
Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian - uptown
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/slack-and-atlassian-team-up-to-take-on-microsoft-in-chat-software
======
solatic
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 thing to sell off
Stride, it isn't doing well, work with Slack to have some kind of automated
migration made available and let customers flip the switch. Maybe if Slack
were to keep supporting Hipchat on-prem, or provide a migration path to a new
Slack on-prem product, that'd be fine. But to leave HipChat on-prem customers
out in the cold?

What's the next Atlassian on-prem product to get thrown under the bus? Bamboo
for sure, it's been unpopular relative to Jenkins almost since its beginning.
It's definitely surprising that Fisheye/Crucible get any support any more, or
Crowd for that matter. But why not Confluence on-prem too? Do we have to worry
that Atlassian will stop supporting Confluence on-prem in eight months because
Office 365 keeps gaining marketshare?

Atlassian's continued long-term support for minor on-prem products was one of
the signals that said, if you pay up for HipChat on-prem, we'll support you
long-term, you'll be fine. Atlassian completely shattered that with this
announcement and eroded a lot of trust that enterprises were putting in them.
Big shot in the foot here.

~~~
it33
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

~~~
brey
Yes, I'd be interested. We're evaluating Slack, MS Teams and Mattermost as a
successor to Hipchat.

Something to move the needle commercially in favour of on-premise would be
helpful in that evaluation.

~~~
nyconyco
You will be soon able to evaluate Nayego as well:
[https://nayego.net/](https://nayego.net/) you can subscribe if you want to
see the preview.

Nayego is an open source and open standard team chat, that is
federated/distributed/decentralised.

~~~
dsr_
Where's the source? nayego.net doesn't have any links.

~~~
ReverseCold
I'm pretty sure it's spam.

I found a link, but it only has a README

[https://github.com/Nayego/Nayego-client](https://github.com/Nayego/Nayego-
client)

------
ironjunkie
When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a
slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago.

This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems
that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool
again.

Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses
of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than
helpful. It fosters a "Always on" culture, where irrelevant chats are
exchanged publicly to advertise how much work is being done. If you shut down
Slack and appear as Offline people assume you are not working.

It also seems to me that now that Slack became the norm for communication, I
almost don't receive well written emails with well-argued technical
discussions anymore. Everything is now a "Chat" that dilutes the technical
discussion because it needs to be responded "directly".

I would expect 2018 to be the year where people start questioning the utility
of "Slack everywhere" and not blindly jump on the Slack bandwagon because
that's what great startups do.

~~~
mmanfrin
There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-
feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people
here fall in to the former.

However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the
competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished
features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's
an app. Want to search? Baked in. Want convenient chat bots? Click a button.

To be sure, all these things are possible in IRC and other lo-fi chat
protocols, but getting them set up is _easy_ on Slack. I see this as similar
to the argument of Linux vs. OSX. Linux can do practically anything OSX can,
but it requires tweaking and setting up. It's a battle of pick-and-choose vs
having it all baked in.

~~~
philwelch
> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-
> feature camp.

I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but
ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a
primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of
that.

~~~
gregmac
I'm firmly in the "email has no place in internal discussions whatsoever"
camp.

Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc
belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive
in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). E-mail might kick some of this
off, or be used to schedule, but that should be it.

The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is
failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into
a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well
have not happened.

~~~
philwelch
"discussions are faster and more productive in realtime"

Real-time discussion is great if you don't have to think about what you're
going to say _before_ you say it. Unfortunately, that places a very, very low
upper limit on the level of depth and consideration that a discussion can
reach. Some decisions are hard enough and some situations are nuanced enough
that you need to take your time with them, enough that the additional cost of
making all of that time strictly synchronous can grow exponentially.

It also excludes large categories of people, including introverts and non-
native speakers. I've worked with a number of people who just flat out did not
or could not participate in real-time face-to-face discussions, but who could
express themselves masterfully via email.

Of course, the "faster! instant! now! now! now!" crowd don't even have the
patience for slower, deeper, better-reasoned discussions, which is why they
shy away from any form of communication that has any more depth than a tweet
or a PowerPoint slide. Slack is great for these people because they don't even
have to string words together to communicate, they can just click on a
reaction emoji.

Sure, some things (operations, for instance) have genuine urgency to them, and
I think real-time communication is essential for situations like that. But if
you're doing work that will have an impact on the span of months, quarters, or
years--either major strategic business decisions, design, or project
development--you're better served by thinking deeper instead of thinking
faster, and deep thought is exactly what the long-form written word was
invented for.

~~~
linuxftw
I agree with you and I feel your points are well articulated. I especially
like how you summarized the internet as 'the illiterates took over.' Very
poignant, indeed. So much of the average person's internet usage boils down to
memes and videos, it's quite unfortunate.

~~~
samstave
One thing to think about with respect to memes and videos is they may evolve
to be more dense in their ability to symbolize and convey a much larger amount
of information.

There are so many examples of teams successfully communicating state,
sentiment and other information among each other with memes and videos an what
not.

Also, to help people blow off steam. We don't need to be absolute productive
units operating at 100% all the time.

Goofin off is healthy

~~~
linuxftw
I don't disagree with not being productive 100% of the time. My gripe is that
for many non-tech people, their computer time is majority memes and videos.
The ratio is all wrong, IMO. This incorrect ratio has created the click-bait
internet and other scorns of the modern internet IMO as corporations are
catering to the masses.

The internet is such a large collection of knowledge, I just wish more people
used it to improve themselves, or at least their understanding of the many
different things we have in the world.

