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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#391

Post by travbrack »

Alupis wrote: post #221
solatic wrote: post #107

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

For on-prem, why not use a free and enterprise-quality XMPP server, like Openfire[1]? It's Java so runs just about anywhere, and with even relatively low resource allocations, you can support a large number of concurrent chats and group sessions. Plus, since XMPP is an Open Standard, you can use any XMPP complaint client of your choosing. Cisco embeds Openfire in a few of their enterprise products already (including…

The client-side story of XMPP is pretty bleak, especially if you're trying to get non-technical people to use it.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#392

Post by exikyut »

amorphid wrote: post #283
mmanfrin wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to…

I don't see any compelling reason to adopt IRC. It does nothing that I care about that Slack doesn't do. If Slack completely implodes, I would search for Slack alternative. If IRC really was my only option, I'd use it just long enough to write a basic alternative myself that replaced or extended IRC w/ the features I really want.

I like this approach very much.

IRC is just a particular implementation of chat. The only thing keeping it relevant is the several hundred thousand people currently connected to servers.

Within a more defined context, such as work communication, adoption network effects become irrelevant. You can just build your own system and set everybody up to use it.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#393

Post by slinkyavenger »

slivym wrote: post #4

Am I the only one who sees this as anti-competitive? This is basically collusion - Atlassian agreeing not to compete in chat in return for a payment from Slack. It almost seems like we're intent on making literally every mistake we made with traditional businesses, but with electronic products.

Using collusion without knowing what it means... Businesses make business deals all the time. If I had a company that made an inferior product and wasn't able or willing to invest time and resources to improve it, you know sure as hell I'd look to sell that product IP off before my competitors take all of my marketshare anyway and my company gets nothing for years of pre-existing work.

That's a sensible business move that lets them allocate resources to their strengths. To believe it's some kind of secret or illegal deal is pretty naïve. It's obviously not a mistake either - Hipchat is technologically behind other products on the market, and Atlassian has other core products that are doing really well (JIRA, for example).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#394

Post by paranoidrobot »

bluedino wrote: post #193
paranoidrobot wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the main benefits of Slack (to me, at least) is persistence, which you don't get from IRC. If I'm not connected to Slack, or even a member of a Slack channel - I can connect/join the channel and be able to get all of the history back to the beginning of the channel (or whatever Slack's limitation is). This makes it very easy to jump into the middle of a conversation and not worry you've missed some important c…

Persistence can be created the the right proxy/helper and clients

> Persistence can be created the the right proxy/helper and clients

As others already pointed out, that requires technical skill and fiddly configuration.

It also doesn't help with the specific scenario of jumping into a channel you've never been in before, and being able to get all the history of that channel.

I frequently have to jump into the channel for another team, provide some input around whatever the current issue is, and then I generally leave. I don't care to see/read about whatever that team normally does. With Slack, that's dead easy - join channel, I can scroll up and see the rest of that conversation, then talk a bit, and get out.

There's also a ton of other features, like threading, editing message in-place, and persistent file attachments that either arn't supported, or require some kind of custom implementation - or depend upon IRCv3.

We also make heavy use of various integrations - our customer support team gets pinged in-channel when certain events happen in their support platform, which has Slack support built in.

Our deployment tools notify teams that need to be aware of new releases and links to resolved issues/new features.

So, yes, we could cobble together something that does all of these things - but this is a major undertaking.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#395

Post by SamWhited »

Karunamon wrote: post #228
lossolo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IRC hasn’t changed much in years. https://ircv3.net/ It's changing a lot for some time now.

A set of RFCs isn't really in the same ballpark of the same planet of the same local galactic group as a mature product that I can go sign up for and be using in under a minute. Maybe in a few years. I say maybe , because XMPP is an IETF RFC, and frankly, it sucks.

What do you not like about the protocol? Like everything, it has its warts, but having worked on a few more-or-less proprietary protocols XMPP is much better designed and thought out than most of them. The community has had a lot of time to address some of its flaws whereas Slack, Stride, et al. tend to reinvent the same problems XMPP solved 20 years ago.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#396

Post by slededit »

andygcook wrote: post #380
slededit wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could find the original document. They do spend about 1/8th talking about how it has to be a great experience. But the majority of the document discusses how they aren't a chat app, they had a broader vision of team communication. And so you don't compare Slack to IRC because IRC is "just" a chat app while Slack is for "collaboration". In the early days of Slack we had Office Communicator in Microsoft. But b…

Not sure, but perhaps you are referencing the article from Stewart Butterfield, We Don’t Sell Saddles Here: https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c5952...

Yes! Thank you.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#397

Post by codezero »

solatic wrote: post #267
__sr__ wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also Zulip ( https://zulipchat.com )

Zulip actually seems to tick a lot of boxes for us, I'll see about bringing it in and spinning it up on a box. Thanks for the recommendation!

The threading concept in Zulip works really well. I haven't used it for work, but I would love to.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#398

Post by SamWhited »

Karunamon wrote: post #194
ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

None of the problems you mentioned are unique to any particular messaging product, up to and including IRC and Jabber. And with respect, you cannot speak to any culture other than the few you've been a part of. I can say with some authority that this is not a problem at my workplace. The reason IM has proliferated is precisely because it's instant and usually targeted. Email is a pain in the ass and usually serves as…

Slight aside: I think one of the big problems in the IRC and XMPP communities is that we discuss them as if the protocol itself or the public federated network (in the case of Jabber) were a "messaging product", but it's really not. Someone could (and should) build a messaging product with XMPP or IRC. HipChat started out that way a bit, but then tacked on more and more proprietary bits, or abused the XMPP protocol in its own clients enough that it could hardly be called XMPP anymore, which was a real shame.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#399

Post by nimchimpsky »

qabqabaca wrote: post #57
joeblau wrote: post #26

I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.

What would you recommend instead of Jira?

trello

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#400

Post by colordrops »

solatic wrote: post #107

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

I'm guessing it's highly likely that one of the reasons for the acquisition is to make Hipchat the on-prem version of Slack, or at least create a path to that goal. Why does everyone here assume they will shutter the product? Slack has been promising self-hosted chat for years.
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