
The Slack Bubble and the Professional Instant Messaging Market - nnx
https://mondaynote.com/the-slack-bubble-and-the-reality-of-the-professional-instant-messaging-market-c5c91ef6e7cd
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PaulHoule
What I find strange about chat is that standards (that people use) have not
arisen and that technical progress seems to be glacial.

I first saw chat on VAX/VMS machines in high school in the 1980s. Circa 1990
there were many incompatible email systems, but by 2000 everything was going
over SMTP.

In the meantime we've had ICQ, AIM, Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk,
Paltalk, Slack, IRC and I am sure. The one thing they have in common is that
they seem to have almost the same feature set and haven't really improved over
time.

There is a standard in the form XMPP which seems to have market penetration
into military and law enforcement markets, but almost everybody in the
enterprise is using Slack while privately bitching about how it doesn't really
integrate well with their systems. (e.g. it looks like it integrates well,
getting 80% of the way is easy, 15% is hard, but the last 5% is impossible
because of Slack's business model.)

People say that Slack is searchable, but the Startup de jour in 2019 is always
complaining that it can't find documents and every week they add some new
place to store documents on the hope that they'll be able to find them.

One of these days they will see the irony in this, but at that point you will
see platforms move to make federated search and/or indexing infeasible.

