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Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

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Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#261

Post by Daviey »

blakeyrat wrote: post #190
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has a well regarded developer network and Q&A system regarding Microsoft technologies, at least in my (limited to primarily Azure) experience. Similarly, Microsoft has already operated a widely used integrated chat, profile, and community system at scale. Given their recent pushes, it wouldn't be entirely surprising for them to bring back similar platforms for business users integrated with LinkedIn. That w…

Does Slack even allow on-premise installs yet? That instantly disqualified them from the last 3 jobs I've had. (All of which had data protection issues that prevented them from using off-premises IM systems, mostly HIPAA regulations.) Microsoft's got that market already sewn-up, right out of the gate.

I think this is one reason teams use hipchat, because it does provide this.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#262

Post by hosh »

kzisme wrote: post #210
hosh wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy using Slack. There were a lot of nuances that together adds up into substantial improvements over Hipchat or IRC. I am also a remote software engineer who have been working on distributed teams for the past 8 years. I've tried a bunch of different things to collaborate remotely, including IRC. Your mileage may vary.

What downsides did you find to using IRC? Either way each choice is just a tool and if it works for you - thanks great!

Wasn't a downside to IRC so much as there are UI/UX stuff in Slack that helps a lot. These are small things that seems obvious now, but they help with communication.

I've been working on applying the theory of Kanban starting from first principle: "Make work visible." Visibility helps develop trust. Slacks helps with signaling a lot, and there are obviously a lot of thought put into the design.

Some examples:

1. URL for every message. I can paste that URL into Github PRs or Jira to reference a conversation where people talk through something.

2. Cross-device notifications and fallbacks, and other controls such as Do Not Disturb, etc. This allows me to control heads-down coding vs. when people needs help.

3. Notification integration helps. I know there are IRC bots that can do that, but how well you can just click through things depends upon the IRC client you choose. Being able to see a log of say, Github and Jira (usually in a separate channel) helps stay in the loop. The same with when adding CI/CD notifications.

4. Starring messages helps me manage time. I don't read everything people send over the chat. I certainly do NOT try replacing person-to-person contact with Slack (or IRC or HipChat). Sometimes I'll star something I want to read later (which may or may not happen).

5. URLs posted often have previews, which also helps with managing whether I go read it or not.

I'm sure these things can be done with IRC, and Hipchat probably copied over some of these ideas. Mattermost has certainly cloned the important stuff. By no means am I saying any of this seem earth-shattering innovative, but it is clear to me that Slack was designed around remote working, and it works well.

To keep things in perspective too: before Gmail, I used to run my own web server and used terminal-based apps for that. I don't do that anymore because it was easier to just dump things in Gmail and then search for things I need. I'm still keeping my tmux+emacs setup though -- maybe I'm missing out with web-based development.

So yeah, Slack is a great tool, and it works well with what I do. If you don't use it with discipline, or you have not developed much of a philosophy on how this all works together, it's not going to work well. You won't have a philosophical framework in which to curate or vet what you want in your life or attention-space.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#263

Post by stable-point »

blakeyrat wrote: post #207
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #171

Does Slack even understand that there are MANY enterprise companies that don't use Slack simply because it's NOT Microsoft? Hubris is rarely a good quality.

More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use HipChat instead, because it is. Either way, this is a HUGE market Slack hasn't even begun to touch. (Although I see they now have a "coming soon!" banner on their homepage.)

> More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use HipChat instead, because it is.

Just one data-point, but: my employer went with HipChat because we needed an on-premise solution. (We were moving away from IRC because we needed persistent chat history for remote employees. Using IRC bouncers was considered too high of a barrier-to-entry, given we wanted non-technical employees to join the conversation too).

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#264

Post by Veratyr »

wahern wrote: post #258
Latty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really weirded out that people can't see the value Slack added. Having your messages stored while you are offline is hugely valuable. If I have been out of signal range on a train, I want to be able to look at history on my phone once I'm back in range of a cell tower. Beyond that, a well made UI for web, desktop and phone that is consistent is valuable. 'Adding a pretty UI' isn't a zero-effort or skill thing. No…

XMPP/Jabber has always supported offline message storage. I don't hate Slack; heck, I've never even used it. But like _many_ people I'm disappointed that we still don't have a non-proprietary, federated IM system. That leaves most of us ambivalent, and some of us bitter. IRC is still around, but IRC isn't a substitute for IM. IRC can't be truly federated because there's no global directory or routing the way there is…

Just because you didn't mention it, Matrix https://matrix.org/ is another option. It supports federation, services (like IRC bridges), encryption, push notifications, offline storage and has some really nice clients for Android and iOS.