------
slivym
Am I the only one who sees this as anti-competitive? This is basically
collusion - Atlassian agreeing not to compete in chat in return for a payment
from Slack. It almost seems like we're intent on making literally every
mistake we made with traditional businesses, but with electronic products.

~~~
csydas
I mean this without being tongue in cheek, but Teams itself is anti-
competitive. It's a horrible product which is basically only in use because
it's bundled into Office 365. Absolutely nothing in Teams is not done better
in other products, including Microsoft's own products such as Skype for
Business or plain old Skype.

Business chats in general are just completely incongruent with what users are
expecting from end-user chats like Telegram or WhatsApp or Messages. Even
Google has fallen far behind with regards to Hangouts, and Allo is not a good
answer either. From a business perspective, I get why businesses choose Teams
or Allo, but the actual products have usability as an incidental feature. With
both major players, the chats are just there to ensure that Slack cannot/will
not grow, same with other programs such as Discord. It's a revenue stream that
is yet untapped, and soon Microsoft and Google will come calling for their
payment from Businesses.

~~~
codenesium
What about it is horrible? My team loves it.

~~~
castlecrasher2
I have a few reasons to list:

1) It constantly minimizes for seemingly no reason (at least once a week).

2) The "Teams" and "Chat" menus are separate. They're in the same window in
Slack, and that just makes sense.

2.1) The "Teams" menu won't list more than 4 channels per Team by default. If
you want to open a channel there you have to open the menu or favorite
everything. I know this can be fixed by good sanitation by Team admins but
Slack's way of doing it encourages it automatically.

3) Can't invite outside users like you can with Slack.

4) The chat history is so short it has to load after maybe 10 lines when
scrolling up.

5) The "thumbs up"/message menu covers the message when hovering over it so
it's impossible to highlight a message to copy/paste starting from the right
to the left. You can go the other way but I never have until Teams.

6) Updates take forever to release! I've googled issues that MS staff note as
"on the docket" for adding but months later it's still not added.

7) I frequently don't see the toast/popup notifications for some reason. I
don't know what's going on there and it could be me but I don't remember it
happening when I used Slack at work.

8) When it updates it shuts down without notification.

9) This might be the Android "work profile" in play but if I get a call or
sometimes even a message the Android notification will not go away until I
restart my phone.

I mean, Slack isn't perfect but I didn't have any complaints about it except
that the call functionality would disconnect randomly.

~~~
rickycook
re toast/pop ups, it’s SO frustrating that they don’t use the OS built in
notifications framework! doesn’t respect DND and plenty of other integrations
because of this ridiculous decision

------
joeblau
I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they
make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be
why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack,
but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones
I would recommend in any category.

~~~
qabqabaca
What would you recommend instead of Jira?

~~~
andreineculau
Stick to github issues or similar. Whatever is closer to the real work and
gives you the biggest bang for the buck. Not the most wet dream. You do not
need a gazillion of workflows and checks and stories and epics and boards etc.
"Keep it simple, stupid"

~~~
qznc
What I like is to specify dependencies. Unfortunately, the simple ones
(Github, Gitlab, Trac) don't have that feature.

The Jira we use at work has gone overboard. There is too many ways to specify
and people are confused. For example, we have "blocks" (B cannot be finished
without A closed) and "follows" (B cannot be started without A closed).

~~~
sytse
As a first step GitLab has implemented relationships in issues, for more
context see [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/4058](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4058)

------
andrewla
They changed the headline to "Slack Is Buying HipChat" from "Slack and
Atlassian Team Up to Take on Microsoft in Chat Software". The latter still
survives in the URL.

The "team up" makes it sound ridiculous, like some sort of cabal is being
formed -- the team up here is like when I team up with a cheeseburger to take
on hunger.

~~~
anant90
+1 for the cheeseburger analogy. I'll be using it. Thanks!

------
mehblahwhatevs
> Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer
> choices for people.”

Strange quote.

~~~
ggg9990
Could also be a reporter misquoting. Reporter says, “how do you respond to
someone who says this creates fewer choices for people?” CEO: “There’s fewer
choices for people, but they are better than choices.” Boom, first half is the
money quote.

~~~
joenathanone
Is that the real quote?

~~~
ggg9990
No, it’s a hypothetical situation where a reporter can create the conditions
for a money quote.

------
arjun27
This reminds me of Aaron Levie’s recent take on Kara Swisher’s podcast - on
how enterprise software is going to be either about Microsoft (jack of trades)
or about a collection of smaller companies (specialists in their fields)
integrated with one and other. Slack and Atlassian focusing on what makes them
great and working together makes a lot of sense

~~~
adventured
Levie is wrong. His personal bias is showing: an over optimism that Box can
survive as an independent long-term. It's going to be Microsoft and other
giants. There's no scenario where Slack remains an independent company, for
the exact same reason there was never a scenario where Github remained an
independent company. It'll be surprising if Slack is still independent three
years from now.

It's perpetual consolidation in enterprise, nothing has changed about that in
decades. Microsoft eats Github. Atlassian eats Slack (or some other company
does). Maybe Atlassian is the next Oracle, or maybe Oracle or Salesforce or
SAP or Microsoft eats Atlassian.

The one thing every scenario has in common: the little fish don't stick around
and cooperate, they all get eaten and merged into ever larger companies.
Nothing can stop that process, all the little fish have shareholders more than
willing to sell when the big price comes in from the giants.

PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun, MySQL, Great Plains, Sybase, Business Objects, Ariba,
SuccessFactors, Concur, RightNow, Taleo, MuleSoft, Demandware, ExactTarget,
etc etc

It's the same thing going on over and over again. The little fish never stick
around. Box will end up in someone's stomach just the same as the rest.

