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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#451

Post by u801e »

greglindahl wrote: post #199
slededit wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago slack's early plan was posted here. From day one this was the goal - they knew it was just a chat app so they had to make it feel like something different. Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off.

I was involved in the early days of IRC, and personally, I'm amazed at how great Slack is. I parachuted into an org which had a not-great email culture and took up Slack as a replacement. It was amazingly great.

> I was involved in the early days of IRC, and personally, I'm amazed at how great Slack is.

At my company, we used to use IRC for internal communication and have since transitioned to Slack. The primary difference I see is that in chat, we see reactions to certain messages, in-line paste snippets, and links that use a slack redirect service.

I don't really see much utility in reactions. In-line paste snippets could just as well be a link I could click on to display the image or document in an external application I launch. And the slack redirect service makes it much harder to search my browser history for the document I was looking for.

I've also noticed that in the browser I use (Firefox), slack will, after a few days of using it in the same tab, become very laggy and non-responsive. This requires me to close the tab and open a new one to free up whatever resources were causing it to slow down so much. This was never a problem in the local application I used for my IRC client.

I'm not very impressed with Slack.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#452

Post by bergheim »

Non-tech people like Facebook (et al). Understandable. Hell, tech people like Facebook. Because of the social graph, understandably, I get it. You can't fight the compartmentalization of our previously open Internet, I guess.

Or maybe, at least developers know better.. ?

Turns out no. What annoys me to no end is when developers willingly crash right into this "electron react"-whatever hipster bullshit cause its "cool". We had IRC _thirty_ years ago. Slack is not cool. Sure, upgrades are in order for IRC. But it works. Slacks evaluation is so laughable. Obviously it is because of its data - that it won't share.

Anyway. We should know better. We should not willingly put everything into slack or hipchat or whatever. Why would we?

Ease of X, I guess.

Give me an api where I can sync all my stuff locally and, you know what, fair enough, go nuts, but these guys build their businesses based on holding on to their data like vultures (no surprises there) . Understandably. I just thought tech savvy people would know/do better.

Anyway, that's my two cents. I feel like a minority.. Now get of my lawn.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#453

Post by u801e »

snom380 wrote: post #356
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…

In my experience, Slack is the first chat application that both techies and non-techies actually use. I don't know why that is. But instead of asking when the hype is going to stop, it might be useful asking why the hype is there in the first place. [Edit:spelling]

> Slack is the first chat application that both techies and non-techies actually use.

IRC, MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo Chat were definitely used by both groups. None of them required a lot of resources to run.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#454

Post by u801e »

hnzix wrote: post #416
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…

I have this same complaint about message boards all moving into Facebook groups. Sure it's convenient but the same content ends up recycled endlessly. Sure phpbb is a little clunky but at least I can use it as a knowledgebase.

> Sure phpbb is a little clunky but at least I can use it as a knowledgebase.

Newsgroups were far better than phpbb :), and they were more easy to search IME.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#455

Post by tempestn »

linuxftw wrote: post #338
strictnein wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jira was great, ~15 years ago. It was a tool that actually helped development, especially with the GreenHopper plugin Now almost the entirety of its functionality is to help various middle managers track things that are important to them, while continuously making development slower. Manager 1 wants to track Metric A? Add a drop down. Manager 2 wants to track Metric B? Add a new form to fill out. And tie them all tog…

> Those that haven't experienced this probably just haven't worked in a medium or large corporation. So true, though I expect that of the HN crowd (given it's hosted by YC). Everytime I hear someone praise Jira, I think "Do you have more than 100 people using the same instance?" Middle manage needs charts and reporting, and that's Jira's strength. It's an absolute disaster to use on a daily basis.

We chose Pivotal Tracker over Jira because we didn't need all that stuff, and PT fit fairly well with our existing workflow. But... is the ability to do those things really a disadvantage? Seems more like a problem with the way these medium/large companies work than with the tool itself. If Jira didn't exist I don't think they'd use something like Pivotal and just do without all the tracking; they'd just have something ad hoc and unwieldy cobbled together instead.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#456

Post by stale2002 »

ggg9990 wrote: post #104
stale2002 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly IS anticompetitive. Anticompetitive practices aren't illegal though. They are only illegal if a company has a monopoly or has significant market power. Now, the question we have to ask is is Slack a near monopoly in it's marketspace? Maybe. I could see the argument go either way.

