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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

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511–520 of 809 posts

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

#511

It's pretty hilarious that first Stewart Butterfield tried to make an MMO (Game Neverending), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Flickr. Then he tried to make another MMO (Glitch), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Slack. I hope he tries to make another MMO.

I just want him to set aside a fund for remaking glitch. The most ambitiously cooperative mmo I ever played. I miss it everytime I think about it :(

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

#512
post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just think it doesn't actually fit any purpose. For quick chats irc is faster and more accessible, and for long thoughtful discussions Slack is lacking a lot of features so that you might as well use email. A lot of discussion from this post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227115

How is IRC in any way faster or more accessible than Slack for quick chats? Does IRC fit a purpose? If so, what? And how does it do anything better than Slack? Slack is certainly no email replacement, and nor will I ever use it for such but in my experience and for the purposes I use it for, it is far, far more featured than IRC, unless you're using some uber IRC client that I'm unaware of. I'm genuinely trying to un…

Personally, I cannot make a comparison between Slack and IRC because I have never tried the former. From the discussion, it is clear that Slack has many features and attractions that are not available or harder to obtain with IRC.

However, for me personally, a major attraction of IRC is that I can easily use it from within Emacs, and automatically have the same Emacs key bindings available that I also use for navigating and editing files.

With IRC, I can therefore quickly copy and paste text between chats and programs, search the history etc., all in the existing Emacs session, using the same key bindings, with direct access to built-in features such as autocompletion, dynamic abbreviation and spell checking, and — importantly! — without switching applications.

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

#514
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.

Yeah, you have to consider more than just the technical aspect

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

#515
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options. Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.

You think enterprise companies switch a product they’re already using with all the integrations to another (possibly inferior) product just because of price? That’s not usually been my experience

That’s the definition of Enterprise Software - the buyer is not the user. They are already paying for Office. Why pay extra for Slack? You really don’t want to go head to head with Microsoft’s Enterprise sells.

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options. Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.

> The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” Also, Google Chat. AFAIK it's free if your company is already using the work version of Gmail, though don't quote me on that. It's out now, and does the job well enough. My current employer went with Google Chat, I think mainly due to the cost difference with 10k+ employees.

Would you really trust any messaging platform from Google? They have a new one every year.

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

#517
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy. What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.

Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service? Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers. "Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it…

You could have a point with Slack but Jira is really terrible. I used it for a customer years ago and I'm so happy any other customer is using something simpler. Jira could be OK if operated by a specialized team paid to do project management and to shield developers from the complications of the tool. It's not only the design, it's the sheer amount of functionality. We don't need all of that.

I'd go with Github simplistic issues all the time instead of wresting with Jira. YouTrack from JetBrains is a reasonable compromise. Redmine is also ok.

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

#518
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded. They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.

I'm not sure they'll be able to compete against a worse but integrated solution like MS teams long term. No doubt it's worse but the bundle is cheaper with when you're already paying for Windows and Office. Same story with G Suite. MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.

Agree - there was a lot of talk about Slack in our org, until everyone realised we had Teams already as part of O365 and it delivers on most of the use cases you set up from Day One.

It's actually pretty good for managing discreet work streams, and even for organising personal work (kind of against the "Team" ethos, but having a channel for myself keeps my work visible and tabs keep important things to hand easily).

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

#519
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it so hard to imagine a photo sharing feature inside the game? MMOs can be anything.

Yes. Can you please explain or give an example of an MMO where photo sharing is a major mechanic or important MVP feature?

Why does it need to be a major mechanic? It was a feature in Game Neverending and they used that to build Flickr.

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

#520
post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service? Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers. "Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it…

IRC is better than you're suggesting: * Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly. * DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's ins…

> Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.

It takes a lot of heat because it is very customisable and get locked down in large corporation.

I worked in company that ran an old shitty very version on underpowered server and disabled feature like rich text editing but force you through a 5 page wizard with in total tens of mandatory field to fill for any jira ticket. People at that company used an excel file on a shared drive to escape the jira hell.

Also there is the crowd of Agile purist that complain that Jira is too bloated for agile and ignoring the extra feature is not good enough because mostly "trust issues".

More recently there are stuff like plandek that create metric on your jira usage. In the wrong hands, this is modern day LOC metric.

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