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OpenAI should build Slack

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201–210 of 349 posts

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#201

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 :-)

Technically, clients could simply upload images to S3 and render them inline whenever they encounter an image URL in a message - no protocol or server changes required. And if you're using an older IRC client, you can still just click the link.

The main problem with IRC is that messages aren't stored anywhere. The classic IRC protocol simply broadcasts new messages to whoever is currently present in the channel. When you rejoin, messages are typically not replayed. In theory, a modified server could handle this, and a supported client could recognize that it's receiving playback and present it as channel history.

I wonder why we don't extend the IRC protocol in these backward-compatible ways instead of inventing new messengers/protocols.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#202
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…

Wave's core ideas are at the heart of modern collaborative tools. It's just the UX that was poor. If they stuck at it and refined it, they could be the leader of this segment. Something that I can say for a lot of what Google does. They quit too fast and maybe more importantly they don't use the knowledge they got from their failures to improve.

It's the same with Inbox which remains the best email client I ever used but weirdly Gmail never got the core UX ideas which made it works so well. I would like to say Google doesn't get UX but clearly they have great UX designers on board. It's just that they probably never get final say and are not first class citizen.

For me, it's an issue of discipline. A lot of Google products seems to be built like R&D projects with the mindset which goes with it. They don't have the discipline to do the boring refining work that great UX requires.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you use Gmail, outlook, etc? A provider backed by 1T+ worth companies?

>99% of people do.

Anything can be decentralized. But people will gravitate toward centralized solutions.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#204

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 dont get this idea of breaking big companies up is inherently a good thing. As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake. The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. Current Google only comes even close with their far out projects(that dont directly make money) such as their quantum computing/deepmind/boston dynamics(when google had them)

Besides, if one does break up google, you wouldnt have those divisions running.

If there are far more opportunities left by the wayside, some one is going to out compete them, ie Slack and Teams

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#205

In my experience building a couple ChatGPT apps and, through colleagues, working with OpenAI folks, I'm not sure they should be building anything in their current state. Seems quite disorganized over there.

If they had OpenAI Slack, maybe it would get better organized.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#206
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.

But that's chaotic chat messages, you should really have proper docs in place and standard operating procedures etc.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dont get this idea of breaking big companies up is inherently a good thing. As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake. The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. Current Google only comes even close with their far out projects(that dont directly make money) such as their quantum computing/deepmind/boston dynamics(when google had them) Besides, if one does break up goog…

> As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake.

With the benefit of hindsight, the break up was performed in the most ineffective way you could possibly imagine.

Take a national monopoly, and convert it into seven regional monopolies, which don't compete on price or service? Then let those monopolies merge back into three companies?

Countries that addressed national telecoms monopolies with local loop unbundling and similar policies seem to have ended up with much more competitive markets.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes! I also don't know why losing zulip is so insanely slow!

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#209
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 has good technology, but is fundamentally bad at product design, UX, CX, product management, and product marketing.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#210
post #205

In my experience building a couple ChatGPT apps and, through colleagues, working with OpenAI folks, I'm not sure they should be building anything in their current state. Seems quite disorganized over there.

If they had OpenAI Slack, maybe it would get better organized.

FWIW, they do: https://openai.enterprise.slack.com/
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