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OpenAI should build Slack

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Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#311

Post by fatfox »

SoftTalker wrote: post #267
gcanyon wrote: post #237

If Google had stuck with Wave, and applied proper product management to it to refine the design feature set, it would be Slack+Notion today and I'd enthusiastically be using it.

IIRC around that time a lot of people were on Jabber. At least that was the case where I worked. We ran our own Jabber server but management made us shut it down because it wasn't a "core contributing technology" or something like that. Google Chat in the early years worked with Jabber clients. Maybe with Wave they changed the protocol? That killed any interest in Google's chat technologies for me. Still haven't ever…

XMPP / Jabber would be more than enough for many small companies. Slack is bloat!

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#312

Post by swyx »

aavci wrote: post #296

Should 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.

they are actually 4 companies in one. planning to ask him about that when he comes on the pod

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#314

Post by EGreg »

haute_cuisine wrote: post #179
EGreg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait What exactly does Slack do that other chats don’t? If you had to boil it down to 10 main features what is the point of this? Realtime chat seems to me to be distracting, and I much prefer threaded forums and issue trackers. But I’m willing to listen.

It's most likely already installed when you send an invite to someone and they already used to how it works. It just works most of the time, well, besides slightly buggy text editor and almost non-working calls.

But so what, browsers are installed too and can load arbitrary websites. Which can implement all that stuff too. And threaded forums like Discourse are far better.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#315

Post by toraway »

swyx wrote: post #310
yellow_lead wrote: post #125

There's already Zulip, Mattermost, and many others. Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO. A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.

Author here. You guys are reacting like engineers - it's not the raw features, it's the critical mass that only a rare few like openai can attract. I don't care that someone else is already trying to build a slack killer. They do not have critical mass. > A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack i ag…

"You guys are reacting like engineers" is a very wave-y dismissal of the many practical questions raised about why exactly OpenAI should expand into a product that's tangentially related (at best) to their core competency of AI.

The chain of logic in the article is explicitly spelled out as: Sam Altman said OpenAI will grow into new products -> Altman says to tell them what these products should be -> You say: Slack sucks so.... how about Slack?

I think most people, engineers or otherwise, reading the article have an understandable reaction of mostly bafflement as to why we are even talking about this, specifically, to begin with?

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#316

Post by flopsamjetsam »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #147
czhu12 wrote: post #121

Google 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…

While the current incarnation of Google Chat has indeed been steadily improving, Google has a lot, and I mean a lot , to make up for: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... (2021, as the URL says) And it's not just messaging. Google has a decades-long history of abandoning apps that don't make them billions, which means no-one with memory trusts them. Especially in their current "AI-everythin…

Such a great article. I love a good postmortem. I also had no idea of the chequered history of Google's messaging apps. I'd heard some of the names before, but being an iMessage and WhatsApp user, I'd just stuck with those mostly.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#317

Post by xnx »

corry wrote: post #282
czhu12 wrote: post #121

Google 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…

Excel on Mac is an especially low bar. Last I checked Mac Excel was like 60% of Windows Excel.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#318

Post by tadfisher »

swyx wrote: post #310
yellow_lead wrote: post #125

There's already Zulip, Mattermost, and many others. Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO. A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.

Author here. You guys are reacting like engineers - it's not the raw features, it's the critical mass that only a rare few like openai can attract. I don't care that someone else is already trying to build a slack killer. They do not have critical mass. > A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack i ag…

There's network effects and then there's core competencies. OpenAI has not demonstrated their ability to create software that is not a primary use case for LLMs. Chat is absolutely not a primary use case for LLMs, and so far LLMs have been sold as a value-add for traditional software.

The argument that OpenAI has the critical mass to dethrone Slack can be made for just about any other product with an 800-pound gorilla market leader. Windows, Office, Photoshop/Premier, Search, GMail, Figma, etc. Thus far, we have yet to see OpenAI build anything like these at scale, and there's no reason to assume their successes in the LLM space will translate.

I agree that they should build killer apps like these, because they are at extreme risk of being commoditized by smaller, better, faster genAI systems, but I don't think anything they do currently shows that they can.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#320

Post by hiq »

lancewiggs wrote: post #305
phil21 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An alternative perspective is that if someone sends me a Google sheet link then I know almost immediately that is probably not a “serious” document. Similarly with Google Docs, as “serious” documents with proper tracking of changes and so on are in Word. Of course the uses of serious spreadsheets are often in finance and serious documents are in law.

> “serious” documents with proper tracking of changes and so on are in Word

How does the tracking works in Word? I've never seen this proper setup so I'm just ignorant when it comes to this. If I hear "Word" and versioning in the same sentence, I'd just assume we're talking about the doc_v1_3_final_really_final_public_feb_2024.docx naming.

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