~~~
ngrilly
Alas, I mostly agree... But what about Basecamp or Mailchimp for example?

~~~
greglindahl
What big corp wants to own the liability of Mailchimp? The minute you crack
down harder on customers using spammy email lists, the revenue picture changes
dramatically.

------
ryandrake
It hurts to think about how much brainpower is being spent worldwide, over and
over for decades, by busines customers and competing developers, on......

sending text.... from one computer to others.

I have this nightmare where I wake up in the year 2045 and am still reading
about yet another chat app being released that’s incompatible with the
hundreds of others out there.

------
dawhizkid
Interesting. I worked at a healthcare tech startup last year and the reason
why we had to use Hipchat is because the self-hosted Hipchat Server was HIPAA-
compliant and Slack does not have a HIPAA-compliant self-hosted option. Have
no idea what they're going to do (or anyone who needs to comply with stricter
regulatory guidelines that prevents use of cloud-based messaging apps).

~~~
ceruleanscott
Shameless self-promotion: We (Trillian) just received HITRUST certification,
provide a BAA, and offer both a SaaS variant and the self-hosted Trillian
Server product, both of which run over our own open IM protocol. We're not
exactly a Slack/Hipchat clone (having been around for 18+ years, we're more of
a traditional IM and group chat solution with some modern stuff like an API,
chat bots, and federation capabilities) but have been getting great feedback
in the healthcare space with our business offering. More:
[https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-
texting/](https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/)

~~~
fencepost
I still remember (and may still have an installer for...) Trillian back in the
days when it was just a multi-IM client.

I like your pricing comparisons for on-premises servers - particularly the
comparison to a Skype for Business site license.
[https://trillian.im/uses/self-hosted-instant-
messaging/](https://trillian.im/uses/self-hosted-instant-messaging/)

Am I correct that you're pretty much focused on just the IM/chat side of
things rather than all the calendar/phone/build system/coffeepot/refrigerator
integrations that Slack seems to talk up?

~~~
ceruleanscott
We think integrations can be great, and offer a few of our own right now (a
proof-of-concept /weather command and a deeper integration with Global Relay
for some of our fintech customers, for example). That being said, we're being
careful about integrations and making sure they're more than just novelties
that do nothing but move email notifications into a group chat. Our primary
focus is lean and mean instant messaging, the good old contact list + presence
(with ICQ-era fun like invisibility allow lists!), speed (being one of the
last few companies offering a desktop chat client written in C++ that chugs
along without using 2GB of RAM!), and strong administrative controls.
Secondary to that is our focus on integrations that bring clear value to our
customers. I expect we'll add more good ones this year!

------
sc00ty
What options are left for self-hosted chat systems with comparable features?
We've been using self-hosted Hipchat at our company and there is zero chance
we will ever use a cloud solution.

~~~
qabqabaca
Out of interest, why would you guys never use a cloud solution? Sensitive
conversations? Server reliability?

~~~
Walkman
For example when a company acquires another, your workflows will be broken,
you are forced to move and learn the new tool and you have no control over
YOUR OWN data at all.

~~~
Karunamon
Like when you buy a product that seems solid and then have to scramble to find
a replacement because it's being shut down out of nowhere?

\--Hipchat onprem user

------
strictnein
> "and are providing a migration path to Slack for all our customers."

Well, not all of your customers. Unless Slack is introducing a self-hosted
version?

They've already nuked the page on the self-hosted hipchat offering, which now
redirects to
[https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack](https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack)

Which is a complete bummer. Slack isn't an option for us.

~~~
core-questions
It is possible to get a confidentiality agreement with Slack over and above
the normal terms if you negotiate with them.

------
optimusclimb
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.

~~~
mdeeks
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. They made it dead simple, and fun to use for
EVERYONE. My limited experience with IRC was honestly not great (please don't
kill me, I'm sorry). Where is the mobile app? How do I get notified when I'm
not online? What is EFNet/Freenode/etc? I use a slash command and paste my
password in plain text to login? I can't just paste an image?

Social apps are extremely difficult to get right. People seem to discount
"silly" things like Emoji reactions. Honestly it DOES sound silly to say this,
but it really is a great way to express and communicate. This is especially
true for our large and diverse team. It also cuts down a TON of message spam
("Congrats!", "Yay!" etc)

~~~
hiccuphippo
My Linux user group used to hangout in IRC until 3 or 4 years ago when little
by little we stopped joining the channel. Some of us tried IRC clients for
smartphone and it was a lousy experience.

Until one day someone created a Telegram group. Now we are all there, the
conversation might not be as fluid as IRC, each is in their own timezone, but
it is there.

~~~
conquistadog
Scrappy founder here. Telegram crushes it for low latency, instantly synched
desktop/mobile flexibility, easy topic channels and groups, and trivial bot
API. I've not seen anything do what it does as perfomantly.

For code, wiki, and issues, it's self hosted Gitea. It's a dream to fire up
thanks to Go and SQLite, and users forget you're not at GitHub.

Nothing more than those two plus email needed here, yet anyway.

------
CGamesPlay
As someone who uses both Slack and HipChat on a daily basis, I am very happy
to see that HipChat is the one shutting down. The "cute" features that Slack
adds aren't worth much individually, but the overall user experience is much
better on Slack than HipChat.

------
janwh
Gosh, I hope there will be a #MovingToMattermost movement coming. This feels
like a dangerous move to me, and bad for the market, competitiveness, and
users. One more thing the tech world does not need right now, is even further
increasing its reliance on a single service (and even more so one with a
mediocre track record of uptime).

------
ge0rg
_Customers with HipChat installed on their own servers will be able to use it
for an extra few months or as long as two years, depending on the version.

Slack and Atlassian will make it easy for customers to move, but they won’t be
forced to switch, Butterfield said._

So they are not forced to switch, but if they don't then their chat will cease
to work?

------
pmontra
Well, thanks to this today I learned that Microsoft had a product called
Teams. I didn't see anybody using it but I saw plenty of people using Slack.
Maybe is Team addressed to big companies? My customers are all medium or
small.

Does anyone here have some experience using Teams? Is it really in competition
with Slack?

