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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

#581

Post by pjmorris »

granshaw wrote: post #568
Sahhaese wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And yet, as a counterexample, HTML and HTTP persist. Maybe things aren't as straightforward as they seem.

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

#582

Post by mehrdadn »

senorjazz wrote: post #577
mehrdadn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even Facebook isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.

What does "well deserved" even mean? Does it just mean not evading your privacy to generate income via ads? Does it mean not being too aggressive / abusive of customers? Personally, I would just call that normal / decent behaviour. Alone, it doesn't mean you deserve a ridiculous billion dollar evaluation

"Decent behavior" describes the process.

"Well deserved" describes the outcome.

So you might say the outcome is well deserved only if decent behavior comprised the process.

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

#584

Post by CondensedBrain »

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?

ActivityPub shows a lot of promise.

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

#585

Post by welly »

triska wrote: post #512
welly wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 navigat…

I think that was something available to Slack in the past when it had it's IRC gateway. Sadly they closed that down.

We all have our own ways of doing things and I personally prefer to have applications run independently so I like my Slack client and my IDE and terminal etc. etc. separate.

I've always found if one tool can do it all, it's generally a worse experience than dedicated software applications and doing a Cmd-TAB (I'm on a Mac) is just as simple as switching to another window in a single application

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

#586

Post by ethbro »

buboard wrote: post #548
ethbro wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email protocols pre-date commercial access to the internet. So incentives were very different when it was created.

so does IRC. I believe even if it adopted IRC as a protocol, slack would still be successful, it's all about the UI being dumb-proof, friendly and capable and seemingly in-vogue. Discord, even more.

If Slack adopted the IRC protocol, it would be subject to the same issue Microsoft had with the early web -- either implementing proprietary extensions to the spec to enable features, kludging in new features by abusing existing functionality, or waiting for spec consensus before expanding.

And furthermore, it'd be reimplemented almost instantly by Facebook / Apple / Microsoft / Google.

So I can see why they decided to chart a different path.

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

#587

Post by vageli »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #156
fiblye wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question is where the hell is that money going? That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It’s the GDP of some minor lower/mid-economy nations’ cities. Their losses are equal to half the entire GDP of Palau. Maybe I’m detached. But I don’t understand the cash flow in chat apps today. It’s absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and will easily be replaced in a few years, a…

Not a fan of Slack but they do have more than chat: voice and video, screen share, drawing on screen, shared control

> Not a fan of Slack but they do have more than chat: voice and video, screen share, drawing on screen, shared control

Most of the features are a no-go in large enterprises and from what I've seen, enterprises will also choose better tools for some of that functionality (like zoom over slack video).

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

#588

Post by james_pm »

mettamage wrote: post #471
mullingitover wrote: post #449

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 feel naive for asking: how would you come up with Flickr as a spinoff for an MMO? A chat application, yea seems fair, but Flickr? I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they are dancing around my head.

For the longest time, Flickr had URLs ending in .gne which was thanks to it's start as Game Neverending.

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

#589

Post by vageli »

randomdata wrote: post #232
tjpnz wrote: post #189

Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.

Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity. Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on…

> Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity.

> Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.

> But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.

Voice chat is almost always faster for me as it is easier to have a discussion and potentially whiteboard. If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.

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

#590

Post by achingtooth »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #580
zimbatm wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IRC was created in 1988. There have been several chat protocols created since then [1]. A few notable protocols that tick a lot of "modern" boxes: - Jami - Matrix - Signal Protocol - XMPP The better question: why aren't new and existing technology companies embracing these protocols and making them ubiquitous? Personally I think it's because companies have a vested interest in creating walled gardens. The more users…

It might be because Slack has support, a great UI, lots of users, and 'just works'. A company I worked with tried to setup Riot and Matrix and they were having all sorts of problems. Even when they tried to use the Riot.im website there were bugs and features from Slack they needed that were missing. What Matrix and Riot.im is doing is still good though, I hope it takes off.
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