
When Slack Won the Team Chat Market - yarapavan
https://zapier.com/blog/slack-versus-hipchat/
======
ravenstine
Slack "won" because, at least at the time it rose, it was a better chat app
for work that had a decent experience across platforms. A user could use it on
macOS, on Windows, in the browser, on Android, on iOS, and expect a very
uniform experience. Very few gotchas, besides some quirks caused by the
difference between what browser APIs can provide and what's expected by OS
users.

I remember using HipChat and wasn't terribly impressed, but I was used to it.
I then switched jobs and was asked to start using Slack. Naturally, in my head
I thought "oh great, I gotta learn a whole new thing." That thought was gone
by the end of my first day since virtually everything about it was better than
workplace chats I've used in the past. (I don't know how HipChat is now but
I'm sure it's improved since 2013).

Seriously, most chat apps at the time were pretty dogcrap. A lot of people
judge it, especially today, by functionality over form. Personally, I put a
somewhat stronger emphasis on form so long as the core functionality is solid.
I don't really get the people who claim it's glorified IRC; yeah, guess what,
most people didn't want to use IRC because they had to understand what IRC
was, what IRC client to use, oops my client doesn't work on macOS, oh hey look
someone from the Czech Republic is DDOSing the channel, etc. It's funny how
nerds keep thinking "if only everyone was a nerd" and get disappointed when
the average person doesn't want to use X nerd-thing. Like "the year of the
Linux desktop", there was never going to be a "year of the IRC client". People
want to open up an app and to send messages to people, and I agree with them.

These days, there's more serious competition in the arena, and that's because
Slack redefined the standard.

~~~
bradknowles
Speaking only for myself, I'm on multiple Slack channels, some related to
certain SaaS companies whose products we use, and some that are personal.

Internally, we use HipChat for our group within the company.

I much prefer HipChat over Slack.

To me, Slack is bloated, slow, and disorganized. I hate, loathe, and despise
the way it tries to do what it thinks of as "threading".

HipChat is simpler and faster to use. It's easy to connect plugins and
administer. It's easy to add your own custom emoji, if you really need them.
And it's easy to configure it to auto-hide animated GIFs, if you don't want to
see them by default.

There is nothing that Slack offers that I want. And plenty that it forces me
to live with that I do not want.

------
opportune
Seems a bit premature to claim that Slack "won" considering the market itself
is growing and that some of their newish competitors (MS, kind of Google,
perhaps even Facebook in the future) have _very_ deep pockets.

The article makes a point that the first movers don't always win in the long
term and I agree. Slack had the right user experience to make people want to
use team chats, but that doesn't mean that experience won't be improved on.
Instant messaging/chat apps' popularities have proven to be quite ephemeral
over the years and I doubt the current generation will be different

~~~
Alex3917
Slack has 8M DAU, which is probably at most 1% of the total team chat market.
The whole article makes no sense.

~~~
mulletbum
Microsoft Teams is currently on for 125,000 companies, with a customer base of
100 million in said market. To act like they can't easily "win" or cut slack
apart is crazy. This article makes no sense at all.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
MSTeams still has issues: the top one being that it’s tied to Office 365 and
the app won’t let you sign-in to multiple accounts. You can only join the
MSTeams account associated with your Office 365 subscription - or as a limited
“Guest” user of another account at their invitation - and there’s no sign this
is going to change any time soon. - and of course, the user-experience for
switching accounts isn’t the best either.

~~~
mulletbum
You mean like the free version not tied to O365 that they have already
released? [https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-
chat...](https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-
software?&OCID=AID643148_SEM_VlZ7H35y)

Multi Accounts, sure, but that is simple and easy for them to implement.

------
phaedryx
I see it differently.

I see the classic situation of "post acquisition we serve the needs of our
parent company, not necessarily the users".

I used to be on a team that used Hipchat. After they got acquired by Atlassian
the story was "look we integrate with Atlassian products" which was useless to
us. We wanted bug fixes and some new features. Eventually we switched to Slack
because it did what we needed.

------
twog
As an aside, _this_ is how you do content marketing. Really timely and topical
post, and sprinkled product tid bits in without feeling like an over sell.

------
mulletbum
I feel like this article would call MySpace the king circa 1990. Real Team
Chat clients are in their infancy. Microsoft is still baking Teams. Slack
still has bug issues. Google can't decide on a product. Discord is starting to
really start to get footing in gaming circles. Slack maybe has a head start,
but they haven't won anything.

~~~
jessaustin
http was created in 1991. MySpace came later.

