last workplace used it, but we used it over gchat for some reason, right around when Hangouts had just been early released for Google Business/Apps for Education Users. Slack was slick, nice, and definitely fun, but we already had a chat system that more-or-less did the same thing. I don't think that Slack's issue is so much that other companies are just copying it,…

> [...] a fancy IRC with a new account that has to be set up - that's a hard sell when you're an org of 100+ employees [...]

Slack appears to support SAML SSO, with a list of supported providers and ability to roll a custom one (https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/205168057). Haven't tried/needed it, but wouldn't that care of this particular problem?

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#27

Post by rb808 »

cmahler7 wrote: post #18

I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.

We need a better patent system basically.

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#29

Post by superquest »

code4tee wrote: post #23

750 employees? I don't get it. Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company. That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueles…

> incredibly easy to copy

I feel obliged to post this tweet https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#30

Post by ajdlinux »

senko wrote: post #26
csydas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like(d) slack as much as the next person when my last workplace used it, but we used it over gchat for some reason, right around when Hangouts had just been early released for Google Business/Apps for Education Users. Slack was slick, nice, and definitely fun, but we already had a chat system that more-or-less did the same thing. I don't think that Slack's issue is so much that other companies are just copying it,…

> [...] a fancy IRC with a new account that has to be set up - that's a hard sell when you're an org of 100+ employees [...] Slack appears to support SAML SSO, with a list of supported providers and ability to roll a custom one ( https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/205168057 ). Haven't tried/needed it, but wouldn't that care of this particular problem?

Can confirm - at my ultra-massive employer where we have a considerable number of very large Slack teams, we use SAML to authenticate Slack against our intranet ID and everything more or less works.
Post reply on HN