Mirabilis should have built
Slack…
OpenAI should build Slack
331–340 of 349 posts
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. --- I think I'd like to see some merger of 'checklists', 'events' (calendar / etc), and 'conversations' much…
They have rolled out something along these lines by integrating the chat in Google Meet with Google Chat (or whatever the Gmail looking interface is called).
It was a huge surprise when the whole company suddenly got notifications about chat messages in various meetings they were invited to (but wasn't participating in) as well as messages sent after the meeting was closed.
That said, I think they are on to something here and I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to make some inroads. It will take a long time though given how much of an organization's operations are running on Slack.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#333I would never use Slack by OpenAI lol
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#334Earlier 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…
It's not though. There are seams everywhere - between Sharepoint, Teams, OneDrive and so forth. It's the worst possible approach. Fortunately the company I work at switched to Slack the day I started (co-incidentally), so I've been able to compare and contrast the two live. Slack wins for every single use case _except_ video and audio (where Zoom or Webex are the only games in town), hands down.
That's on top of the fact that the Teams client is an absolute pig, and is incapable of remembering basic things like "which of the two cameras do I want to use" and "which audio output is appropriate".
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#335Google 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…
Haven't they built like, 5 different versions of chat at this point?
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#336There'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.
Mattermost did a rug pull though.
Hi @consuln,
Mattermost team here. Agree we could have done a better job communicating. The change started in 2023 and we had made a lot of effort to work with the largest unsupported deployments early.
They were very aware of the direction ahead of the August 2025 announce. From then, there was still over a year of support during the transition: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...
Our understanding is that the organizations most impacted were those using the unsupported Mattermost commercial version, not the open source version. The commercial version of Mattermost is offered in Docker, K8, etc.
If you look into the license of the Mattermost instance you ran, what is the "Enterprise Edition" (i.e. commercial version that upgrades into paid offering) or under MIT license (open source licensed offering, bundled with GitLab omnibus)?
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#337I don't think the world needs another protocol, we need to leverage the ones we have. This space (text-based real-time messaging with media attachments) is feature complete, there's nothing left to add. The remaining value-adds are exactly that; optional extensions for productivities suites and integrating SaaS tools. Pricing and Privacy are another two concerns, and personally for the latter I'd like human chat to be as far away from AI as possible.
I use Google Chat, only because my clients use it. Network effects matter. Personally I think it's terrible, but I wasn't a fan of Slack either but I'm not entirely sure why as it's pretty much just sending text. Maybe the opportunity to innovate in this space is UI/UX, and performance/reliability (Signal has been slow/flaky recently for us).
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#338Google 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…
Competent is not the same as good. I can do the very basic things I need in Sheets, but the moment it needs more than =A1+B2 then it's uphill all the way. I also don't know how performant it is with larger datasets. I use Libre Office instead and despite the horrible UI it's been speedy and accurate. Desktop Excel is still king of the spreadsheets.
As for Slides, it's pure junk compared to the Keynote, but iCloud has it's own problems so I use this offline-only.
With the web version of Word 365 or whatever it's called, we've had so many problems syncing with OneDrive and sharing and whether it's showing the right version of the document that I'd be happy to never see it again, but their foothold in education means I'm forced to deal with it and provide technical support.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I wouldn't say most. Google is known for constantly iterating on its code internally to the point of not getting anything done other than code churn. While there is use of raw pointers, I'd argue it's idiomatic to still use raw pointers in c++ for non owning references that are well scoped. Using shared pointers everywhere can be overkill. That doesn't mean the codebase is pre c++11 in style.
Rewriting a codebase in another language that has no good interop is rarely a good idea. The need to replicate multiple versions of each internal library can become incredibly taxing. Migrations need to be low risk at Google scale and if you can't do it piecewise it's often not worth attempting either. Also worth noting that java is just as prevelant if not moreso in core products.
Re: OpenAI should build Slack
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dont get this idea of breaking big companies up is inherently a good thing. As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake. The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. Current Google only comes even close with their far out projects(that dont directly make money) such as their quantum computing/deepmind/boston dynamics(when google had them) Besides, if one does break up goog…
> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.
IBM Research when IBM was basically a monopoly was also an innovation machine.