Most SaaS companies eventually veer towards the heavy enterprise which results in them raising prices and excessively complicating their app. So there is opportunity for a competitor but I'm not sure OpenAI is in a good position and it'd cement the view that they will eventually use your data to compete with you.
OpenAI should build Slack
281–290 of 349 posts
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#282Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use…
"how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is" - is that a common sentiment on HN?
To me, Google Sheets is 10% of Excel on desktop (Mac), Slides are 5% of PowerPoint on desktop (Mac), and the integration between the two (copying and pasting linked charts from Excel to Powerpoint with formatting) makes it a completely non-starter to consider the Google alternatives as primary drivers.
I'm probably a power-user of both, granted, but I took for granted Sheets/Slides are still just toys compared to the real stuff, so curious if I'm missing something.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
"plenty of corporations much larger than Google"? Google is the third largest company by market cap in the world. I suppose by "much larger" you mean number of employees? Walmart maybe? I doubt there's many out there using slack
By market cap? Is the money using slack? Company size when you're talking about tools for humans makes no sense in terms of market cap. Plenty of companies with many more employees than Google use slack.
Such as who? And are most of their employees actually using Slack or are a few white collar employees using it while 90% of their workforce has no idea?
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#284Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use…
"how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is" - is that a common sentiment on HN? To me, Google Sheets is 10% of Excel on desktop (Mac), Slides are 5% of PowerPoint on desktop (Mac), and the integration between the two (copying and pasting linked charts from Excel to Powerpoint with formatting) makes it a completely non-starter to consider the Google alternatives as primary drivers. I'm probably a po…
Most of the time what you call "the real stuff" is unnecessary.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
There might be an institutional block in Google due to the way that Google Wave was received. Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work. It's never quite lived up to expectations (or hype in the case of Wave). Knowing their history, I can see why they'd want to avoid trying to take on that market again. It's difficult to get enough traction with users to make it a successful product. Not impossible, but it's…
> Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work The original gmail-integrated gchat/google-talk first released in 2005 was fabulous. If they had just kept developing it instead of repeatedly creating a new one, they would easily be the undisputed leaders in this space.
Sometimes you have to question whether the product organisation actually hampers effective delivery of products as PM’s chase career winning moves
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
On that basis, Microsoft are also hampered by a lackluster chat client - Teams is atrocious. Slack is pretty much the only game in town that isn't bad (and even that needs native clients, because the UI is poor and not system-integrated).
I think I have this discussion on HN everytime Teams comes up but it really is a great piece of software for a typical office worker. File sharing is incredible. You get a SharePoint and collaborative editing in a seamless way. Video conf is great and work great with Teams compatible room booking system and room video material. The chat part barely matters. People don't use Teams to chat. It's a collaboration hub. Th…
Meanwhile, last time I had a video call in Teams, when I went into the call settings to change my microphone, my computer slowed to a crawl and became inoperable until the person who called me ended it. We eventually settled on a phone call. When I try to share a file over a certain arbitrary size limit, Teams refuses to do so, indicating some undesired and complicated permissions interaction with Teams and SharePoint.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#287Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use…
"how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is" - is that a common sentiment on HN? To me, Google Sheets is 10% of Excel on desktop (Mac), Slides are 5% of PowerPoint on desktop (Mac), and the integration between the two (copying and pasting linked charts from Excel to Powerpoint with formatting) makes it a completely non-starter to consider the Google alternatives as primary drivers. I'm probably a po…
As you note, most people aren’t power users. That core functionality is enough for 80%+ of users.
Even I, a definite though intermittent power user, am fine with the Google versions most of the time.
Collaboration also just feels faster in Google.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand why Gemini is not better integrated into Google Docs. I can’t transfer results into docs, it can’t manipulate existing docs. I can’t even rule out that I’m doing something wrong somehow. But it’s just frustrating to see that the teams inside of Google don’t work well together.
Gemini isn’t even an expert in Google’s own products. Ask about a feature from within one of their own products and it’s as dumb as any other LLM. Why wouldn’t you ground it in knowledge and your product?
first they would need to create docs that aren't useless and completely disorganized to train on. the best way to figure out how to actually use more than the most basic examples of most the gcp sdks is by looking at the source code.
either a hello world example or an autogenerated class list with no explanations /rant
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#289> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success. Not sure if the author has used Teams. But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.
Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often. Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability. The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support…
They're ending webhooks? Bummer. By the looks of it, they're going to introduce a more complex alternative. No, two, because why not. Why make something work when you can also make two things that work half, right?
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean I get your point. But still, shouldn’t we hold the big companies accountable? I don’t want to lower my expectations just because I need to understand that the company in charge is huge.
Sure, we should demand good stuff from companies. That's different than your original claim of not being able to understand why it's this way (and another commenter calling it ironic). Totally expected IMO. It's very hard to do cross-cutting things in big companies. It just is!
It's so interesting to read these comments because this this is literally my job (to help Workspace teams integrate Gemini faster)
Some thoughts:
- Hardware constraints are real, even at Google.
- Features are often released for enterprise users first, before being released for the general public.
- I only started my current role last year.
- 2 years ago is forever ago in AI and things are changing a lot. For example, with older model generations people used to do a lot more fine-tuning (slow) vs. prompt engineering (fast). The implication is that things that are easier to do today might have been hard to do not that long ago. The rapid changes also create churn for internal platforms and dev tooling.
- Google is less yolo and cares about safety, prompt injection, etc. so some time goes into that
- Typical big company bureaucracy also applies, but TBH there's a lot of pressure to deliver Gemini related stuff so I think there's less of that