~~~
partiallypro
Teams at the moment is mostly used by massive companies, as Slack is really
built for smaller teams. I like Slack, but it is very unreliable. I am
constantly disconnected, have messages never sent. This is not on the free
version, it's almost inexcusable in the amount of times it happens.

~~~
duderific
> I am constantly disconnected, have messages never sent.

Weird, I have never had those issues, and have been using Slack heavily on a
daily basis for a couple of years.

~~~
partiallypro
I used it in two different jobs, both with paid plans (and obviously different
internet services) and both have had the same disconnection problems. Maybe
it's a regional issue? I'm around Nashville/Atlanta. I have had multiple
instances of someone asking me why I haven't replied only to see a message
marked as "failed to send" because of a disconnection. This is multiple team
members too, not just myself.

------
PedroBatista
It's a smart move from Atlassian, Slack is a superior product with an huge
mind-share.

Most of the time companies stick with their own products as if they were a
sacred cow no matter the costs.

~~~
dbbk
Well, I wouldn't say Slack is a superior product necessarily. Stride had some
really great ideas, like focus management and designating decisions out of
discussions.

------
drcursor
What bothers me the most with the current on-premises chat solutions is the
lack of a true alternative for jabber/xmpp with OTR (or equivalent e2e
encryption) support. I honestly hate that in 2018 there is no way to move away
from Pidgin/Adium if you want to keep this functionality.

\- RocketChat - OTR breaks very easily, and
[https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/10094](https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/10094)
has been open for months \- Matrix / Riot - Last I tried it had the most
complex and unusable interface \- Mattermost - At first glance seems to
include E2E, but when reading a little bit more...not really, just at rest
encryption -
[https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-669](https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-669)
\- Zulip - nop -
[https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096)
\- Movim - nop -
[https://github.com/movim/movim/issues/63](https://github.com/movim/movim/issues/63)
...

~~~
ge0rg
OTR hasn't aged very well (it doesn't support asynchronous communication,
multiple parties or multiple clients per party). For XMPP there is OMEMO,
which is gaining traction (and is based on the Signal ratchet), but like with
OTR, the forward secrecy it provides might be unwanted or even forbidden in
corporate environments where you have retention policies in place. E2EE is
great for private chats over an untrusted cloud provider, but really not a
priority in enterprise environments.

------
thogenhaven
Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more
competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft.

And based on the numbers in the article, it seems like Atlassian had less than
4% marketshare (Slack expects single digit growth - and assuming they have
around 50% of the market)

This deals seems like the last step before a full - and in competitive terms
logical - merger between Slack and Atlassian.

~~~
sithadmin
>Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more
competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft.

That's pretty dependent on which way Slack decides to go in terms of
facilitating large Enterprises' needs for absolute control of and visibility
into communications platforms. Monitoring and governance of Slack is, at
present, a goddamned nightmare. The third party tools that currently exist
are, in my experience, somewhat unreliable, and all of them are crippled by
the fact that Slack's API drastically limits visibility into the platform.
I've worked with more than one very large Enterprise customer with special
compliance needs whose Slack instance(s) are one foul-up away from having a
regulator rain down fines/sanctions, and in every case Slack is pretending
like the issues don't exist while my customers shove their head in the sand.
And compliance aside: the Slack API doesn't even have methods in place to deal
with things like emoji-react trolling on read-only announcement channels, and
a plethora of other little features required to control toxic and obnoxious
behaviors.

I love Slack to death, but it's not an Enterprise product yet.

------
schappim
>> We are purchasing the IP for Hipchat Cloud and Stride

It would be nice if Slack took a leaf out of the Hipchat play book and made a
native (non-electron) Mac app.

~~~
Kiro
What's wrong with the electron app?

~~~
kidfiji
I personally don't have a problem with it, but a lot of people have a problem
with it taking up a bit of system resources, primarily ram.

~~~
Kiro
Thanks! The only Electron app I use is Visual Studio Code and it works great
so was curious.

(Crazy btw that I get downvoted to oblivion within seconds for asking an
honest question.)

~~~
fernandotakai
an example -- i currently have 3 workspaces on my slack client (on linux) and
it's currently using 500mb of RAM, which is insane for a chat client. the only
thing using more ram is firefox with literally 25 tabs, including gmail's
inbox and pocketcasts playing a podcast (~1gb).

------
nyconyco
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 to fix all that with Nayego:
[https://nayego.net/](https://nayego.net/) Nayego is an open source team chat
under development, that has a world-class UX, and that is
federated/decentralised/federated like email.

Nayego wishes to address the organisations that are open and extended, where
teams are working together with other internal teams, and with partners,
customers, providers, but also freelancers, and remote and home office
workers.

Nayego is and will remain free/open source and open standard (XMPP, SIP,
WebRTC). If you wish to register to the preview, please go to:
[https://nayego.net/](https://nayego.net/) We will do our best.

~~~
LiquidFlux
Echoing Promarged, the world class UX claim had me searching for screenshots,
not having any was a major turn-off.

~~~
nyconyco
I understand.

A complete and comprehensive UX is not seen in a few screenshots...

~~~
hellojason
You have several potential customers here telling you what they expect to see
on a landing page when considering your product. If you’re this stubborn about
listening to non-customers who are telling you exactly how to get them into
your sales funnel, it gives the impression you would care less about their
needs and suggestions regarding the product itself once they become customers.

Listen to your ideal customers, then regurgitate it back to them. If
screenshots are not enough, how about a video? Discuss the pain points you’re
solving, and show how you solve them. Maybe embed a chat session on the page
and let me chat with a bot to feel why it’s better, but do something so I take
your product seriously.

------
AzzieElbab
I hope they buy Skype and every other corporate chat app too. So, I do not
have to run all this crap at the same time

~~~
eddieh
Microsoft owns Skype. I doubt they'd sell it to Slack.

~~~
AzzieElbab
One can dream...

------
maxehmookau
This is a curious quote:

"Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer
choices for people.”"

