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Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

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Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#91

Post by mercer »

reitanqild wrote: post #62
fizzbatter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love…

> I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. This reminds me a lot of HN dismissing Dropbox on the original show HN or something: "We have git, rsync, FTP. We can hack something like this together in an afternoon." Except that was before Dropbox went ahead to become a huge success. This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]

I have the feeling doing Dropbox right is a lot more difficult than doing Slack right. I still use Dropbox because somehow Drive and iCloud still don't work quite as nicely as Dropbox does. But I might be wrong; I've never built chat or file-sync apps.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#92

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

Latty wrote: post #78
fizzbatter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love…

It sounds a lot like all the people that bash StackOverflow - "It's just posts and a voting system, I could write that in a week!", ignoring all the complexity and design behind it, operating at scale and cultivating the environment. If people need something to be 'amazing' not to put it down, and 'amazing' doesn't include doing the right things to be highly successful... If no one else did it, was it really so obvio…

Microsoft has a well regarded developer network and Q&A system regarding Microsoft technologies, at least in my (limited to primarily Azure) experience.

Similarly, Microsoft has already operated a widely used integrated chat, profile, and community system at scale. Given their recent pushes, it wouldn't be entirely surprising for them to bring back similar platforms for business users integrated with LinkedIn.

That would eat a lot of Slack's potential big clients, because MS has a history of enterprise grade support on products like that, and Slack has scale issues for large orgs.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#93

Post by 6stringmerc »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #3

It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995. Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble implementing a chat room and they don't need l…

The Bloomberg Terminal lock-in strikes me as a similar walled garden of sorts and ripe for upstarts to break the grasp in time. Not overnight, of course, but in time.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#94

Post by aidbiuasbi »

asurty wrote: post #90

Microsoft has lost my trust in them after what happened to me with Skype. I was one of the many victims who had their account hacked. The worst part was how their customer support handled the issue. They almost gave me an ulcer by trying to convince me that it was probably a virus on my computer causing the problem. Look at your own Skype forums people! Be transparent, own up to having problems, and fix it! Communica…

You seem like a real joy to work with.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#95

Post by vehementi »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #85
fizzbatter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love…

>What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I don't think they even do that well, it's a complete nightmare finding anything on slack beyond the last 24 hours. What Slack did well was branding and marketing.

Marketing yeah. They weren't the first to do the obvious "make IRC in the cloud with persistent storage and notifications/app/etc." I had been waiting for, just the first I heard of.

Do you have any other issues, just curious or is their search algorithm enough to make the Slack platform a net bad UX?

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#96

Post by kzisme »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #85
fizzbatter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love…

>What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack. I don't think they even do that well, it's a complete nightmare finding anything on slack beyond the last 24 hours. What Slack did well was branding and marketing.

I haven't met a single person (unless they were ~really~ non technical) that enjoyed using slack.

It never works the way I expect it to work, and very simple things that you can do within IRC takes multiple steps in Slack.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#98

Post by geofft »

Latty wrote: post #70
geofft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email does the stored-history thing. So does every other mobile IM app I have (the built-in SMS app, Google Hangouts, BBM, etc.). Furthermore, in the IRC world that's not uncommon either; Quasseldroid does this. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembile...

Email sucks for real-time communcation. Most of the other IM applications you list suck for multi-person communication. Quassel looks good, but clearly harder to set up than Slack. People always point at everything and go 'this stuff existed!' - even if all Slack did was pull everything together into a single cohesive environment, that's useful to people, it provides value. I'm shocked people are shocked by that idea…

It absolutely provides value! But I don't think the commenter above is claiming that it doesn't provide value. They're claiming it's not innovative.

Some of the most important work in the tech industry is highly valuable and not one bit innovative. CRUD apps that bridge data from two different parts of an organization are amazingly valuable and amazingly important, but have no innovation. There's nothing wrong with that CRUD app—but there's nothing making that app better from another CRUD app that also bridges those two departments.

None of this thread is saying that Slack is bad. It's not criticizing Slack. It's not saying people are wrong to use it. It's just saying that people can jump ship very easily because there's nothing innovative.

Slack is great. I use it daily and love it. But the things I like about it aren't tied to Slack the company in any way, and it would be easy for me to love Microsoft Teams (or some hypothetical open-source, competent-at-UX, mobile-enabled version of IRC) every bit as much. Slack doesn't seem to realize that.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#99

Post by kevingadd »

NDizzle wrote: post #60
kbenson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is, Slack has a user base consisting mainly of people willing to switch to the "next big thing" pretty quickly. I'm not so sure. I got us using Slack at work, and that was after about 12 months of hearing ads for it. It is IRC plus a slick UI and integrated bots, but putting all that together with a web UI and a dedicated client and phone apps makes it multiple times better than regular IRC for the comm…

Have you ever looked at Discord? Slack isn't the only choice if you want a nice UI that works on all of your devices. https://discordapp.com/

Discord is a bad alternative to Slack for anything you care about. It often fails to deliver messages for multiple minutes at a time and will deliver messages out of order or only sparsely deliver some of your messages.

It's a nice option for small communities and people who need voice chat, though.

Re: Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

#100

Post by Ntrails »

reitanqild wrote: post #62
fizzbatter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo. I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form. What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love…

> I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. This reminds me a lot of HN dismissing Dropbox on the original show HN or something: "We have git, rsync, FTP. We can hack something like this together in an afternoon." Except that was before Dropbox went ahead to become a huge success. This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]

It's not about what can be done, it's about prior art.

I've used xmpp chats with a couple of clients since well before slack and I'd struggle to think of a feature in slack that I hadn't used before.

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