
Ask HN: How can Slack be disrupted? - bossx
I read many articles about &quot;Company X taking on Slack&quot;, but they fail to point out exactly how the company plans to disrupt Slack.<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;microsoft-slack-killer&#x2F;<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techinasia.com&#x2F;wechat-slack-work-office-chat
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;22&#x2F;domo-takes-on-slack-with-130m-at-2-billion-valuation&#x2F;<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techrepublic.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;google-to-take-on-slack-and-facebook-with-new-ai-powered-chat-says-report&#x2F;<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slashgear.com&#x2F;quip-adds-chat-rooms-to-take-on-slack-21380086&#x2F;<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenextweb.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;27&#x2F;hipchat-looks-take-slack-new-app-private-networks&#x2F;<p>We use Slack all day, it is deeply embedded in our productivity and workflows, it just works. What exactly would convince us to give up something that works?<p>Emulating Slack is not enough, how do you think Slack can truly be disrupted?
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cballard
The experience of Slack is horrid, IMO.

\- Anyone can be interrupted at any time (to say nothing of @everyone), so
it's essentially just an all-day meeting. At least emails could be responded
to at relative leisure.

\- There are only three notification states: "nothing" (normal icon)
"something happened in a non-muted channel" (red dot), and "you were mentioned
specifically". There's no way to gauge importance without disrupting your
flow. Some pointless cat GIF (why are these being posted on _work_ chat?) is
ranked the same as "what should we do next?". Similarly, "@everyone there are
donuts in the kitchen, OMG" is ranked the same as "@someone THE SERVER IS ON
FIRE".

\- Channels are never-ending, so it's relatively impossible to tell where one
topic began and another ended. Additionally, multiple conversations can be
held at the same time, and it's difficult to tell who's replying to who.

However, I quite like Slack's group private chats. I'd like to see a group-
chat solution that promoted those and completely got rid of static channels.
Everything's just a private group chat, with all of the people that are
needed. When the discussion's done, archive it - it's searchable, of course,
but if you need to continue the discussion, make a new one! Maybe everyone in
the chat even gets a summary emailed to them that they can search in their
email client as well (thus solving the "wait, where did we discuss that"
problem).

There are a few other changes I would make - for example, the return key
should be newline by default to prevent people from writing

like

this

and instead

putting their thoughts into well-composed

messages

~~~
onion2k
Your criticisms of Slack are actually criticisms of your company's use of
Slack. You can tell people to keep non-work chat to a few channels that people
who don't want to see that stuff can mute. You can have a rule that states
"Notifications of server fires should not be done over the company chat
application". You can have a per-team, per-project channel for conversations
about those things.

It's not really any different to email. I've worked in offices where people
use group lists to inform everyone that there's donuts in the kitchen, and
dozens of people reply-all to say thank you. That doesn't mean email is
broken; it means people use email badly. In exactly the same way, Slack is a
tool. How you use it determines how effective it is.

~~~
cballard
A better app would holistically encourage proper use. Slack does not. For
example, what if we could _schedule_ group chats? We schedule meetings (well,
I hope we do). Group chat is just digital meetings. If all chats are just
throwaway (metaphorically, it's all archived, of course!) private chats with
only the people that need to be included, then we can schedule them for a
specific time (with a Doodle-type scheduler, even).

~~~
onion2k
_Group chat is just digital meetings._

I think of group chat as more akin to a digital open-plan office, with both
the good and the bad connotations of that.

 _For example, what if we could schedule group chats?_

You can: [https://meekan.com/slack/](https://meekan.com/slack/)

~~~
cballard
I'd argue that an open office, in the absence of strict library rules, is
analogous to an all-day meeting, e.g. "quick question!".

Meekan looks interesting, and they have the idea right (since as a third-party
they are limited), but it's a plugin, and it's a bot[1]. Scheduling would be a
_core concept_ of my theoretical group-chat app - something you were
incredibly encouraged to do by the interface, instead of bothering an
arbitrary number of people that are probably trying to focus.

[1] the problem with bots is that it pushes stuff that ought to be "interface"
into public view, with all of the notification and visual noise baggage that
is implied by that.

Date/time localization should _just work_ , here Amy needs to manually ask for
it, and everyone else is notified that she did! And that doesn't even cover
language localization! If I'm having a meeting with a colleague whose English
is weak and prefers Chinese, will it just drop even more noise into the chat
when she requests a translation?

