Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#331

Post by danielscrubs » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:44 AM UTC

vehementi wrote: post #231

erichurkman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you still cannot leave a channel in Discord. You can mute, but that's not the same thing — it still clutters your sidebar, and still downloads contents from it. Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot…

Obviously downloading contents from muted channels is not an issue. Also you can both mute and hide the channel which effectively leaves it. And obviously slack bots are just as powerful as discord's so it's just a matter of servers electing to add crazy bots or not. Everyone bitches about giphy... these are some real stretches if these are your actual complaints about enterprise readiness, rather than data/admin pol…

Didn’t know about Discord but those are some glaring issues I’d say.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#332

Post by pestaa » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:47 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #253

ngaut wrote: post #233

Mattermost raises $50 million to advance its open source Slack alternative https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost-raises-50-mill...

Here's another one. http://www.ircd-hybrid.org You don't even need a client because you can read https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812 and then use telnet. Just remember to respond to PINGs.

Is your cynicism targeted at Mattermost?

Because I find it to be already better than Slack. Took a few commands to set it up at work on our own server. Convenient, fast, and has the good bits from the Slack UI.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#333

Post by dmitriid » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:47 AM UTC

dstaley wrote: post #165

carlosdp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the pure-web play will end up being a better decision in the long run tbh.

I think from an app developer's perspective, web-based apps are definitely the way to go. That's because it's so incredibly difficult to build a good web, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android app. I'm hopeful that one day making good native apps will be as easy and accessible as web development.

It’s significantly easier to build a good native app than a good web app.

However, it’s significantly harder to build several native apps for each OS/platform with the same level of polish and functionality than a single web app that will work on all of them.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#334

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:48 AM UTC

geodel wrote: post #32

Roritharr wrote: post #5

Well deserved. Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.

> and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. I agree. There is no law against half-assed, bloated Electron based desktop software that can bring even recent hardware to its knees.

[deleted]

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#335

Post by hindsightbias » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:49 AM UTC

reitzensteinm wrote: post #150

dstaley wrote: post #110

It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got T…

I don't even think they need to make a native app; I use plenty of Electron apps day to day, like VSCode, Atom, GitHub Desktop and they're all fine. Slack however is borderline unusable. Ghost processes, background workspaces silently closing and not delivering notifications, processes pinned at 100% CPU, silent crashes, pauses while typing, and even sometimes character drops. I've tried it on three laptops from two…

When my late model macbook pro fan starts running, it’s always slack. And thats several times a week.

At least it’s not another Box spinning beachball.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#336

Post by quickthrower2 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:49 AM UTC

CoryG89 wrote: post #327

huis wrote: post #313

To me the succes of Slack also shows how invaluable it is. Companies jumped to it very easily. Everybody just started using it. And the moment something better comes along Slack will be forgotten. I think this is different from Facebook. Company employees come and go so they don't value what they put on Slack very much. And for companies the history on slack is also not very important. Well that's how I see how Slack…

I don't necessarily think Slack is worth $16B any time soon, but I actually do feel like my searchable Slack history stretching back ~5 years is one of the most valuable resources I have at my fingertips on a dailt basis. The search quickly pulls up stuff from years ago even stuff from before we changed the subdomain for the org.

Yeah it would be wise to get that exported and searchable some other way. Justin case.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#337

Post by founderling » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:49 AM UTC

I never used Slack. Given a $16B valuation, I wanted to see what it is about.

But Slack seems to actively prevent me from using it on Safari on my iPad.

It keeps trying to make me install their app.

Is there a way to try their web interface it on an iPad?

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#338

Post by atombender » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:52 AM UTC

henning wrote: post #307

loeg wrote: post #302

It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.

I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can reall…

Back when Slack came out, my company was using HipChat. It was okay, but clearly outdated and not great -- barely a step up from AOL Messenger. I was invited into a Slack by some former colleagues, and it was a breath of fresh air. Someone finally upgraded the chat UI to something modern and un-clunky. It didn't hurt that it had a web UI, that it was free, and that it had configurable integrations that could work right inside the channel. Another thing that I think helped it take off was the simplicity with which it handled embedded media. Post a YouTube video or a tweet or a GIF, and the thing came alive on your screen, embedded right in the channel. You shouldn't underestimate the power of GIF sharing.

There was nothing groundbreaking about Slack, and there still isn't. There are a lot of naysayers on HN scoffing at Slack for basically being a worse form of IRC, which is silly and wrong, but also right in that there is nothing groundbreaking about the tech. But products don't need to be groundbreaking to win. They just need to be better than the rest, and perhaps generate the necessary "reality distortion field" that convinces people that it's the next natural evolutionary step. Once you convince people of that, they don't go back to HipChat.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#339

Post by sciurus » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:54 AM UTC

gpm wrote: post #108

khazhou wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My very-large project switched chat apps in one weekend (backed by a few weeks of prep by IT team). We had JIRA integration on day one, and one or two missing things within a week. It wasn't that big a deal. I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.

Chat history seems like the issue to me. My company has tons of institutional knowledge locked away in slack channels.

That might not be an issue at many big companies, which likely have data retention policies that disallow storing chat history longer than N days.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#340

Post by notatoad » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 5:54 AM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #326

aeternus wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notifications are easy, do many companies really use more advanced bots?

Notifications are easy if the integrations exist.

Building the integrations is easy, if all the integration is is a notification. I've got half a dozen custom slack integrations that i've written for my team, it's no more than a day of work sunk in so far, including the infrastructure in our product to figure out who, what and when to notify.

If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.