I know most tech CEOs might think it, but you don't say it out loud!

------
fl0wenol
And _whoosh_ there goes another option for non-cloud-based enterprise chat.

~~~
horsecaptin
Weren't both Slack's and Atlassian's offerings cloud-based?

~~~
quanticle
No. Hipchat had an on-prem option. In fact, I'm kind of stunned to see that
the blog post on Slack's website doesn't mention the on-prem version at all.
Given that on-prem was one of the differentiators that Hipchat had against
Slack (and one of the reasons that many companies stuck with Hipchat, even
though Slack had more features), the lack of discussion around the on-prem
version seems like a huge mistake.

~~~
Jaepa
Hmm mentioning it would probably be a bigger mistake. If they say anything
they'll have detractors and proponents, by staying silent it allows them to
prep & bleed off users who MUST have onprem.

All in all I would guess that slack will probably retain more than 80% of
users, which is pretty good.

------
arenaninja
I hope this means Slack will invest in improving their core desktop offering;
it is a notorious resource hog

~~~
coldacid
I'd love that too, but it won't happen.

~~~
arenaninja
Well in that case I hope MS gets a second wind like it does for VSCode. I use
IntelliJ daily since I use a lot of the bells and whistles, but VSCode is
great and also runs on Electron. It seems that there's a lot of things MS is
doing right with the tool that Slack can't or won't.

Maybe WASM to Electron is in the horizon? :)

~~~
coldacid
Microsoft is the only company I've seen that can actually get any performance
out of Electron, and even then it's still a resource hog. In their favour,
though, VSCode is written exclusively for Electron, unlike many of these apps
which are essentially SPAs lightly reworked for a non-browser.

------
ulfw
Wow. Atlassian is really on the way down, giving up on such an important and
strategic part of the business. They've given Stride not even a year to try to
compete.

Guess they'll always be the JIRA company. Congrats to Slack to winning the
Enterprise Market!

------
zokier
Stride was launched last year. I guess it didn't get much traction then if
they gave up on it in less than a year. For consumer it is of course bit sad
to see the 800lb gorilla just keep growing and eating up competition, but I
can see how this makes sense to at least Atlassian; they are getting better
Slack integrations, and possibly other partnership benefits for what seems
like essentially free. Not sure how much this move will benefit Slack (the
company, not the product), but maybe they'll absorb few more customers this
way. Although I imagine many Hipchat/Stride admins will be reevaluating their
choices instead of just jumping blindly to Slack.

~~~
cothomps
I was curious whether or not the Sride project was failing. We were about to
do a migration once some key integration things were done; doesn't look like
they'll finish those.

------
filereaper
What bothered us the most with HipChat was their lax security model. Any file
uploads in HipChat would be uploaded to an S3 bucket and opts for security via
obscurity [1] as opposed to proper authentication.

This forced us to send sensitive material via email as opposed to directly via
HipChat.

[1] [https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-
questions/Securit...](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-
questions/Security-of-HipChat-file-uploads/qaq-p/385492)

------
stockkid
As a Hipchat user, I welcome this decision. I was not happy with using Hipchat
at work for a number of reasons including

* No inline syntax highlight * No edit of message (apparently I've seen some do this but I never figured it out) * can only attach one image at a time * Message fails to send then after some retries, sends multiple times

It's great that I won't have to use it again. However I'm a bit surprised that
atlassian is discontinuing Stride given that they have launched it relatively
recently.

~~~
forty
Last time I used hipchat, you could edit your last message with
s/search/replace à la sed

------
chadlavi
* slack gets paid to take hipchat off atlassian's hands

~~~
jedberg
Actually Slack is paying Atlassian.

~~~
paxy
But Atlassian is investing in Slack

------
bachmeier
I don't know if Stride was losing out to Slack, or if it was losing out to the
FOSS competitors like Rocket, Mattermost, and Zulip. I've found Rocket and
Mattermost to work well for small teams (no experience with medium or big
deployments).

With the FOSS alternatives plus the more fringe competitors like Ryver, Glip,
and Twist, plus related tools from Dropbox, Basecamp, etc., it's hard to see
there being a market for Stride.

------
hiccuphippo
Tangentially related, recently Google pushed an ad for chat.google.com my way
(in a Gmail popup no less). It seems they made a Slack competitor, it sort of
uses Hangouts for one-on-one chats but its own thing for groups (and groups
from Hangouts don't show up there) and broke Hangouts in Gmail since then
(some conversation where the other person wrote the last message shows as
unread the next time I open gmail).

~~~
lern_too_spel
I tried it. It's garbage. Worse than every other option listed here. You can't
even search for rooms.

------
lolsal
I'm not a huge fan of Slack or Hipchat either way, but I can't help but lament
that there is less competition for enterprise chat solutions now.

------
bergheim
Non-tech people like Facebook (et al). Understandable. Hell, tech people like
Facebook. Because of the social graph, understandably, I get it. You can't
fight the compartmentalization of our previously open Internet, I guess.

Or maybe, at least developers know better.. ?

Turns out no. What annoys me to no end is when developers willingly crash
right into this "electron react"-whatever hipster bullshit cause its "cool".
We had IRC _thirty_ years ago. Slack is not cool. Sure, upgrades are in order
for IRC. But it works. Slacks evaluation is so laughable. Obviously it is
because of its data - that it won't share.

Anyway. We should know better. We should not willingly put everything into
slack or hipchat or whatever. Why would we?

Ease of X, I guess.

Give me an api where I can sync all my stuff locally and, you know what, fair
enough, go nuts, but these guys build their businesses based on holding on to
their data like vultures (no surprises there) . Understandably. I just thought
tech savvy people would know/do better.

Anyway, that's my two cents. I feel like a minority.. Now get of my lawn.

------
visualphoenix
This both sucks and is great. Sucks for me. Hopefully will be great for
Mattermost and Matrix.

For HIPAA compliant shops Slack is a non-starter. Mattermost will hopefully
get a lot of corporate $ now. I wish Matrix's dendrite[0] golang replacement
homeserver was finished and in better shape. I'd much prefer to go the
Riot/Matrix route, but it doesn't feel ready for prime time yet.

HipChat Server was SPOF but could be made to be HIPAA compliant by hoisting
their AMI out and encrypting the base image.

I literally was at the tail end of hacking Hipchat Data Center to be fully
HIPAA compliant and HA using Vault, Consul (+locks), Terraform, scaling groups
and friends. I was so excited about getting to blog about it. _sigh_

Looks like I'll be re-engaging Mattermost. Last time I looked their E20
pricing was like 4x more expensive per user than it was costing for HipChat
DC. Hopefully they finished their HipChat importing option.

[0] [https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite](https://github.com/matrix-
org/dendrite)