------
MichaelBurge
What a myopic question. There's 30 companies registered to do the annual
backflow inspections that the city requires on my property. When I get the
list, I don't think to myself "Man, there's at least 30 companies making buck
inspecting people's pipes. I better start a backflow inspection company! How
can I disrupt these people who've managed to scrape together some profit?"

Yes, yes - Slack gets all the news and chicks and is probably bigger. But it's
the entire mindset. You wouldn't start an HVAC repair company after hearing
that an HVAC repair company is doing well, even if they're the biggest one in
the region and even if they're making millions; similarly, you shouldn't start
a chat app just because you hear Fortune magazine writing about a chat app.

There's another part to this too: With the word 'disrupt' I'm hearing "Slack
is doing well; I'm jealous of Slack; how can I hurt Slack?" I used to have a
neighbor that would get jealous of people and key their car if it was nicer
than his. Nobody liked him and eventually they arrested him for unrelated
reasons.

Don't phrase your business plan as being the equivalent of keying Slack's car.

~~~
bossx
First of all, I never said I wanted to disrupt Slack, I simply posed the
question to the community to start an intelligent debate about how they might
be displaced in the future. If you lack the foresight to look that far head,
that's okay, you can say you don't know how they can be disrupted.

There have been multi-million (and billion) dollar businesses started by
disrupting major players in their space, by solving the problem they are
trying to solve, with much better technology and approaching the problem from
new angles. If you think tech companies aren't started with the intent of
disrupting other companies, you are living in a bubble.

[http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-
dilem...](http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilemma/)

------
Communitivity
You will have better luck with a different question.

Don't ask 'How do I disrupt Slack?', or more generally 'How do I disrupt Y?'.

Also don't ask 'I want to build Slack for X, what X is good?', or more
generally 'I want to build Y for X, what X is good for that Y?'.

Instead observe your environment. Get out and walk around. Talk to people you
know in domains you have personal experience in, or are very familiar with.
Lots of people - people that are like you, and people that aren't. Find out
what their pain points are, and what they'd pay to get rid of those pain
points. If you want to focus on chat, find out what their pain points are in
communication (the broader area).

Then execute to solve those pain points and make the world a better place.
Iterate your execution to solve one pain point (the one the most people say
they have/would pay for) and get your first customers. Then solve additional
related pain points in successive iterations.

~~~
bossx
I didn't ask how I can disrupt Slack, nor do I have any intent to. I posed the
question to the community to start an intelligent debate around how they might
be disrupted in the future.

Slack wasn't built by walking around talking to people outside, they built an
internal chat tool to solve a problem they had at their company (where they
were originally building a video game). They realized the chat tool was good,
and turned it into a product. They solved their own pain point, not other
people's. [http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-
slack-2015-...](http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-
slack-2015-09-25)

------
eitally
Better administrative controls, more fully fleshed out bot ecosystem, payments
integration (perhaps by bot), ability to let users setup alerts (hashtag,
keyword or user) based on content in various chat spaces that they may or may
not want to actively participate in, email integration, better binary document
handling (attach files to chats), preferably with collaborative inline
editing.... Just a few things OTOH. There are really two options, imho: 1) go
after Slack & enterprise chat, or 2) go after Whatsapp, FB Messenger & WeChat
and consumer group chat. If anyone creates a product that can do both, they'll
be instant billionaires.

~~~
Fargren
Nitpick: OTOH usually means "on the other hand". I'm guessing you mean "off
the top of my head", but that's not an usage I can find anywhere else.

------
justin_vanw
Why do you want to disrupt Slack? Slack is a great product, and it's not
winning based on features and functionality alone, they have a great business
team as well.

Don't try to compete with a well run team at the peak of their abilities. Go
find an underserved market that has tons of money and incompetent incumbents
providing services. Slack is successful because this is what they did, but
that has sucked a lot of the upside out of the market.

~~~
bossx
I don't want to disrupt Slack, I posed the question to the community to start
an intelligent debate around how they might be disrupted in the future.

