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Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

nytimes.com

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Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#41

Post by seppin »

mathattack wrote: post #40
cmahler7 wrote: post #18

I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.

Nothing new here. Look at Netscape, eventually being surpassed by Internet Explorer. (Which in turn was surpassed by Safari and Chrome) It's very hard for large companies to do large scale decentralized R&D, so they copy and buy companies that are doing it. This isn't an awful thing. In many cases the original technologists get acquired. If the market is big enough, big players will want in too.

so who buys slack ?

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#42

Post by pokemongoaway »

cmahler7 wrote: post #18

I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.

One lesser discussed reason for this is the amount of power centralized control of big data & the cloud allows to the massive companies that leverage it. Companies are leveraging it before they really even have it. Control of the data is a big part of controlling the ecosystem. Everyone likes to make fun of how technologically illiterate legislators are - but it seems we simultaneously expect legislation to make a safe space for us. It seems more reasonable that developers & users together figure out how to take back control of our data!

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#43

Post by seppin »

sumedh wrote: post #39
code4tee wrote: post #23

750 employees? I don't get it. Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company. That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueles…

> but it's also incredibly easy to copy. I used to have same attitude but what I have learned over the years is that sometimes the big Co just does not get it. Just look at Google with its 100 chat applications, it's like watching Titanic hitting an iceberg in slow motion.

yeah, it's not. simple things always look "easy" to copy, the brilliance of them is how they have become simple.

For example, I had to roll out MS Teams (a slack clone) for a company event. Big company, big budget, terrible software.

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#44

Post by pokemongoaway »

beaconstudios wrote: post #34
wheelerwj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this thought the other day, even though I doubt it's original, and it seems like income inequality is growing to be so massive that its impossible, or at least much harder, to build a business anymore. If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants. Even bigger, more established companies like slack or NYT find themselves between a ro…

> income inequality is growing to be so massive that its impossible, or at least much harder, to build a business anymore. > If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants. These two ideas are diametrically opposed. If it's impossible to build a business then you'd expect that their you'd get no offers to buy your company (indicating that i…

Indeed, I think it is easier to build a business today - and income inequality is not the reason for most of the entrepreneurship issues people struggle with...

Automation and concentration of power are, however, problems for the modern entrepreneur. If they build a cool app or something and become part of the tech ecosystem that way, then they have decreasing power over their own piece of the pie. They can be banned from the app store, out-SEO'd in a week, locked out from previously accessible user data, banned from an API, etc... Some of this is due to today's fast pace, but another factor is the centralized architecture of modern internet ecosystems.

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#45

Post by microcolonel »

afandian wrote: post #20
bshimmin wrote: post #12

Looking at that office makes me feel so glad that I work from home - look at all those people hovering about and interrupting!

It is interesting. It might go some way to explain the culture that the app embodies. Lots of 'cutesy' things like MOTD on the loading screen, emoticons everywhere, application messages that include the word "yay", integration with Giphy which seems to be a random Gif roulette. It all feels rather unprofessional sometimes. And like they're trying to crowbar the Slack culture into my own office culture. When tools are…

I've been trying to figure out what it would take to make SMTP the last business IM protocol. Today's fancy email applications are basically laid out like IMs anyway. It just seems like a matter of getting delivery latency down, and demanding some level of compliance with modern email standards (STARTTLS only, must have spf and dkim, must have FCrDNS). If we're playing by IM rules, we can even have people establish contacts, which should make spam filtering a lot lower latency.

The other sundry things would be video transcoding, and reference-type attachments (for stupid nonsense like attaching a giphy to your message, or possibly-useful things like embedding google docs info).

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#46

Post by stagbeetle »

code4tee wrote: post #23

750 employees? I don't get it. Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company. That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueles…

I agree, it is easy to copy slack into a "good enough" state, but not if you're trying to compete with Slack, which is the main point here.

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#47

Post by stagbeetle »

superquest wrote: post #29
code4tee wrote: post #23

750 employees? I don't get it. Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company. That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueles…

> incredibly easy to copy I feel obliged to post this tweet https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218

If that's all Slack does, then it is incredibly simple (I realize this is only one part). It has saved me the time of figuring out what pieces make the whole and how they interact with each other (i.e the skeleton). Now, I just I need to slap the nervous system (code) onto it and call it alive.

Do it in a weekend? A codemonkey could do it in a day.

This argument would be different if it were for something like Dropbox, where the internals are really "something else."

But, I agree, with what I believe you're implying, that HN users throw around "I could code it in a weekend," even if it doesn't apply here.

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#48

Post by stagbeetle »

throwanem wrote: post #10

> “We’re trying to build empathy at scale,” Mr. Butterfield said. > “There are people who will die, get divorced, have children with cancer,” Mr. Butterfield said. “You really have to put yourself in their frames of mind. If we preoccupy these people for a minute longer than we have to, we’ll lose them.”

It's definitely not the most eloquent way to put it, but I think it gets the point across.

"People are in a rush these days, let's not get in their way."

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#49

Post by beaconstudios »

pokemongoaway wrote: post #44
beaconstudios wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> income inequality is growing to be so massive that its impossible, or at least much harder, to build a business anymore. > If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants. These two ideas are diametrically opposed. If it's impossible to build a business then you'd expect that their you'd get no offers to buy your company (indicating that i…

Indeed, I think it is easier to build a business today - and income inequality is not the reason for most of the entrepreneurship issues people struggle with... Automation and concentration of power are, however, problems for the modern entrepreneur. If they build a cool app or something and become part of the tech ecosystem that way, then they have decreasing power over their own piece of the pie. They can be banned…

I agree, and I think we're on the brink of a real revolution in decentralising the internet once more. Many people are working on this problem, from masotodon to the bitcoin economy to ethereum, I2P/TOR and so on. I think what we really need is a "browser" equivalent that talks P2P - the internet would have never taken off if not for the web, and many of the companies working on decentralisation now are either talking "web" or providing infrastructure/protocols that no-one really talks yet.

Even the fact that journalism is getting dominated by citizen journalism speaks to this, imo. We just need to free citizen journalism from the shackles of twitter.

Re: Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals

#50

Post by cmahler7 »

pryelluw wrote: post #37
cmahler7 wrote: post #18

I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first. With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.

It has always been like that. Thinking this is new or trending is a really naive point of view. The business world is unethical, immoral, frequently borders on the illegal, and hardly ever does the right thing. If you think any of the tech companies are any different then you drank the kool aid. They are not too big to fail. The bubble we are in makes it seem that way. Cheap money makes valuations soar. Won't last mu…

I don't think it has. Tech has allowed for massive consolidation not possible in the past, in almost every industry.

Media is now controlled by a handful of global corporations rather than independent outlets

Tech is the same, Amazon will soon control everything from ocean freight to last mile delivery. Google and Facebook have similar reach as well as the ability to influence billions.

If something isn't done I think we're going to see Weylan-Yutani level super-corporations that are effectively more powerful than governments.

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