~~~
adrianpike
Hey, can you elaborate a touch on the lack of HIPAA compliance with Slack?
Some folks on my team seem to think it's compliant - and I'm not finding true
hard answers either way (ignoring the BAA side of things)

~~~
ceruleanscott
Slack showcases the HIPAA logo on their security page, but upon closer
inspection - [https://slack.com/terms-of-
service/supplement#healthcare](https://slack.com/terms-of-
service/supplement#healthcare) \- you'll see that unless you've signed a
separate agreement with them, you acknowledge that Slack is _not_ HIPAA
compliant and that you are _not_ to send them any PHI. My guess: they are
signing BAAs for grid customers only (so the logo isn't a lie) and making them
pay handsomely for the pleasure.

As I shamelessly disclosed upthread, we (Trillian) offer a HITRUST certified,
BAA-backed solution for healthcare organizations that comes in SaaS and on-
prem variants. More: [https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-
texting/](https://trillian.im/uses/hipaa-compliant-texting/)

------
dmode
Our Corp IT requested engineering to Pilot Google Hangout Chats as we already
have GSuite. Turns out that Slack is the most expensive enterprise application
that IT owns. It is more expensive that GSuite, although it provides a
specific utility, while GSuite has emails, spreadsheets, docs etc. etc. That
doesn't really sounds sustainable.

~~~
2T1Qka0rEiPr
Any feedback on Google Hangouts Chat?

------
brightball
Would be interesting to see Discord make an entry into the space. They're
killing it on the gaming side already.

------
stemuk
It seems really weird to me that a CEO of a big company like Slack comes
forward and comments "There’s fewer choices for people.” as if this is
supposed to be a good thing. I get that this is true on paper, most CEOs
however would rather hide this effect of a merger in order to avoid government
regulation.

------
makecheck
Of course, in an ideal world, the obvious technical flaws in chat products
would easily enable competitors to “take on” the broken ones.

Why does it seem so hard to get chat right? Heck, Yahoo Messenger had lots of
features in about year _2000_ that we still lack or struggle with in newer
products?

~~~
jazzyjackson
Hi there, I'm currently building out some chat-based groupware and also feel
like we've gone backwards since 2000.

Can you humor me with some nostalgia and tell me what features of Yahoo
Messenger you used?

------
jokoon
I'm really hopeless about chat applications. So many apps and platforms, so
little inter operability.

All that users need, most of the time, is a web app and a smartphone app for
private messages.

Channels and voice are special cases. Voice is hard to achieve, and channels
are usually covered by private servers.

------
thedangler
We were using hipchat, worked fine with our custom integrations and workflow.
Stopped working when they switched to stride ( had to do with version of jira
we are on) Now that my integrations are all most working again I have to
probably look at using mattermost.

We don't want to use slack.

~~~
gms
Why not?

~~~
Deimorz
Probably because they don't want to (or can't) have a huge portion of their
company's internal communication stored forever on a third-party server.

I still find it hard to believe that so many companies are okay with doing
that.

~~~
Karunamon
And yet most large companies are using AWS and the like. This obsession with
"MUST be behind OUR firewall!" is very arrogant, penny-wise pound-foolish
thinking - and it tends to wither in the face of a frank, honest cost/benefit
analysis.

Amazon probably has more, if not better, security and engineers than most of
the companies we're talking about.

~~~
Grue3
>Amazon probably has more, if not better, security and engineers than most of
the companies we're talking about.

And Slack has...? A bunch of VC money and a hastily thrown together chat app?

------
ulfw
Wow. Atlassian is really on the way down, giving up on such an important and
strategic part of the business. They've given Stride not even a year to try to
compete. Guess they'll always be the JIRA company. Congrats to Slack to
winning the Enterprise Market!

------
orliesaurus
I wonder what all these folks who have worked and are still working on Stride
will end up doing? If I am not mistaken most of the devs who worked on Stride
are located in Austin, TX. I wonder how they feel about this whole change...it
must feel yucky!

