edit: to expand. Slack has 0 technology moat. The reason Github has been so successful and has gone many years without significant competition, is that it is an open platform in the sense that I have my personal, work, and private repos there. Many open source stuff is up there, and the platform allows me to contribute to my private repos, public repos and quickly download software.
To some extent slack has this idea where you can have 3 or 4 organizations in the app, but user to user seems to not be implemented, or at least non-obvious. Everything is siloed in an org.
lots of companies and apps are working on chat and are substitutes for pieces. It was not obvioius Github could make money or was significant for a long time. Professional chat is the opposite.
* Low barrier to entry
* high competition
* limited revenue/margin
* open source alternatives
* largely based on users/social proof. e.g. could get myspaced.
* competing in a space that is "hot" and many larger companies are moving in, already poised to take this.
I'm not really bullish on Slack as a product, but I don't think Slack as a business is so bad. I think Slack is trying to be the Yammer of IRC: you get it in through a couple of people using it, and all of a sudden you convert the entire enterprise, hence the focus on marketing.
Hipchat/Flowdock/probably others existed before Slack, and are still largely interchangeable at this point, but they're not investing so heavily in marketing.
I think a direct comparison to MySpace is inaccurate since neither they nor their competitors are directly viral (yet?), but they could certainly be replaced.
The question is: who would want to spend a pile of money trying to outmarket Slack? It's hard to tell what their sales figures are, but if they get lodged in the public's view as the company that does this, it will take concerted, capital-intensive effort to dislodge them, and why would you go to that effort for a low margin space?
Open Source is really not relevant in this space since the price is cheap and you're paying for convenience.
edit: to expand. Slack has 0 technology moat. The reason Github has been so successful and has gone many years without significant competition, is that it is an open platform in the sense that I have my personal, work, and private repos there. Many open source stuff is up there, and the platform allows me to contribute to my private repos, public repos and quickly download software.
To some extent slack has this idea where you can have 3 or 4 organizations in the app, but user to user seems to not be implemented, or at least non-obvious. Everything is siloed in an org.
lots of companies and apps are working on chat and are substitutes for pieces. It was not obvioius Github could make money or was significant for a long time. Professional chat is the opposite.
* Low barrier to entry
* high competition
* limited revenue/margin
* open source alternatives
* largely based on users/social proof. e.g. could get myspaced.
* competing in a space that is "hot" and many larger companies are moving in, already poised to take this.