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Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

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Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#271

Post by carterehsmith »

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…

> 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.

Perhaps you should also try using email. Or SMS. They can do that.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#272

Post by otterley »

stephengillie wrote: post #196
nilkn wrote: post #9

Our entire company switched to Slack within basically a day. While that's a big selling point for Slack's ease of use, it also means it'd be easy to switch away to a competitor within a day too.

My team has built numerous chatops bots and automation around Slack, mostly because of their great API. In a way, we're building our own lock-in, as any replacement would have to provide the same level of API access, from in-channel announcements to channel scraping for parsing by other systems. And it would require retooling the bots too.

Respectfully, that sounds like an engineering failure on your part. There are enough similarities in the APIs among different chat systems that the business logic can be easily decoupled from the event loop; had you abstracted the interface, your system would be more easily portable to other providers.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#273

Post by ryanwaggoner »

asp_hornet wrote: post #269
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

And the relational database

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#274

Post by murukesh_s »

dasil003 wrote: post #147
murukesh_s wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Execution is everything? Then Microsoft is also copying their execution. What's wrong with that? Why going overboard and trying to troll Microsoft?

You can't copy execution. In the trenches every day decisions are made. The quality of the product that comes out deeply reflects the team that made it. You can clone an implementation relatively easily, and Microsoft has a ton of smart teams and has really upped its game recently, but Microsoft's next feature will not be the same as Slack's next feature, the cultures are just too different.

Can't copy in one day for sure, but boy you sure can. Ask zynga how they did it. Or just look at Samsung phones with latest Android. Sure there are few products like Adobe suite & stackoverflow etc which have stood the test of time, but slack is a relatively newcomer who is yet to crack into the big enterprises.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#275

Post by asp_hornet »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #273
asp_hornet wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

And the relational database

great catch!

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#276

Post by quanticle »

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…

>No, Slack isn't a world away from IRC or email - but it's enough better that people want to use it, that's good.

Move Slack into IRC's position, and Microsoft Teams into Slack's position, and you can see what Microsoft is trying to do. The problem with Slack is that right now, they're caught in the middle. They're not a consumer-facing company (at least, their profit model isn't consumer-facing), but, at the same time, they haven't invested in the boring schlep work (auditing, compliance, etc.) to make their product truly competitive to large enterprises. So they're stuck in this small-to-medium business space, while Microsoft is trying to vault ahead of them to capture the large enterprises.

From what I've seen, this is pretty much Microsoft's cloud strategy in a nutshell: take other companies' products, do the boring schlep work to add auditing, compliance, Active Directory Integration, etc. and then sell it to enterprises as a cloud service. This appears to be Azure's strategy against AWS, Office 365's strategy against Google Docs, Visual Studio Team Services' strategy against Github, and now, Microsoft Teams' strategy against Slack. It's a brilliant strategy that plays to Microsoft's strengths - knowing the needs of enterprise customers - while relying on the broader market to fill in for its weaknesses in discovering new products and doing UI design.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#277

Post by cmdrfred »

8_hours_ago wrote: post #239
blakeyrat wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft Team doesn't currently have a self-hosted option. I hope it's in the pipeline because my company can't use an offsite IM service. It would be nice if Microsoft added support and then Slack followed. Competition is good!

Skype can be self hosted.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#278

Post by domino »

beachstartup wrote: post #215
geoka9 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know you can "star" stuff in slack, right?

so what? i want to search based on keyword, not know ahead-of-time what i'm going to find important in 6 months.

Shameless plug here, but you could give us a try: https://pogo.ai , we aim to solve that problem (and more :) )

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#280

Post by [deleted] »

6stringmerc wrote: post #88
mcphage wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Execution is everything. Execution is a lot, but so is timing. Execution can be controlled, timing is mostly luck.

From a creative sector perspective, this claim holds a lot of merit as well. A correlative phrase I've heard is "Success is preparation meeting luck" because the sands of time are littered with well executed failures. In many fields!

[deleted]
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