211–220 of 301 posts
Microsoft can just copy everything that Slack does right, give it away for a fraction or for free and there's nothing that they can do about it.
They better, because if they try to adapt skype for business (a.k.a lync), they'll fail miserably. That app was terrible
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…
Or it is "time", or marketing, or just because it is mobile first.
You could say the same about what's app, Instagram and others. Maybe it is not just about the big picture. Maybe they are successful because of small things like knowing they will always work when you need.
The essential issue here is this - starting with the Fortune 500, how far down the business size stack do you have to go before this question stops being a laughing out loud no-brainer: "Shall we buy more-or-less the same chat application from Microsoft or Slack?"
"Nobody was ever fired for choosing IBM."
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What people are saying is that not only have the pieces to make Slack been around for awhile, but IRC has implemented those pieces successfully for 20 years. The only "innovation" Slack provided was the UI, and that's textbook "bad startup idea", because of how easy it is for someone else to step into the space.
"but IRC has implemented those pieces successfully for 20 years." It did indeed... implement them as pieces . The out-of-the-box experience for an IRC network does not look like Slack. And the UI was a non-trivial component. Personally I'm in the segment who doesn't much care and for whom IRC is a fine amount of bandwidth... but a looooot of other people, including lots of people with money, want something more. Slac…
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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?
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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…
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Plus, Microsoft can throw engineering power at integrating their 'clone' with all their other tools. While I can't seem myself buying into their ecosystem anytime soon, that's a huge advantage that will be hard for Slack to compete with.
I'd imaginethe developers of the products integrating their own things into Slack would give more and better thingts than Microsoft integrating other products into their things. We'll have to see if people start shifting where they integrate.
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…
> It's a chat room. With channels. And the iPhone was just a phone with a pretty UI. Slack is winning exactly for the same reason that the iPhone did, and you're misjudging it for the same reason that a lot of people misjudged Apple: It's all about execution. The first iPhone had the same features as previous phones, but those features were executed so much better than the competition. Slack is the same way. It's an…
The browser was the killer feature. Remember Jobs going to the NYT website?
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> 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. :-]
So what? you don't have to innovate to be a success, that's where a lot of HNers get stuck imo. Sure, i'm not calling Slack amazing - but i very clearly said i use slack, love it, pay for it and recommend it. I used Dropbox too. I don't think anyone here is claiming Slack isn't a massive success. Nor that the product is any less great because it's not innovative. A comment like: > This time we are saying this after S…
Rethinking it I think they might have been really innovative, but more in sales, marketing etc than in pure technical terms.