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Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

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Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#241

Post by mikestew »

dimino wrote: post #117
mikestew wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lync, was the that the app whose Mac client I've never seen run without crashing shortly after startup, on multiple machines across multiple companies? That's right, I've never successfully used the Mac Lync client to send a message, despite having it installed on probably three or four machines over time. That's not to say that Slack doesn't have a lot to worry about. But competition from Lync, or whatever the hell…

I use their Mac client just fine...

As one who was previously employed by Microsoft, I have to believe that they would not let something that broken out the door, and that I've just had a run of bad luck of broken configurations or server-side operations folk that didn't know what they were doing. But the fact remains that I've never sent a message using the Lync Mac client, and not for lack of trying.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#242

Post by chiefalchemist »

Apples and oranges. The MS product is a paid version within a particular target/universe. That said, evidently, MS didn't study the never-rose and fell story of Google Wave. In short, collaboration needs people. Any people. All people. One outside within the team and a platform becomes irrelevant to the matter at hand.

In addition, the communication market is bigger than the market for soda. Genuine or otherwise Slack and the market will benefit from competition. There's still plenty of upside for Slack, Microsoft and perhaps one or two more.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#243

Post by dimino »

Latty wrote: post #141
dimino wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except, that's not true. As I pointed out with History, IRC does not do that. Even if you count hacks like bots or additional services, it doesn't do it well, easily, or as a core part of the thing that is there the second you set it up without extra effort.

I don't understand why people keep saying it's not "easy" or IRC doesn't do history "well"? ZNC or another bouncer is plenty easy to set up and configure, and you get a full history of all messages in a chat.

Slack didn't innovate, it simplified. I called it a "UI" simplification, but you can call it whatever you like. They didn't innovate on technology, and that's a dangerous place to build your startup, because someone like Microsoft can eat your lunch and there's nothing you can do about it.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#244

Post by rudolf0 »

aseipp wrote: post #221
rudolf0 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Discord is on a path to be a suitable replacement for IRC, Slack, and Skype. They still need some polishing, but once they fix some bugs and add good support for history and searching, I think it'll be fantastic.

IMO, the main worrying thing is that Discord is propped up entirely by VC money right now, and there's absolutely no telling how the hell they're going to monetize it. Slack at least has the obvious "pay us money" model, so they can survive on that even with competitors. IRC (decentralized) and Skype (Microsoft, unlimited money) could practically survive nuclear apocalypse, by comparison. They promise the core featur…

Valid point.

I personally like the UI/UX, except some of the channel management features. It took me some time to figure out how to set ranks and give permissions.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#245

Post by dimino »

jerf wrote: post #161
dimino wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The UI was a trivial enough component that it can be replicated by a dozen competitors, to suddenly become a hugely busy space such as it is now.

Those people with money can easily be stolen out from under Slack, precisely because they didn't innovate, they simplified.

Slack is "just IRC", and the proof is that if it were more, there wouldn't be nearly as much competition in the space, with more people joining every month, it seems.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#247

Post by jhgg »

rudolf0 wrote: post #195
kbenson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but from looking at it now that's likely because they've targeted themselves towards more informal (game) voice chat. It actually looks like it could be a good contender in this space if they decided to not only compare themselves to voice chat systems[1] (Skype, Ventrilo, Teamspeak), and didn't specifically market to gamers. That is, assuming the service is good, since I haven't tried it. 1: https://discordapp.c…

I think Discord is on a path to be a suitable replacement for IRC, Slack, and Skype. They still need some polishing, but once they fix some bugs and add good support for history and searching, I think it'll be fantastic.

What bugs ail you friend? Looking to see where and if they are on our bug tracker.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#248

Post by sleepnaught »

Why are we analyzing this as though it's supposed to be an honest statement from Slack (ie. arguing they're not an open platform or that Slack isn't actually as special and snowflakey as the ad makes them out to be)? It's pure marketing. Could argue it comes across too insincerely for positive impact, not sure if that will be true for the general audience reading it or not.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#249

Post by Fishkins »

threatofrain wrote: post #150
Latty wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They provided a ton of value by bringing things together, by making everything easy and work intuatively. I guess my point is I think too many people are indeed dismissing slack as being lucky, or just pushing with heavy marketing, when I think they actually did something of value we can learn from.

But what would you say about HipChat or other competitors? Why didn't HipChat win? Was there a critical feature they missed or botched? Providing value is not the whole story. That's why I begin looking for alternative factors -- like luck and circumstance.

I don't know about the overall reason, but in my personal experience Slack just worked way better. My team used Hipchat for a while a few years ago. We found it to be very buggy. I would frequently send messages, but the recipient would never get any indication I'd sent it. The same thing happened for my incoming messages. Technically the message would be there if I looked though all my chats and checked for messages I hadn't seen yet, but there were no notifications or indications they were new.

Even when the worked, Hipchat notifications weren't configurable a the granularity I wanted.

Slack also is prettier and feels more cohesive to me, but that's a secondary concern.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#250

Post by Fishkins »

leesalminen wrote: post #194
dingaling wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I wouldn't even credit them with that. 20 minutes ago I yet again pressed up-arrow to scroll up one line to see a message off the top of the page and yet again it dropped me into an editing prompt for my last message. What? And then there's the click-click-click of jumping between channels to see the latest messages, instead of having some form of summary.…

I've long thought that an aggregated screen holding all unread message (with a button to expand +/- 5 lines) was sorely missing from Slack.

This is a newish feature that's at least close to what you want https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/226410907-View-all-...
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