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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#671

Post by std_throwaway »

haggy wrote: post #619
rimliu wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking and managing has a cost associated with it too. If your own DC burns down you also have nothing. There is no "wrong way" just a different ways to evaluate risks-benefits and choosing whatever works best for your case.

100% this. As soon as you fork a project, you are now responsible for the evolution of it (even if that's just merging in upstream changes). It puts a large burden on engineering teams to track changes and maintain the fork.

OpenOffice is dead but its fork, LibreOffice, lives on.

You don't necessarily have to fork it, just the possibility of the fork changes the game. It means that the original maintainer cannot shut you down. If enough people deem a fork useful they can work together.

Of course there's a cost associated with it. But how much is it compared to the risk of someone shutting a core element of your business down? You have to evaluate.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#672

Post by gizmo385 »

aninteger wrote: post #669
solatic wrote: post #107

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

Slack might not have an on-prem option now but if they are buying HipChat they will have one soon. Yes it is possible they will remove it but they may go the other way and make some parts of slack available to on-prem as the two products merge.

> as the two products merge.

The 2 products aren't merging, so far as I am aware. Slack is buying Hipchat and then promptly discontinuing support for it. It's primarily a move to eliminate competition, not to acquire technology.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#673

Post by hnbroseph »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #633
it33 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mattermost CEO here. We're thinking of offering a special package for HipChat customers who want to stay on-prem using Mattermost. It's perhaps a mix of services, migration/import assistance and possibly a discount to our commercial version. Would such a package be interesting? For anyone who'd like to discuss outside of HN, please feel free to mail us at info at mattermost.com

We did this at my company; we already had self hosted free GitLab. We tied it into our AD and went happily without Hipchat about a year ago. Some things are rougher (image support) but it was mostly smooth and equivalent, and actually nicer in that it supported Markdown. Recommended. And, a lot cheaper than Slack which is insanely expensive ($72/user/year) - of course it is not free as it takes up AWS server resource…

> We tied it into our AD

sorry if it's obvious but do you mean Active Directory?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#674

Post by yborg »

mdeeks wrote: post #53
optimusclimb wrote: post #5

Hipchat took standard IRC, and added some interface fluff, youtube links, and emojis. They achieved great market footprint. Then Slack starts up later - makes literally the same exact product, and manages to surpass, and eventually subsume Hipchat. Crazy.

HipChat had some major uptime issues. I have friends who experienced whole day outages at their companies. I hear a lot of people on HN say it was "Just IRC" and I'm always surprised by that. If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off? Why did Slack have a meteoric rise? It can't be for no good reason. I think the answer is that the interface fluff they added is actually extremely important and valuable. Th…

>If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off Define 'take off'. It was quite popular in the 90s and early 00s, but not in comparison to say AIM or ICQ for example. But where are those two networks now ... and IRC is still there.

People seldom seem to acknowledge this, but software apps go through fads just like everything else. Slack won because it was the new hotness and it was able to get the network effect snowball. Especially in the beginning, small things matter a lot, and Slack was pretty polished right out of the box.

IRC's main issues in my opinion are a lack of integrated file/attachment handling (you can't just post that meme GIF in a channel without finding someplace to upload it first) and hideous clients. If there were more free clients like the Colloquy Mac client I still use even though it basically has been abandonware for almost a decade, I think IRC would have had an easier time getting traction.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#675

Post by gizmo385 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #300
solatic wrote: post #107

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

We might have to revert to talking. Aahhhhh!

I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but for a lot of distributed companies, it just isn't realistic for people to get on the phone every time they need to talk to one another.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#676

Post by spiegro »

forty wrote: post #173
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…

I'm in a company which uses the full atlassian suite (on premise) and I find your comment is a very good summary. I always see people complaining about jira on the internet, but in real life, everyone I know seems happy with it, I have no idea where that come from. Maybe it depends on your admin and/or the size/culture of the company

Whenever someone passionately hates Jira my go-to line is "your Jira instance can only be as good as its admin."

IT departments in charge of installing and upgrading Jira don't tend to bother with optimizing it, and most companies don't have dedicated Jira admins.

So you either have a motivated employee that will moonlight as an admin and figure out how to make it better in their spare time, or you just end up using all the defaults, which most projects probably don't need.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#677

Post by jacobsenscott »

travbrack wrote: post #524
SamWhited wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we need specific services (like Slack or HipChat) that are XMPP but maintain their own ecosystem, clients, specific feature sets, etc. Then if you want to use third party clients (eg. for better accessibility, or because your platform isn't supported officially, etc.) you can, but if not you can use their clients. HipChat was almost this way (I used Mcabber with it extensively), but had just enough bits o…

It's a real shame that the industry has forsaken the protocol in favor of walled gardens.

The reason is open protocols soon become the single biggest blocker to innovation. Open protocols stagnate and ossify. So some competitor with a proprietary system will come along and eat your lunch. That's why there have only been 2 changes in email clients ever - the move from terminal to desktop GUI and desktop GUI to web 2.0 client. That's why XMPP and IRC clients will never compete with slack (queue the 'what does slack have that IRC doesn't have thread').

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#678

Post by surge »

hnbroseph wrote: post #673
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did this at my company; we already had self hosted free GitLab. We tied it into our AD and went happily without Hipchat about a year ago. Some things are rougher (image support) but it was mostly smooth and equivalent, and actually nicer in that it supported Markdown. Recommended. And, a lot cheaper than Slack which is insanely expensive ($72/user/year) - of course it is not free as it takes up AWS server resource…

> We tied it into our AD sorry if it's obvious but do you mean Active Directory?

98% likely that they do.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#679

Post by [deleted] »

nyconyco wrote: post #580

Hey all here, So I observe that lots of team chat users seem lost and don't what to do anymore. The problem with alternative Open Source team chats attempts is that they are just another silo, or walled garden. Instances do not talk to each other. A private island cannot join continent. Even within the same organisations plenty of incompatible team chats are used competitively, fragmenting the workforces. We propose…

[deleted]

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#680

Post by tabbott »

it33 wrote: post #509
solatic wrote: post #107

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

Mattermost CEO here. We're thinking of offering a special package for HipChat customers who want to stay on-prem using Mattermost. It's perhaps a mix of services, migration/import assistance and possibly a discount to our commercial version. Would such a package be interesting? For anyone who'd like to discuss outside of HN, please feel free to mail us at info at mattermost.com

Zulip CEO also here. For folks migrating from HipChat, we've decided to match the current price you're paying for HipChat for Zulip enterprise support (and we'll also provide a high-quality migration path similar to what we have for Slack and Gitter).

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622987 (also on HN today) to learn more about how Zulip, or contact support@zulipchat.com if you're interested in our offer.

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