I found it really cool that I could spend ~half an hour setting it up on my own server then just pop in on chats on another server.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#265

Post by lifeisstillgood »

jdmichal wrote: post #213
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #120

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?"

Let's really talk about a no-brainer... How far down that stack do you have to go to before the Microsoft choice isn't included as part of some already-priced-and-paid package? Free Microsoft or paid Slack... "Nobody was ever fired for choosing IBM."

At my Fortune 500 client Office communicator / lync/ Skype for whatever is per seat chargeable. But as it's 3 bucks no one even blinks at signing it off.

MS actually has done rather neatly out of that one

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#266

Post by jlgaddis »

beamatronic wrote: post #162
empath75 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at the company that popularized internet messaging in the 90s. We used our own product exclusively for interoffice communication, until slack came out, and slack totally replaced it within the course of a couple of months, totally organically. Literally nobody at the company uses our own product any more.

Yahoo Messenger, right?

Personally, my money would would be on AOL (by a large margin), followed closely by ICQ. MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, although relatively popular, were latecomers.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#267

Post by oldmanjay »

forgetsusername wrote: post #228
oldmanjay wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another day, another post dismissing success as luck. Let's take this somewhere. So what if it's just luck? What useful information can we glean from your dismissal?

> Another day, another post dismissing success as luck. I thought it was pretty well known that luck plays a significant factor in success. Are you disputing that?

Not at all. If you need to add words to a person's statement in order to refute it, you are engaging in rhetorically useless behavior.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#268

Post by K0SM0S »

r2dnb wrote: post #136

Wow... So if I understand correctly : 1) They decided to mess with a company having $500B in-cash 2) Which decided to attack their low barrier-to-entry market 3) And took the unusual revealing step of building its own instead of buying 4) And is playing in its comfort zone (productivity tools, Office, API, cloud-scale integration points : azure, azure marketplace etc...) 5) While having a pool of 90M trustful paying…

Or maybe they knew all that, being the communication gurus that they claim to be, and it was a desperate move to be bought, essentially saying: "hey MS you got cash and loads of engineers but you can still fail at that because _reasons_; we have the know-how, consider buying us too". J/k, but who knows.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#269

Post by asp_hornet »

r2dnb wrote: post #136

Wow... So if I understand correctly : 1) They decided to mess with a company having $500B in-cash 2) Which decided to attack their low barrier-to-entry market 3) And took the unusual revealing step of building its own instead of buying 4) And is playing in its comfort zone (productivity tools, Office, API, cloud-scale integration points : azure, azure marketplace etc...) 5) While having a pool of 90M trustful paying…

"Making my eyes roll" sums my feelings on this perfectly.

Dear Slack,

We built the cloud service, web framework, programming language and operating system our Team app runs on as well as the IDE it was built with, the source control its stored in and the office apps it integrates with, oh and 2 of the browsers we tested it on. The chat part really wasn't that hard.

We'll probably be OK.

- Microsoft

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#270

Post by lokedhs »

Latty wrote: post #27
Mc_Big_G wrote: post #3

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…

I'm really weirded out that people can't see the value Slack added. Having your messages stored while you are offline is hugely valuable. If I have been out of signal range on a train, I want to be able to look at history on my phone once I'm back in range of a cell tower. Beyond that, a well made UI for web, desktop and phone that is consistent is valuable. 'Adding a pretty UI' isn't a zero-effort or skill thing. No…

It's not zero effort, but it's low effort. Implementing the important features of Slack (specifically the ones you mention) is not hard. I know that because me and one other person did that as a weekend project over a few months[1]. It's not because we're the most amazing developers in the world, but

(Sure, not as poslished but that would only take one more designer to fix.)

What I'm saying here is that GP is correct, and you are significantly overestimating the value of what Slack provides. They have the mindshare right now, but that's really all. They don't even the benefits a company like Facebook has, since a Slack competitor is still useful if a small number of people use it, as opposed to social media companies who are not useful at all unless they have a large userbase.

[1] https://github.com/cicakhq/potato

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