I disagree that you can't compete with a well run team at the peak of their
abilities, this is a free market, you can compete with whoever you like. Slack
is successful because they solved an internal pain point, read about their
history [http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-
slack-2015-...](http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-
slack-2015-09-25)

~~~
justin_vanw
Of course you _can_ compete against a well run team, but why would you ever
want to do that when you can instead compete against a crappy team that is in
the toilet, steal all their customers, and so on?

------
open-source-ux
This might not be a popular opinion amongst (some) developers, but to compete
against Slack, you need an excellent UI and UX that matches or exceeds (not
necessarily copies) the UI of Slack, with similar core features or useful new
features.

When I say UI and UX, I mean an interface that both looks good and is easy to
use as well (they are not mutually exclusive).

Of course, the app has has to be fast and reliable too. Even better if it's
lightweight in size and in it's use of system resources - things that many
cross-platform apps rarely achieve (including Slack).

I don't think Slack has the best UX in some aspects. For example, the way you
need to sign-in multiple times to separate groups feels clumsy and cumbersome.

Does Slack now have too many features and functions? Does the interface feel
too busy or cluttered? Do people want even more features? (Probably, although
they probably want different features for their own unique needs). Can a
simpler, open-source version offer an alternative?

One thing that's obvious from interviews with their staff is that they take UX
very seriously - it's a key component in the development of their product. If
you're developing an alternative open source version, don't discount the
importance of UX to your own product.

Whether you agree or not that Slack is a well-designed app, there's no doubt
its succeeded because it can _easily_ be used by both developers and non-
developers. Not something you can really say abour IRC, often put forward as a
Slack alternative.

------
bryanlarsen
We were just discussing here at work about how Flowdock sucks for knowledge
capture and retention. Somebody asked a question that I had answered one or
two weeks prior, and it wasn't easy to find the answer. I assume Slack isn't
any better.

Incredibly difficult problem to solve -- any solution would probably add
considerable friction to the interface, but it would rock if somebody could
nail it.

------
an4rchy
I think the open source approach is probably the most likely at this point. To
become a meaningful disruptor in the space, you need a product that does
something much better (or at least start of with parity features but free). If
you can scale, an open source project with the same features and reliability
would be a starting point. Slack also has great customer acquisition/retention
metrics so this new product would have to work hard to convince a lot of
people to learn a new product for it to be worth it.

------
mbrock
Start from the premise that existing forms of human communication are far from
optimal. Come up with a delightful, game-like interface for collaborating on
thoughts, arguments, knowledge, etc. Step out of the matrix of predefined
forms like "chat", "mail", "wiki", "forum". Get the clients very, very right.
Establish a brand so strong that people can't stop talking about it. Make the
technology so great that lovers want to use it to get closer to each other.

------
andymurd
A lot of people (me included) use Slack/HipChat like a news feed, in which
chat is an incidental feature. My servers, databases, CI/CD, bug tracker etc
all publish to Slack and then (maybe) a human discussion will form around a
particular event.

To disrupt Slack, make an awesome news feed, with chat and publishing API and
search. Add an API for reading (like Twitter's API). Make it easily
compartmentalised (faceted search maybe?) Then you'll pick up users like me,
who used to use email and find group chat better but really need "Hootsuite
for infrastructure".

------
unfamiliar
Why is everyone so eager to disrupt Slack? What exactly is so bad about it
that an alternative needs to be built? It seems to me that they just made a
product that works really well and everybody finds useful.

~~~
bossx
I'm not eager to disrupt Slack, I am genuinely curious how the companies I
referenced in the original post could possibly disrupt them. As I mentioned,
we are happy with their product and continue to use it, and I am seeing Slack
disrupt other products we use (example is the recent addition of voice chat).

------
sharemywin
That's just it, it would have to work 10x better to disrupt. I suppose it
would take not reacting to new technology change. If Augmented reality took
off, and their interface was only minimally adapted.

------
leojg
Slack is IRC for dummies. Use IRC, its 100% free and 1000% more powerful.

~~~
lerouxb
100% free: sure. 1000% more powerful: debatable at best.

~~~
AznHisoka
One word: fserves.

------
jdevtlv
slack needs the virtual equivalent of "closing the door", an "online"-"away"
that can be accessed through the taskbar icon. And teams need guidelines and
free spaces and open channels for all the different types of team memebers...
you can't expect the technology to solve every single issue (yet)

