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OpenAI should build Slack

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Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#211

Post by rimbo789 »

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 have never understood the dislike for Google chat. I’ve been using it since it first came out even for friends and it’s everything I want in a chat.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#212

Post by rimbo789 »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #195
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.

If you can’t retrieve the knowledge easily it doesn’t exist. Basically impossible to find anything in slack older than a week.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#213

Post by KronisLV »

I'd take even a smaller self-hostable "Hey, here's a really cool project that can be made with Codex and our other tools, ain't it great PR?" program that's not built for some crazy scale, but that I can put on a VPS somewhere - and would support the basic features of Slack and Discord. Think a Node.js app or something similar, PostgreSQL, maybe RabbitMQ/Redis, a SPA with React or whatever. Basic but consistent styling and features.

So, workspaces, channels, threads, voice and video calls, screen sharing, file sharing, polls/reactions to messages.

Especially given the current situation with Discord. If such a thing could even be built with any tools and mostly/partially vibe coded, then it'd reflect really positively on the state of the tools!

The problem is that if they'd try that and mess up, it'd be like Unity's own Gigaya project, which was really bad PR: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/vz1b43/gigaya_has_...

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#214

Post by itomato »

Can we go back to IRC now? Slack took what we were already doing with IRC, replaced the duct tape and firewalks, packaged up the key functionality (channels, file sharing, access) with a purple UI and mobile app and went to market.

The days of a single company maintaining a grip on something like workplace chat (and the inherent data) are numbered now. We're not building a C compiler.

Time will come when their subscription fee competes directly with another spend that can generate bespoke but commonplace business tools like chat with no data egress (or better yet, a demonstration that what you now keep and can act on what you previously paid Salesforce to steal.) Soon.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#215

Post by MyelinatedT »

tomjen3 wrote: post #154
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 hope I don't suffer from early onset Alzheimer's, but I seem to recall the joke pre the pandemic was that Google would constantly make new chat apps. Google Dou, Google Chat, Google Wave, Google this, Google that. Seemingly because someone needed a promotion and the way to do that was to create a new chat app or lead the effort for the same.

How could you forget YouTube Chat?

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#216

Post by seanhunter »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #202
mbreese wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s not just the UX in wave was poor. They didn’t have one compelling use case that made sense to people and they botched the launch.

1. They did the same “invite” thing they had done with gmail so you couldn’t get an account (even if you had a gmail account). They repeated this mistake with google+ also (a social network for people who work at google).

2. They basically had a working CRDT and said “you can use this for all sorts of things” (which is true) and a thin UX on it that implemented a sort of bizzaro threaded chat with document sharing and said “this will replace email” (which is blatantly untrue) and everyone was just confused.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#217

Post by jen20 »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #199
echelon wrote: post #161

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 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.

On that basis, Microsoft are also hampered by a lackluster chat client - Teams is atrocious. Slack is pretty much the only game in town that isn't bad (and even that needs native clients, because the UI is poor and not system-integrated).

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#218

Post by ngrilly »

figmert wrote: post #32
cj wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.

And it's worse than Teams

Hard disagree. We use both in my company. Google Chat is definitely better than Teams for actual collaboration: it's easier to track unread messages in "Home" (it's the "inbox"), and channels (called "spaces") are much better designed (they are conceptually closer to Slack's channels). Also, it's not crashing all the time. What's missing: the message editor doesn't support nested bulleted lists, we can't archive a space/channel.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#219

Post by [deleted] »

valenterry wrote: post #148
lewisjoe wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good is really good at engineering great software and really sucks at making them enterprise ready. It's why they've been failing with GCP, Google Tables (shutdown now I guess), Analytics or any product that aims for enterprise consumption. Note: they are really good at making consumer softwares though (take the success of Google Photos or Gsearch)

Google isn't even good at engineering great software. They have some good people working on some good projects. If you look at the relation between software-quality of their average product and number of developers they have... yeah I don't know. Maybe hiring tons of new-grads that are good at leetcode and then forcing them to use golang... is not what actually makes high quality software. I could believe that they a…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#220

Post by direwolf20 »

meekaaku wrote: post #204
echelon wrote: post #161

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…

The Bell breakup is the only reason we have communication technologies newer than $2/minute telephone calls or (for the same price) Telex.

Bell had one good side, that was Bell Labs. How was it funded? By overcharging the whole country for communications, pocketing 90% of the profit, and using the last 10% to find ways to lower costs to provide the service — cost decreases that would not be passed onto customers.

It was even worse than it is right now with the regional internet monopolies.

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