

Stewart Butterfield and Slack - replicatorblog
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/the-most-fascinating-profile-youll-ever-read-about-a-guy-and-his-boring-startup/

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rkuykendall-com
I think this article completely misses the value of Slack. It's IRC made easy.
Very easy, and that makes it very valuable. It's like the iPod, which did
everything MP3 players already did, but without being a pain in the ass.

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dakotasmith
I think the value of Slack is in how platform agnostic the whole experience
is. I have use it on a Nexus 5, iPhone 5c, iPad, in a browser (both IE and
Chrome on Windows) and as a native OS X application.

All work exactly the same way, and all have the same feature set.

Push notifications let conversations happen in real-time. You can turn off
Jira, Github, Trello notifications and set up integrations in Slack, create
#firehose channel, and now you have corralled all those announcements into one
spot.

If only I could get the other members of my team to use it, I could maybe talk
about its chat features.

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nobodysfool
One thing that Stewart Butterfield did that changed the web was www.the5k.org.

[http://www.the5k.org/about.php](http://www.the5k.org/about.php)

They made people rethink what can be done with the web, and it brought out a
lot of creativity.

For example: My favorite was the 2001 entry "fully functional 5k calendar".

[https://web.archive.org/web/20021027194935/http://entries.th...](https://web.archive.org/web/20021027194935/http://entries.the5k.org/502/index.html)

What was great about these is that they had functionality. It was the start of
client side web-apps. I think without that contest website, a lot of these
great creators wouldn't have gotten the recognition that they have now.

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jonas21
> At $7 per user per month, the paid version of Slack is expensive.

Really? $7 per user per month sounds very cheap for business software,
considering how much you're already paying that user in salary and benefits.

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fps
compared to the other software out there that does the same thing, it's very
expensive:

    
    
       - Hipchat: $2/user/month
       - Campfire: $1/user/month
       - Flowdock: $3/user/month
       - IRCCloud: $5/user/month
    

I've trialed slack, and it's Hipchat (or IRC) with a point and click
configurable hubot. The price goes up as you add more features/integrations to
the bot. I didn't really see any other important or useful features that
hipchat doesn't already have, certainly not worth the added expense.

~~~
harryh
Every time I see Foursquare's monthly bill for Slack I think of some quote
(possibly from pg?) about how to price enterprise software. He said that you
know you have the right price when customers complain about it....but still
pay.

Then I show my grudging respect the slack team. I don't like their pricing.
But I'm still paying.

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dharma1
We use IRC at work (and I've been using it since mid 90s) but I think there's
definitely a demand for a more modern, friendly web based group chat app.

Using hipchat with my startups at the moment and that's working pretty nicely.
Flowdock also looks great and I want them to succeed since they are Finnish!

Slack looks alright and I've been using it for a couple of days now - but
agree with the commenters below, I can't see much difference between it and
hipchat or Flowdock

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kylelibra
I didn't realize he was also a co-founder of Flickr. Interesting article.
Anyone know how Slack's MAU compares to Hipchat's?

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danso
> _“If we had waited six months we would have made much more money. If we had
> waited a year we would have made 10 times more money,” he says. He regrets
> it now. But at the time, after the dotcom crash, the Nasdaq plummet, and
> September 11, deals just weren’t happening. All his advisers and investors
> told him to go for it. It was hard to know what to do._

Oy, hurts to read this. I've been a satisfied Flickr-Pro customer for about
five years now, and I'm happy to see the recent cosmetic improvements it's had
in the last year...but it sorely needed someone with Butterfield's "mundane"
vision to really get the logistics and details right...there was no reason for
it to take a backseat to Instagram (though really, it's hard to beat the
overall social package that Facebook brings to photos)...The fact that I'm OK
with Flickr even though much of its functionality/structure has remained
virtually unchanged since 2009 goes to show how fairly solid it is/was.