------
tremendo
They're still in the honeymoon of warm-fuzzy public perception, sitting in
plenty of cash. They're not going to be disrupted soon apparently. Not even by
freemium and advertising and a few different features, native clients, etc. or
being just good. See Ryver.

~~~
bossx
I agree, it will be hard to disrupt them through technology right now, but in
the next 2-3 years there will be a new wave of tech they might not adapt to
immediately.

Another possibility is them getting acquired, as they have already raised 7
rounds of funding (investor pressure), and their founder has had a large exit
already (Flickr to Yahoo).

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack)

------
smilesnd
Sounds more like a lot of click-bait news articles to me. I don't see Slack
going away any time soon, but I stick mostly to irc Freenode for all my
communication needs. It almost does everything Slack does minus the screen
sharing, voice, and video stuff.

------
vincent_s
Ask all those people looking for an alternative:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%20alternative&...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%20alternative&date=1%2F2009%2087m)

------
Jach
Slack is still niche, it's like asking how to disrupt the Go language. I
wouldn't mind hearing ideas of how to arrest its progress though. Personally
I'll just pitch hard for Matrix if my team ever gets the desire to move off
HipChat.

------
hackerboos
With a gitlab like business model.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for the compliment! GitLab is shipping with Mattermost that is an open
source Slack replacement and we're working with Rocket Chat to bring that to
GitLab.

------
jpalomaki
I have a feeling that sometimes (often?) people just get bored with their
existing, working solutions and want to try something new. Obviously Slack is
so new that this does not really work.

------
sadadar
I think disrupting slack is a mistake. They are still in their infancy and
have clearly built a solid product. Disrupt spaces and industries that don't
have that :)

------
hanniabu
I think it'd be great if there was a way to create different branches for a
topic within a chat. Take that as you will and use your imagination.

------
joefarish
These companies will have a hard time displacing existing Slack installs, but
they should still be able to grab some of the remaining market share.

------
joeyspn
With FOSS...

I.e: [https://rocket.chat/](https://rocket.chat/)

~~~
atonse
I'm not sure about that. Right now (apart from ideology), there are probably
two major reasons why someone would pick an OSS solution.

1) Inside Firewall hosting – Slack can easily fix this by introducing a
product that works inside your firewall, and I bet they're already working on
it. Their "teams" model already works perfectly for it.

2) Customizability – Slack already has such a robust API for integrations,
that most of your customizability and branding needs can be taken care of
through the API and CSS rules.

The one thing I personally need for my product is the ability to bundle slack
as an embedded chat directly on my site (mostly because I don't want users to
have to install a separate app), and I really don't see Slack building that,
to be honest.

------
DotSauce
Currently using Wrike + Skype and I've found it's a much better experience
than Slack.

------
swah
I'm going back to Skype, which is actually lighter than Slack, and we only
need simple chat. Slack (both Chrome and the desktop version) was taking
almost a second to change rooms... (like a webpage with thousands of elements)

~~~
tajen
And no-one talks about HipChat anymore.

------
saulrh
Target a well-defined sub-market that Slack currently serves and serve it
better by targeting it more precisely [1]. As demonstrated by the comments on
this thread, there are a lot of people that all think that Slack needs to go
in _different directions_ , which agrees with my own personal observations of
Slack's utility to different people on different teams. Slack is a simple,
general solution that works well enough for a lot of teams and a lot of
people. If you want to disrupt it, I doubt you're going to be able to improve
it across the board point-for-point, so in stead you want to target a subgroup
that's _sort of_ well serviced by Slack but could stand to have tweaking done
to fit it to their needs better.

To collect some examples from this thread:

* Some engineering teams need default UI that encourages larger message sizes so people aren't writing strings of tiny messages all the time. This _clearly_ isn't something that everybody wants or needs - a lot of brainstorming goes on in my Slack chats, for example, and that means tiny ideas have to go out quickly and easily - but it's a reasonable submarket to target. This would also lead to a larger emphasis on text formatting and composition, better controls on notification and addressing, better searching and filtering and quoting/reply/threading, and other tools that improve the power of an individual message at the expense of usability and speed - move it more toward the email/forum topic side of things.

* Some teams feel that the existing UI already gets in their way too much. Improve the ease of use and speed of message composition and flow of discussion. Not sure how you'd do this exactly; Slack is already pretty well optimized in this direction. Step one here would probably be to hire a whole building full of UX engineers and optimize the crap out of every single interaction anybody ever does with the UI. Microoptimization on top of microoptimization on top of microoptimization, like Apple did with the groundbreaking early IOSs.

* Specifically cater to enterprise clients with security requirements. Better technical details for security and access control, make it compliant with regulations with particular security and auditing and access control requirements. Provide a powerful system for per-channel access controls that interoperates with something like LDAP, maybe provide a system where you can only talk to people in different groups if you've managed to inherit some permissions that let you talk to them otherwise everything they say never appears on your screen, tag everything with a secrecy level and control access intelligence-agency style, etcetera.

And so on and so forth.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y)

------
niahmiah
Easy... Apple builds the functionality into iOS and OS X, so you never look
for an alternative.

------
taf2
Flowdock

