Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#251

Post by castlecrasher2 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

codenesium wrote: post #116

csydas wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this without being tongue in cheek, but Teams itself is anti-competitive. It's a horrible product which is basically only in use because it's bundled into Office 365. Absolutely nothing in Teams is not done better in other products, including Microsoft's own products such as Skype for Business or plain old Skype. Business chats in general are just completely incongruent with what users are expecting from end-u…

What about it is horrible? My team loves it.

I have a few reasons to list:

1) It constantly minimizes for seemingly no reason (at least once a week).

2) The "Teams" and "Chat" menus are separate. They're in the same window in Slack, and that just makes sense.

2.1) The "Teams" menu won't list more than 4 channels per Team by default. If you want to open a channel there you have to open the menu or favorite everything. I know this can be fixed by good sanitation by Team admins but Slack's way of doing it encourages it automatically.

3) Can't invite outside users like you can with Slack.

4) The chat history is so short it has to load after maybe 10 lines when scrolling up.

5) The "thumbs up"/message menu covers the message when hovering over it so it's impossible to highlight a message to copy/paste starting from the right to the left. You can go the other way but I never have until Teams.

6) Updates take forever to release! I've googled issues that MS staff note as "on the docket" for adding but months later it's still not added.

7) I frequently don't see the toast/popup notifications for some reason. I don't know what's going on there and it could be me but I don't remember it happening when I used Slack at work.

8) When it updates it shuts down without notification.

9) This might be the Android "work profile" in play but if I get a call or sometimes even a message the Android notification will not go away until I restart my phone.

I mean, Slack isn't perfect but I didn't have any complaints about it except that the call functionality would disconnect randomly.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#252

Post by jmalicki » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

mehblahwhatevs wrote: post #3

> Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.” Strange quote.

Why is that strange? It's very well established that people hate choices (regardless of what they may say) when you actually measure it:

https://sheenaiyengar.com/the-art-of-choosing/

And it's very good for the company, as they don't need to do as much competition with HipChat so they can slow down innovation and raise prices. Win, win.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#253

Post by Karunamon » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

spilk wrote: post #89

paxy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be cool if they re-released Hipchat as an on-prem Slack

there's Mattermost for that, which is open-source to boot.

Unless you need most of the features that Hipchat onprem has - then you get to pay $39/user/year.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#254

Post by komali2 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

mdeeks wrote: post #219

ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

Going through all of your channels you don't need immediate updates from and doing /mute will go a long way to getting the silence you want. People can still @mention you to get your attention if needed. You can check muted channels on your own time when you feel like it. You should also set up Do not Disturb and turn off the red notification dots. The rest is a cultural problem that exists will all communication cha…

For some inexplicable reason, in the absurdly big Hack Reactor alumni slack, it's considered cool to scoff at people asking for conversations to be taken into threads.

There's like 3000 people in there. Sometimes shitloads of conversations are happening at once. The people that refuse to use threads aren't cool, they're just co-opting literally the entire channel for just their conversation.

I see it as a forum, where you browse threads and click into the ones you want to discuss in. I guess other people see it as a bloodless Colosseum, may the loudest win.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#255

Post by solatic » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

lvillani wrote: post #214

solatic wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not blaming Mattermost for Atlassian's choices, I'm saying, you can't really try to recruit dissatisfied HipChat customers with promises of a supported migration if you can't help HipChat customers de-facto migrate from their old product to your product.

I read this as HipChat’s own export function having problems handling large amounts of data. I’m not sure how this is Mattermost’s fault.

HipChat internally uses Postgres and Redis, not some proprietary undocumented blob store. While I'm sure that a working applicative export function would make things easier, I don't see why you can't give Mattermost the relevant read-only credentials to those datastores and let Mattermost read directly from the source.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#256

Post by nerdb4itwascool » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

arjun27 wrote: post #8

This reminds me of Aaron Levie’s recent take on Kara Swisher’s podcast - on how enterprise software is going to be either about Microsoft (jack of trades) or about a collection of smaller companies (specialists in their fields) integrated with one and other. Slack and Atlassian focusing on what makes them great and working together makes a lot of sense

The big fish (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple) will continue to buy smaller companies until governments steps in and breaks them up in an anti-trust suit. The EU will lead that charge. The writing is on the wall.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#257

Post by Karunamon » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

elithrar wrote: post #23

horsecaptin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren't both Slack's and Atlassian's offerings cloud-based?

HipChat had an on-prem (self-hosted) release, but it's been near-abandoned for quite some time.

? It just had a release back in April.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#258

Post by jawilson2 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:04 PM UTC

apple4ever wrote: post #130

merlincorey wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Mattermost[1], with a clear migration path from Slack, at least. [1] https://mattermost.com/

We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already). We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#259

Post by pram » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:04 PM UTC

orliesaurus wrote: post #144

I wonder what all these folks who have worked and are still working on Stride will end up doing? If I am not mistaken most of the devs who worked on Stride are located in Austin, TX. I wonder how they feel about this whole change...it must feel yucky!

Having worked on that team, it always felt yucky. The product has been a train-wreck for years.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#260

Post by alanfranzoni » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

gregmac wrote: post #239

philwelch wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

I'm firmly in the "email has no place in internal discussions whatsoever" camp. Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). E-mail might kick some of this off, or be used to schedule, but that should be it. The problem I think most people run into with the realtim…

Your suggestions may work inside a company. E-mail is the only federated system we've left. If you need to contact somebody outside it, you're screwed. XMPP/Jabber could have solved some of this, but it's pretty dead right now.