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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

#591

Post by Certhas »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #578
Certhas wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Federation prevents experimenting, iterating and developing the protocol forward. How so? Nothing prevent versioning a protocol and having experimental servers.

I talk about that _literally_ in the sentence after the one you quoted.

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

#592

Post by lima »

pjmorris wrote: post #581
granshaw wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With QUIC, even TCP is getting replaced because of the need to innovate despite protocol ossification. It's almost impossible to improve TCP at this point due to non-compliant endpoints and middleboxes.

It's a similar "lowest common denominator" issue with IRC, XMPP, mail and many others. Yes, XMPP can - in theory - do almost everything Slack does, but there's dozens of clients supporting a different subset of the protocol. Of course nobody wants to use it.

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

#593

Post by roncanepa »

jasode wrote: post #569
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?

>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 pu…

I think this is a very good explanation of things.

Reminds me of the "free as in puppies" angle.

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

#594

Post by blinzy »

mehrdadn wrote: post #202
bjoernw wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Corporate Export On the Plus plan, Workspace Owners can apply to access a self-service tool called Corporate Export. This type of export includes content from public and private channels and direct messages. If Corporate Export is enabled for your workspace, Standard Export will not be available." https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...

Yes, which means they hold your data hostage until you pay, exactly like I said.

I don't use or even like Slack, but what is the problem with that?

I mean they are already giving you the oppportunity to use a limited version for free, you can't expect them to give you one of the most useful features imho when you are just using their resources and infrastructure in exchange for nothing; it doesn't make any business sense.

If I'm a non-paying user of Slack (or whatever other SaaS with a free tier) I am not entitled to anything whatsoever, I'd be grateful for the fact that they allow me partial functionality at all.

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

#595

Post by simonh »

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 a big fan of Pythonista. When I do a search for a topic Google often takes me to a post on the user forums. There's also a Slack channel, but Google can't see it so anything useful in there is much harder to access hence I don't use it. I don't want to encourage content migrating to a proprietary silo. That's why I don't mind Reddit, for all it's faults it's at least still an actual web site.

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

#596

Post by bpicolo »

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…

> why aren't new and existing technology companies embracing these protocols and making them ubiquitous?

Because they don't want to be at the behest of protocol maintainers to improve their product? Their goals and the goals of maintainers would never align.

Open source is great, but open source moves at slow pace compared to what a revenue-driven company can. There's a reason that most of the big open source projects have a company backing them.

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

#597

Post by vntok »

pjmorris wrote: post #581
granshaw wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't get how your point is a counter example to the parent's argument? I think there is a lot of money to be made in building on HTML and HTTP. For one, a faster HTTP protocol directly means more cost efficiency in hosting and streaming content, better customer conversions, etc.

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

#598

Post by pgm8705 »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #179

This valuation depends on the continued incompetence of Google and Microsoft, who both offer Slack competitors as part of their productivity packages that most of Slack's paying customers already subscribe to. Their offerings are so bad that people pay money to Slack not to use them.

This has been my experience. Every few months or so we sign in to Google Hangouts Chat in hopes it has made some progress so we can stop paying for Slack, but it is always a disappointment.

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

#599

Post by marbletiles »

Myrmornis wrote: post #543
bborud wrote: 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.

> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. You need to explain a claim like that. On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?

>On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients.

It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully".

But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user.

The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances.

On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste.

On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.

And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.

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

#600

Post by saltminer »

phtrivier wrote: post #527
sagichmal wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would literally and unironically prefer to run a company on mIRC/corporate IRC servers and Bugzilla than Slack and Jira.

Does anyone actually have data on which company is run with what. Herding exists, but at some point I suspect the fact that more working business use the one rather than the other would have some meaning. That being said, the good thing about mIRC / Bugzilla is that no-one prevents you from using them for your business, so go for it !

>no-one prevents you from using them for your business

People who complain about these products probably aren't in the position to use something else, or they probably would have switched already.

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