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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

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

#561

Post by zimbatm »

Sahhaese wrote: post #529
antirez wrote: post #488

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

Except people still release protocols. Just look at https://matrix.org/

IRC is an early protocol and wasn't designed for extensibility purposes. A new chat protocol just needs to replace it.

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

#562

Post by sethammons »

konspence wrote: post #397
askafriend wrote: post #361

Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success. All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us more productive. I would hate to go back to what came before it. IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.

Slack is one of the most bloated apps on my computer, and my smartphone. On both, it takes seconds to boot, and that's just to load the local cache. Syncing with the main server takes a few more seconds. It has some good UI patterns. But overall, it's heavy and slow. It takes longer to load than the previous chat clients I used.

On slower internet, slack takes ages. If I'm tethering, slack has taken over 30 seconds to load. Insane.

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

#563

Post by buboard »

Certhas wrote: post #550
buboard wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think federation has anything to do with it. There were no incentives to bring it to consumers though (in contrast e.g. to email), and by itself it is not easy to use for vast majority of end users.

Federation prevents experimenting, iterating and developing the protocol forward. Yes there are all sort of workarounds like protocol extensions and what have you not, but then you add massive new friction to the system ("No sorry my client doesn't do OpenVideoCall2.0 it only does LibreAVConference0.3"). That type of friction isn't that hard to deal with if you have a bunch of tech savvy people with time on their han…

There s nothing wrong with extensions unless they break the entire system, but seems there was no One IRC company that would essentially dictate extensions to everyone else. Google has changed HTTP and HTML a lot, and email too. Slack could have done the same with IRC (maybe someone else will do in the future? ). Yes, walled gardens are a recipe for success , but despite massive walled gardens we still have not switched wholly to those gardens, because they come and go.

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

#564

Post by kuschku »

orthoxerox wrote: post #344
henning wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can reall…

Slack and IRC are incomparable. Slack has authentication, message retention and search, multimedia attachments, mobile application with notifications, conversation threads, etc. You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.

Except for message retention and search, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible with bouncers.

Mobile applications with notifications, conversation threads with +draft/reply (IRCv3 draft), multimedia attachments (IRCv3 idea), authentication with SASL and standardized account management (IRCv3 draft), etc.

Look at what IRCCloud provides, and what IRCv3 is doing.

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

#565

Post by dTal »

bouk wrote: post #558
antirez wrote: post #488

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

IRC has terrible UX, and Slack beat it because the experience is better.

That's not an intrinsic problem with IRC-the-protocol. The only technical issue with it is the lack of server-side channel history scrollback which makes it inconvenient for users who aren't connected 100% of the time. This could have been entirely solved with a single extra server command - "/fetch-channel-history". But I suppose no one was convinced of the need.

If you wanted to make a modern, user-friendly chat application that relies on central servers, there's no reason not to base it on IRC.

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

#566

Post by kashyapc »

antirez wrote: post #488

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

I'm truly hoping the Matrix protocol takes off.

(FWIW, /me has been using Matrix-based chat clients for group and individual chats at conferences. Quite happy with it.)

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

#567

Post by jillesvangurp »

saagarjha wrote: post #466
jillesvangurp wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pain of forking development into multiple separate teams with completely different technology stacks, bugs, and coordination overhead is just not worth it for most startups. It slows you down when you need to be able to adapt quickly. A lot of unicorns in the past would have addressed this by simply focusing on one platform initially but for an application like this that is not feasible. Even Linux support is not…

Slack is in no way a "small startup".

They were when they started out and not getting distracted by a multi platform strategy is what allowed them to stop being one.

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

#568

Post by granshaw »

Sahhaese wrote: post #529
antirez wrote: post #488

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

There’s no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols. Without money to be made there’s no funding. Without funding there’s no way to create great experiences. Without great experiences nobody will use the thing.

Pretty straightforward, really

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

#569

Post by jasode »

Sahhaese wrote: post #529
antirez wrote: post #488

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

>The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died.

People ascribe too much credit to a protocol. The real issue is the funding model to support spending money on that protocol.

By focusing the lens on the funding, the web wasn't as "open" as people think. The so-called "open" web was a government project which wasn't fully open to the public until about ~1995. Before then, you had to work on government-funded projects (ARPANET & NSFNET). The "open" web was actually quite closed off to people that didn't belong to an institution to give them an ".edu" or ".mil" address.

>I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared.

The "conditions" were government sponsorship to pay for protocols.

- Vint Cerf developed the TCPIP protocol -- but he was funded by DARPA (USA government). Mr Cerf didn't have to go to venture capital firms on Sand Hill Rd and get funding to pay the salaries of his team to build a proof-of-concept or "MVP". He didn't have to worry about not making payroll if his TCPIP protocol project failed.

- Tim Berners-Lee developed the http protocol and also HTML language -- but he was funded by CERN...which is one step removed from being funded by a consortium of governments[0]. Therefore, TBL didn't have to wear a "salesman" hat and pound the pavement begging enterprise customers to buy his "http protocol stack" so he could buy his expensive NeXT workstation[1] to help build and test the protocol.

Those are prominent examples but it doesn't mean people can't create new protocols on their without government help. The SSL protocol was developed by Netscape -- a commercial business. I believe the the git protocol was developed by Linus without a government grant. (Also note that http v1 was funded by CERN (government sponsored) but http/2 & http/3 appears to be mostly funded by Google (non-government sponsored).)

But notice what happens with "open protocols" like SSL and git: they eventually run into a wall where somebody has to spend money on it. The SSL protocol is free of royalties but the Certificate Authorities issuing certificates are not free of charge. The git protocol is free but enterprise accounts for Github are not. The ActivityPub protocol is also free but Mastodon servers are run by altruistic admins spending their own money or requesting Patreon donations. Somewhere, money has to be spent and that ultimately constrains what the "free web" will be. Releasing a "free to use protocol" is not enough.

Therefore, it doesn't matter if the old IRC protocol is free of charge. People still have to spend money on auxiliary features outside the scope of the protocol. Slack spent money on those extra features (e.g. searchable history, etc) that nobody spent on IRC.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:Fi...

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

#570

Post by kristopolous »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #352
dstaley wrote: post #110

It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got T…

The pain of forking development into multiple separate teams with completely different technology stacks, bugs, and coordination overhead is just not worth it for most startups. It slows you down when you need to be able to adapt quickly. A lot of unicorns in the past would have addressed this by simply focusing on one platform initially but for an application like this that is not feasible. Even Linux support is not…

if they can't build a couple binary apps with a $16,000,000,000 valuation then they're doing something seriously seriously wrong.

I've worked for companies 1/2000th that with native binaries on all 5 big platforms (linux/win/osx/ios/android).

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