~~~
gregmac
August 1, 2003, to be exact.

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

~~~
astrodust
In the beginning Tim created The Protocol and The Web.

And The Web was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of The
Protocol. And the NCSA moved upon the face of the code.

And Andreessen said "Let there be a GUI" and there was a graphical browser.

And Filo and Yang saw this graphical browser and created order from chaos...

------
thomastjeffery
Slack is just another case of closed-source software getting enough market-
share to compel the rest of us into its user-base.

~~~
sillyquiet
Not exactly sure what it being closed-source has to do with it.

Wouldn't this exact scenario have played out had it been OSS?

~~~
thomastjeffery
That's the finer point that brings a lot of frustration.

For example: We have a slack channel for every support case with our business.
Whenever a case is closed, we archive that channel.

Whenever a channel is archived, slackbot sends a direct message to every user
in that channel so they will know it was archived. The message cannot be
muted, and has the same notification authority as a direct message from a real
person.

This means that when someone is closing support cases while I am not working,
my phone will alarm me that I got a direct message from a slack user;
something that I generally need to know about.

Slack has had an issue open regarding this for _months_ , yet nothing has
changed. If I had an open-source client, I would have fixed this problem
myself as soon as I ran in to it.

------
austenallred
I really want to see Slack and Discord compared directly

~~~
azangru
They are super similar, but Discord is free. I can't imagine what can be said
in its disfavor.

Fun fact: several months ago, Russia blocked Telegram. Telegram refused to go
quietly and started hopping between numerous Amazon IPs to avoid direct IP
blocking. The Russian regulators started blocking Amazon IPs en masse and
severely damaged internet connectivity for weeks. Youtube slowed down to a
crawl. Slack was paralyzed. Discord? Not even a hiccup.

~~~
sciurus
I'm positive Youtube doesn't run on AWS.

~~~
azangru
Good point! Quick googling shows that Google’s IPs were also targeted, not
only Amazon’s ([https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/18/russia-blocks-google-
amazon-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/18/russia-blocks-google-amazon-ip-
addresses-in-bid-to-ban-telegram.html)).

------
Thkejehd
Any idiot can standup ejabberd and write some user mgmt + a mediocre web
interface.

We all saw how quickly folks migrated off hipchat.

This is commodity software.

It's only a matter of time until MSFT gets their shit together, ships a
passable chat product, and crushes slack, having sales channels into like 90%
of like all businesses.

Slack is a joke and if they were publicly traded I'd short them.

Inb4 my company's documentation is searchable chat

smdh.

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

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/slack-
and...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/slack-and-
atlassian-team-up-to-take-on-microsoft-in-chat-software)

~~~
astrodust
Just wait until Microsoft buys Slack.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Why not Oracle or Salesforce? I think Salesforce would be a natural fit, but
would love for Oracle to do it just to watch the tech community freak out.

~~~
astrodust
Buying Oracle would be a welcome relief, but it's unlikely to happen. Oracle's
culture is just too different from modern Microsoft to ever work.

Salesforce would be an interesting acquisition. Maybe they could merge that in
with their Dynamics division, perhaps shunted under Azure.

~~~
tzakrajs
Salesforce is $100B company with over 30,000 employees. MSFT would be insane
to try and absorb them.

~~~
astrodust
Microsoft a decade ago would absorb. Today they'd acquire and let it run
quasi-independently.

------
bachmeier
I think we all agree that Slack has been the most successful in this space.
This article presents statistics for Zapier users, though, and I don't think
that's going to tell you much about the market as a whole.

------
pjmlp
Won what?!?

We keep happily using Skype for Business and Lotus Sametime.

------
activatedgeek
I'm afraid those charts mean nothing unless I see the Y-Axis labelled.

------
kertis
When they move off from using web-technologies.

------
eafkuor
Conflusion?

------
megaman22
Is team chat some newfangled thing, or have people just forgotten that this
has always been a thing? Ten years ago Sametime and Microsoft Office
Communicator had persistent chat rooms that are identical to Slack channels,
and they were certainly not the first. The company I work for was founded on a
persistent chat product cobbled together in the wake of a startup collapse in
the first dotcom bust.

~~~
itomato
And IRC begat AIM, and AIM begat ICQ, and ICQ begat Jabber...

An IRC bot is no match for a Slack bot when it comes to simplicity and
availability.

