281–290 of 301 posts
And i think it would be easier/safe for companies to adopt self hosted solution or use already trusted company like Microsoft.
Slack had great UX - but one cannot compete only with that because it could be copied. Maybe Slack have some comparative advantage that could not be copied.
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Unless you use their API. Or you invited external users. Or you use one of the other features that lock you in. In fact, I think Slack wrote the letter because they feel so confident that they've locked in their current customers. Switching to Slack is easy. Switching from Slack is not.
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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.
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
That was a very nice turn of phrase.
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…
Sure someone can replicate it, but I think you're underestimating the value of it. Like IRC could have the best features in the world but for the users who do not find it approachable it may as well not exist.
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It's not about what can be done, it's about prior art. I've used xmpp chats with a couple of clients since well before slack and I'd struggle to think of a feature in slack that I hadn't used before.
We're actually investigating switching over to an XMPP server and completely ditching slack. No-one in the company uses it, no-one likes using it and XMPP just seems to work.
But if you don't like Slack, I'm guessing Mattermost is out of the question as well. I'm still using IRC in a lot of places which "just works", but obviously that is missing a lot of features and fluff of newer technologies, even if some can be retrofitted in.
Please et me know what you decide and your success since it's still relevant for me in a couple of places.
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.
Does that really matter, since those companies by definition would never be Slack customers? It's not like Slack could ever become a Microsoft product -- barring the obvious buyout, which is not likely to ever happen since Microsoft rolled their own. So if they aren't buying now because it's not Microsoft, I don't see how Slack hubris changes anything in that equation.