~~~
pram
Having worked on that team, it always felt yucky. The product has been a
train-wreck for years.

~~~
orliesaurus
I wonder then, this "partnership" means that whoever is on the Stride team is
now going to somewhat work really close to Slack's team? Or is Slack acqui-
hiring the Stride team? or ... ?

------
omnimus
People are talking about secure alternative matrix/riot, mattermost, zullip...
not that i have anything to do with them but Wire
[https://wire.com](https://wire.com) is pretty impressive (you can geek out on
haskell backend).

In small org we have been using riot/matrix and it is great. Works well but it
is more like modern IRC. It doesnt have too much ui sugar. Mattermost on the
other hand looks cool but had slow clients and there was some bullshit with
push notifications requireing some enterprise server license. Hope its no
longer the case - i mean why would you want chat without notifications?

------
a13n
It's crazy to me that so many people here think IRC is a valid alternative to
Slack in 2018.

With the recent trend of consumerizing business apps, IRC is an awful
experience compared to so many modern chat apps. It's much harder to set up,
looks way uglier, and lacks useful features.

Not to mention IRC has a somewhat technical setup, which makes any non-
engineering team reluctant to buy in. Software companies have sales,
marketing, design, product, support, leadership teams... use a tool that works
great for everyone.

Personally we use Twist. I enjoy that it's lightweight and performant compared
to Slack, which feels clunky (just take a look at your activity monitor).

------
KamBha
We have been using Stride for a few months and are baffled by how bad it can
be and how it seems to miss key features that was in Hipchat (such as a call
indicator). I used to always say "this is not the hard part of your job,
stride " because it would fail to do basic things such as display images.

A colleague of mine found a security issue but had a hard time logging it and
had to make it public.

Basically, I got the impression that the stride team in Atlassian was a bit of
a mess.

All that said, it is sad to see it go because it was an alternative to the
near monopoly of Slack. The only other alternative is rocket chat and MS teams
now.

------
snaily
For being the business chat darling, Slack is just not that great at being an
amazing chat platform.

I'm comparing to WhatsApp, because in my org that's what everyone defaults to,
as the basic chat functionality in Slack is a subpar experience: * No delivery
notices, even in private chat * Can't upload multiple attachments/images in
one go, but instead defaults to N single uploads * No option not to download
large images * Logs in slow, needs to be "connected" and thus struggles to
send messages on intermittent connections

Maybe the HipChat infusion of people with a different viewpoint will help?

------
resalisbury
"Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, There’s fewer choices for people.”
- Stewart Butterfield in the above article.

When are tech CEO's going to realize it's bad to sound like a monopolist b/c
anti-trust?

I tend to agree with Ben Thompson of Stratechery that one of the best ways to
thwart emerging monopolies and preserve choice for consumers it to prevent
companies from acquiring competitors. Although today Microsoft is the goliath
and Slack is the david, in today's world David's grow up very very fast...

------
prawn
Spotted on Twitter: "Imagine winning a market so dramatically that your
competitor shuts down their competing services, hands you their IP, and gives
you money for the trouble."

------
actualanswer
Seems like a move to take on Microsoft Teams. This is something that these
independent software vendors will need to do in order to take on Microsoft:
integrate and enable a best of breed world. Its not really a great experience
if I buy Slack, Okta, Box/Dropbox, GSuite if I don't have a seamless and
integrated and experience throughout. The only way is to build a integrated
ecosystem and enable these horizontal use-cases.

------
time0ut
This is disappointing. Our compliance department requires an on prem solution.
I don't necessarily agree, but convincing them is a challenge. We've been
using RocketChat. The experience has been great, but it's becoming more
critical to our business and harder to manage. We were starting to look at
HipChat as a replacement as we already have a large Atlassian deployment.
Maybe Mattermost is worth a look?

------
joshstrange
Even those less competition normally isn't good I'm hopefully optimistic about
this. It seems by and large slack has won the chat wars for open
projects/podcast live chat/business. My company uses HipChat (due to being in
the Atlassian suite) and so I'm not going to have both Slack and HipChat open
but if we move to Slack it means I can participant in some other open Slack
channels.

------
WesleyJohnson
I haven't used Stride, but some of the features it was touting that Slack
doesn't have seemed nice. I liked the idea of marking something as a
"decision". Not sure how that played out in practice, but I know I'm
constantly searching our Slack conversations at work to try to find decision
points. Would be cool if they integrated that, and other features from Stride.

------
7ewis
We've been waiting a long time to move to Slack, and recently started
migrating over ~2,000 users from HipChat.

Everyone is desperate for the migration to be complete, and to get rid of
HipChat. A large majority had already moved their own team over.

Can't say I'll be sad to say goodbye to HipChat, it worked well for the 6
years we had it, but Slack is superior in many ways (other than price...).

------
auslander
Slack is best of the breed - all history search, easy code blocks that i
cannot yet figure out how to in Hipchat, pictures, files.

Electron is big and bad, is it phoning back to Google? but I can understand
the savings.

Hipchat have an UI, that looks like a joke, after using Slack, but on-
premises, offline installs are very important for company security.

I guess Slack bought it just to kill it. No offline stuff in 2018, folks.

------
daveheq
Ugh, so how do Jira tickets related Bitbucket commits get automatically
hyperlinked by ID? I guess they don't.

Slack is unfortunately thought by some people I work with as a replacement for
email... When it's almost impossible to discuss certain things in a chat app,
and it's search is just not as good, and it's organizing messages almost non-
existent.

------
ddtaylor
Has Slack fixed the problem with bots spamming people yet? I used to be a
member of a lot of channels for various projects but then a wave of bots
started hitting all of them spamming various scams or trying to impersonate
accounts so I had to leave because I couldn't have my inbox flooded with
nonsense and the signal-to-noise ratio was too high.

------
archildress
Microsoft Teams isn't successful because it's a great product, it's because
their sales team goes into corporate environments where they're already using
Office 365 and offer Teams for free as an integrated extension to the rest of
the suite.

Big companies aren't choosing between Teams and Slack, they're choosing
between Teams and email.

------
partiallypro
Are they really this scared of Teams? I don't even really see them as true
competitors, they are going after different customers. It's kind of odd to me.
Maybe they believe Google is going too enter the space soon, that would change
things if it were bundled with GSuite and then Teams is bundled with O365.

------
stuff4ben
There's always Cisco Webex Teams. I actually kinda like it, although I do work
for Cisco. Unfortunately I have to keep it, Slack, and Jabber open on my
laptop so I can communicate with anyone anytime (/sarcasm). On my phone I only
have Webex Teams which is great when I'm away from my computer.

------
acd
How is that legal from a competition law point? Slack is the dominating actor
in office chat how can they buy Hipchat?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law)

------
hdi

      Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: “There’s fewer choices for people.”
    

What a statement! This is why I dislike Slack as a company and as much as I
hate Teams (have to use it at work), I have no problem with it if the choice
is Slack or Teams.