Not really, Teams is half as large and growing much faster because it’s glued to the side of Office 365.

Alas, perhaps I have just spent way too much of my life living in startup land. I've never even heard of people using these Microsoft chat products.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#457

Post by daturkel »

alienreborn wrote: post #220
core-questions wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this: - Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it. - Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from…

Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use wha…

I don't care for Confluence at all. It feels engineered to death (as does Jira, for that matter)—it can do everything, but nothing well. I've been trying to organize my team's Confluence space but I'm constantly confused by the software which seems to be working against me.

I think my issue with Atlassian software is that it feels so unopinionated—they've added every option and customization because they have such a large enterprise customer base with unique needs—and the result is that it becomes byzantine and unfriendly because it can do _everything_.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#458

Post by u801e »

briandear wrote: post #289
lossolo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not use Slack, we use IRC for direct and fast communication. We do not use it for things that need RFCs and technical specifications, for that we use gitlab and other tools. IRC is great and I am using it for 14+ years already. It's stable, fast, efficient and secure with lots of options. I've written a lot of IRC bots in many languages because protocol is so easy and every language have library/bot for IRC tha…

Can you share an image inline? Can you rapidly search the history? Can you customize alerts? Does it work reliably on mobile? You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC? Can you start audio or video calls with room participants? Slack is great. I don't need to waste time writing bots because all of the tools I use already have simple integrations: GitHub, Box, Dro…

> Can you share an image inline?

You can always paste a link to an image hosting service and launch the viewer as a separate application. I don't really see why viewing the image in the same application as the rest of the text is seen as an advantage. If it's inline, it would eventually disappear from the screen as more messages are posted.

> Can you rapidly search the history?

I can use grep on the locally stored log files.

> Can you customize alerts?

That depends on the client.

> Does it work reliably on mobile?

The IRC client I have on my Nokia phone works just fine.

> You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC?

Normally, you post a link to an image or pastebin service that shows the problem.

> Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?

You would have to use a separate application for that. FWIW, I use Slack in Firefox and that feature (at least the last time I tried it), didn't work. I had to install chrome to get it to work.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#459

Post by lossolo »

briandear wrote: post #289
lossolo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not use Slack, we use IRC for direct and fast communication. We do not use it for things that need RFCs and technical specifications, for that we use gitlab and other tools. IRC is great and I am using it for 14+ years already. It's stable, fast, efficient and secure with lots of options. I've written a lot of IRC bots in many languages because protocol is so easy and every language have library/bot for IRC tha…

Can you share an image inline? Can you rapidly search the history? Can you customize alerts? Does it work reliably on mobile? You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC? Can you start audio or video calls with room participants? Slack is great. I don't need to waste time writing bots because all of the tools I use already have simple integrations: GitHub, Box, Dro…

> Can you share an image inline?

Not inline, but you can share link to the image or send it to other person/persons via DCC directly, that's what you do on IRC.

> Can you rapidly search the history?

Sure, no problems with that, all the channels we use are logged and ready for advanced search.

> Can you customize alerts?

Yes.

> Does it work reliably on mobile?

Works for us.

> You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC?

I already answered that.

> Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?

We don't do that on IRC.

If Slack works for you then great, it doesn't do anything for us. We have different workflow than you, which doesn't mean it's worse, it's just different. We don't need integration with dropbox, intercom etc, because we don't use them and we have IRC integration with tools we use already. We host all our tools and infrastructure and we need to control the whole stack.

I didn't said anywhere that new startup should go with IRC (unless you are already familiar with IRC with your team). I've shared my experience and opinion about IRC. We had infrastructure built around IRC already, we have a lot of experience with IRC and whole team knows IRC very well. I know some other teams that use IRC and they don't have any problems either.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#460

Post by g3rv4 »

tabbott wrote: post #414
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…

Because just about every technical team needs the ability to do some sort of real-time communication, and Slack's UI is obviously better polished than the products that predate it (HipChat/IRC/etc). If you're looking for a product built by top MIT engineers who spent years thinking about how to make chat actually productive, check out Zulip. I'm one of those MIT engineers, and I agree that Slack is a huge waste of ti…

wow, this looks really really really good
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