ByteDance already built Slack and it works perfectly fine. Zoom out.
OpenAI should build Slack
291–300 of 349 posts
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#292Google 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…
Google Wave was very Slack-coded long before Slack existed. I think they feel the pain of getting that wrong so deeply that they'll never try it again.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
a lot of knowledge lives in our slack history.
If you can’t retrieve the knowledge easily it doesn’t exist. Basically impossible to find anything in slack older than a week.
I find search to be pretty good, regularly use it to find stuff posted years ago in a Slack community with ~27k members.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#294Google 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…
I've worked for years at companies that only use Google Sheets.
For 99% of people (sometimes we let Finance folks have an Excel license), it's more than enough. Google Apps Script is also reasonably useful, and the newer Smart Chips are a nice addition.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
email works, not everything has to be run by corporate greed
Do you use Gmail, outlook, etc? A provider backed by 1T+ worth companies? >99% of people do. Anything can be decentralized. But people will gravitate toward centralized solutions.
That has nothing to do with federation. A Gmail user can talk to an Outlook user. A Slack user cannot talk to a Teams user.
Email is only federated because it was used before it was commercialized. If companies could monopolize email they would. The solution here is government regulation requiring interconnection, like we got with phones and text messaging.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#296Should they be a model company or a product company? What do you think is the best way forward for them? Apple went with Google as their model choice while OpenAI was looking into new products to build.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#297Google 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…
I am not a power user of either, and I absolutely detest when someone insists on using Excel. Sharing and collaboration is such a giant pain, and it's like going backwards in time to the 90's with e-mailed versions of files back and forth. Our org does not have a MS 365 license, so I'm unsure of Microsoft's web versions of Excel or how good they happen to be these days. I know users of it who complain though, and end up using it locally on their workstation like the olden days.
Most of my use is incredibly simple and used for project planning, inventory counting, lists of things that are split up into status/to-dos among multiple people, etc.
I've also never had a use for "Advanced" powerpoint, so the simplicity of google slides is a breath of fresh are as I only ever use the 10% most common feature set.
I actually get a bit of anxiety when someone sends me an excel sheet these days. It's usually going to be overly complex using clever methods, and that person is going to be a real pain to work with on iterating anything most of the time.
I've noted some very rare and specific times Excel is warranted though - such as our CFO creating complex financial modeling. For those uses I totally get that Google Sheets would be like working with handcuffs on.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#298Google 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…
Google Wave was very Slack-coded long before Slack existed. I think they feel the pain of getting that wrong so deeply that they'll never try it again.
It's been too long so I only vaguely remember Wave.
It was a little too early to market. Common PCs weren't quite good enough, and common Internet was very not good enough.
The UI also didn't quite help shape normal user workflows enough so it was hard for an average user to just pick it up and be productive.
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I think I'd like to see some merger of 'checklists', 'events' (calendar / etc), and 'conversations' much more like Slack channels where each new topic is a thread / email chain.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good is really good at engineering great software and really sucks at making them enterprise ready. It's why they've been failing with GCP, Google Tables (shutdown now I guess), Analytics or any product that aims for enterprise consumption. Note: they are really good at making consumer softwares though (take the success of Google Photos or Gsearch)
Google isn't even good at engineering great software. They have some good people working on some good projects. If you look at the relation between software-quality of their average product and number of developers they have... yeah I don't know. Maybe hiring tons of new-grads that are good at leetcode and then forcing them to use golang... is not what actually makes high quality software. I could believe that they a…
Most of the core products at Google are still written in pre-C++11.
I wish these services would be rewritten in Go!
That’s where a lot of the development time goes: trying to make incredibly small changes that cause cascading bugs and regressions a massive 2000s C++ codebase that doesn’t even use smart pointers half the time.
Also, I think the outside world has a very skewed view on Go and how development happens at Google. It’s still a rather bottom up, or at least distributed company. It’s hard to make hundreds of teams to actually do something. Most teams just ignored those top-down “write new code in Go” directives and continued using C++, Python, and Java.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#300Google 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…
They did. You can find few attempts here https://killedbygoogle.com/
Google tried to build chat/video conferencing software like 5 times now. Some of attempts were even decent. They just decided that because they instantly didn't win 100% of the market they need to close it.
> 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.
The only reason Teams is even in the running is it's because it is (was) added for free to the O365 suite so many execs just went "well, since we already have it..."
As a piece of software for voice chats it's okay but as piece of software for text chats it is absolutely atrocious piece of shit that learned zero lessons from anything else and refused to fix anything users actually want