~~~
skrebbel
I love it. Finally a CEO being direct and honest instead of "synergy
blablabla" when the reality is "we're taking out a competitor".

------
zenethian
I really hope that this results in a combination of the two's best features.
Slack is so nice and polished and runs well as a standalone app, and Hipchat
has some really nice features (like channel re-ordering in the sidebar) that
I'd love to see brought into Slack.

------
tjadams
I remember working at a company several years ago where they used HipChat.
Slack was just up-and-coming and I remember wondering why it even bothered to
compete since HipChat did a fine enough job. Interesting to see how Slack has
evolved and that Slack is absorbing HipChat.

------
AndrewBissell
I feel like the outages and backend infrastructure issues at HipChat were a
major factor in its being overtaken by Slack. Don't know how open Slack is to
discussing this, but I'd be very interested in a side-by-side comparison of
the two architectures.

------
eric_b
HipChat was a great tool 3 years ago. Atlassian left it to wither on the vine.
Really too bad, as I enjoyed its simplicity.

Also, data export is great, sure, but what I really want is someone to re-
setup all our build and monitoring notifications in Slack :P

------
sandGorgon
For those considering an alternative, there's an alternative made by an Indian
startup ([https://flock.com](https://flock.com)) that's pretty popular out
here.

It's much cheaper than slack.

------
Brosper
Slack is still to expensive :/ this merge will not help.

What we need is self hosted app like Rocket Chat, which is not the best
software on the market but it's the best solution for new companies to start
with something inexpensive.

------
throwaway180118
What's out there in the way of white-label or integrated slack alternatives?
My non-tech staff are very confused by these modern UIs and ideally I'd like
something I can embed into our intranet laravel site.

------
bradt
Keep an eye on [https://level.app/](https://level.app/) if you're interested
in self-hosted chat and/or are tired of the interruptive nature of Slack.

------
monocasa
Can you use self host slack?

~~~
compuguy
To my knowledge no. That is going to be an issue for current users of Hipchat
Server/Data Center.

~~~
mnkypete
I've seen a private Slack instance at SAP, so it seems to be possible for big
corps..

------
KAMSPioneer
The CEO of Slack really said that the acquisition was good because "there's
[sic] fewer choices for people"???

Imagine the CEO of any non-tech startup company saying this in a Bloomberg
interview.

------
jaimex2
I really didn't like Stride but couldn't put my finger on why not. A lot of
shortcuts from Hipchat didn't migrate across but I could live with that,
something just felt off...

------
phyzome
I'm not thrilled to see further consolidation, but frankly I'm not surprised
in the least -- Hipchat is an utter dumpster fire.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
News of chat companies buying and selling your chat should strike fear into
the hearts of their users. Use open protocols.

------
janlukacs
This is an incredibly good move by Slack, even more so after the recent
announcement from MS with the Teams free version.

------
crb002
Github merger has sent the vultures to pick apart Atlassian before they lose
all enterprise market share to Microsoft.

------
wolfi1
used both, hipchat and slack. both underwhelmed me. I still don't understand
the hype around them, both provide their full functionality only in the
browser, their clients having quite a few deficits. zulip. mentioned in
another thread, looks promising, don't know if it can keep its promises

------
rbosinger
"hip", "slack", "chat", "buying" \- makes you wonder...

------
sidcool
Seems like they are shutting down HipChat...What about existing customers?

------
lev99
Great! How many cooperate chat applications does the world actually need?

------
knodi
Rev must be good, save on tax buy a useless company.

------
Tharkun
Time to set up an IRC server again then. Sigh.

------
dbg31415
What's the point of Stride again?

------
LinuxBender
Are they also going to buy Discord?

------
hateful
It's really easy, the first one to support multiple chat windows will win.
That and ctrl+enter to send message.

------
nine_k
tl;dr: Atlassian discontinues HipChat, sells some important HipChat's IP to
Slack, and is concentrating on a better Slack integration.

------
cylinder
Atlassian wins again.

------
brodock
huge opportunity for Mattermost and Rocket.Chat folks

------
cup-of-tea
Shame all three are terrible products. How hard can text chat be?

------
Karishma1234
One of the things that have surprised me is the lack of a good slack
alternative from one of the large companies like Microsoft or Google.

Now, before someone tells me about Teams and Hangouts, they need to realise
that Slack/Teams/Hangouts all are glorified Yahoo! messengers but slack is the
only one that seems to have a sweet spot where people are comfortable using
it.

------
jlebrech
RIP hipchat, piece of crap

------
Fzzr
Woah, this is huge. Atlassian is really going for the "everything a tech shop
needs" gold.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
The exact opposite, Atlassian is selling and retreating.

~~~
Fzzr
I see it as a step towards integrating more (or in this case better IMO)
things into their ecosystem. Consolidating Hipchat with Slack is a step toward
that.

~~~
zackkitzmiller
Atlassian is selling the defunct Hipchat to Slack.

------
captain_perl
Just for the record, I surveyed a dozen Hipchat users who used it all day in
late 2016 for software development. They had zero complaints about using
Hipchat.

My opinion of the Hipchat web client at the time was that it worked fine (no
complaints from me.)

I believe we were on the free tier, so that was a great deal.

A new Eng. VP wanted to seem hip, so he switched us to Slack "to ensure we
were using the best tools possible."

Nobody said that Slack was better or added any features that were worth
mentioning.

~~~
aaronharnly
Mid-to-late 2016 was the peak of periodic outages in HipChat (like, several
hours per week, which is a lot for a core messaging platform), which was when
we threw in the towel and switched to Slack.

At the time, Slack had the feature of "you can log in", which teams really
liked :)

[https://status.hipchat.com/uptime?page=10](https://status.hipchat.com/uptime?page=10)

