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Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

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Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#201

Post by blakeyrat »

Latty wrote: post #70
geofft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email does the stored-history thing. So does every other mobile IM app I have (the built-in SMS app, Google Hangouts, BBM, etc.). Furthermore, in the IRC world that's not uncommon either; Quasseldroid does this. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembile...

Email sucks for real-time communcation. Most of the other IM applications you list suck for multi-person communication. Quassel looks good, but clearly harder to set up than Slack. People always point at everything and go 'this stuff existed!' - even if all Slack did was pull everything together into a single cohesive environment, that's useful to people, it provides value. I'm shocked people are shocked by that idea…

It's from the same set of people who don't understand why Microsoft's Active Directory is more popular than the cluster of hard-to-configured, barely-related Linux utilities needed to reproduce some of its functions on a Linux server.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#202

Post by jpalomaki »

reitanqild wrote: post #62
fizzbatter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love…

> I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. This reminds me a lot of HN dismissing Dropbox on the original show HN or something: "We have git, rsync, FTP. We can hack something like this together in an afternoon." Except that was before Dropbox went ahead to become a huge success. This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]

Both Slack and Dropbox are simple ideas, executed extremely well. I see that for both of them the challenge is there's quite many customers who don't demand the best execution, but can settle for not-so-good-but-a-bit-cheaper alternative.

Both companies can probably make well enough money to survive and achieve growth, but maybe not such an exponential growth the investors where expecting.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#203

Post by kzisme »

donum wrote: post #170
Latty wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and none of those solutions are as good as 'scroll up' after clicking five buttons to make a slack team. By quite a way.

When I used a Bouncer, all messages that I missed just were there after logging in. I could just scroll up. Easy!

Bouncers are really "Set it and forget it"...

Pings show up - if you desperately need phone notifications there are many apps/solutions to deal with that too. (but lets be real...nobody ~really~ wants notifications outside of work)

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#204

Post by sebastianconcpt »

Surprised by the tone of this. It's Slack declaring cultural war to Microsoft. All values subverted, what is praise is actually negative admiration (envy basically), probably based on fear. Kind of gramscian stuff what they did. Very unexpected and unnecessary. Unless they wanted to do some noise because of marketing? I guess they got scared but doesn't sound like Slack needs that. Wonder why they bought this battle this soon.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#205

Post by jdmichal »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #171

Does Slack even understand that there are MANY enterprise companies that don't use Slack simply because it's NOT Microsoft? Hubris is rarely a good quality.

Does that really matter, since those companies by definition would never be Slack customers? It's not like Slack could ever become a Microsoft product -- barring the obvious buyout, which is not likely to ever happen since Microsoft rolled their own.

So if they aren't buying now because it's not Microsoft, I don't see how Slack hubris changes anything in that equation.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#206

Post by geofft »

Latty wrote: post #78
fizzbatter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love…

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…

I think you are interpreting the rhetoric as "Slack is not innovative, therefore it is not praiseworthy."

The claim is something else entirely: "Slack is not innovative, therefore it is not immune to competition."

There isn't any value judgment with the second claim. "didn't do anything amazing" is a statement of fact, not a put down. It's not somehow morally bad to do nothing amazing! If anything, it's morally good. There's no sense wasting time building amazing technological breakthroughs when the problem space doesn't need it, and just needs someone to execute well on boring problems. (Slack is particularly good at recognizing this and just getting the job done; see also their tech stack running on PHP.)

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#207

Post by blakeyrat »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #171

Does Slack even understand that there are MANY enterprise companies that don't use Slack simply because it's NOT Microsoft? Hubris is rarely a good quality.

More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use HipChat instead, because it is.

Either way, this is a HUGE market Slack hasn't even begun to touch. (Although I see they now have a "coming soon!" banner on their homepage.)

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#208

Post by geoka9 »

beachstartup wrote: post #106
intoverflow2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 agree, the search and history are its achilles' heel right now. i still cut and paste important stuff out of slack into a big notes text file because i know it will be a shitty experience finding it later.

You know you can "star" stuff in slack, right?

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#209

Post by kzisme »

thesimpsons1022 wrote: post #187
kzisme wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i enjoy the built in gifs and emojis but thats about it

When I used it at a previous job emojis/gifs were quite fun, but after awhile I stopped using them.

I feel like they get in the way more than anything - and other platforms can still implement those just as easily.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#210

Post by kzisme »

hosh wrote: post #200
kzisme wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I enjoy using Slack. There were a lot of nuances that together adds up into substantial improvements over Hipchat or IRC. I am also a remote software engineer who have been working on distributed teams for the past 8 years. I've tried a bunch of different things to collaborate remotely, including IRC. Your mileage may vary.

What downsides did you find to using IRC?

Either way each choice is just a tool and if it works for you - thanks great!

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