

Slack Acquires Screenhero (YC W13) - pallian
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/28/slack-buys-screenhero-to-add-screen-sharing-and-voice-chat-to-its-work-messaging-platform/

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hammerdr
This saddens and frustrates me as a user. I love screenhero and it does its
job well. I've used it for all of my remote interactions over the past year or
so and was a happy paying customer (through our company).

Unfortunately, due to other concerns about paying for Slack[1], we probably
will not be able to continue to use it. We'll be a once-happy customer that
falls victim to this acquisition. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth :(

[1] It is expensive especially at our scale, we already pay for a couple
chatroom-type/irc-like services, and the big one: long-lasting offsite chat
logs present a difficult hurdle in client negotiations, a headache we just do
not need

~~~
jsherwani
I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be
able to continue to use Screenhero. This isn't just PR/marketing-speak, as
someone who has spent many years of his life working on this product (that I
love), it really does pain me to know that someone who also loved what we'd
built will no longer be able to use it.

However, in the grand scheme of things, I (and our team) feels that this is
the best step forward for everyone involved (including Screenhero users).
Slack is on its way towards becoming the de facto communication tool used by
teams (both big and small), and an integrated Screenhero + Slack product just
makes the most sense for the most people.

I would love to learn more about why your team can't use Slack, and what we
can do to mitigate the issues you've outlined and others that you may not have
outlined yet. Please feel free to add me to Screenhero (j at slack-corp.com)
and let's have a deeper conversation about this, if you're open to it.

~~~
fennecfoxen
> I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be
> able to continue to use Screenhero.

You know what you need to do, to keep these teams happy? You need to continue
have a minimal tool that does the thing that people need -- screen sharing --
and does it well, instead of bludgeoning them with a massive general-purpose
communications suite that they don't want, which is essentially what you were
just cheering about in your recent email.

I'm sure you'll make more money this way, but you needn't expect the people
you're abandoning to be happy.

~~~
FooBarWidget
Strongly disagree.

As a software developer, I've put off adding more features into my products
for several years now. All because I feared introducing features will make my
users think it's "bloated", "violating the Unix philosophy", etc.

But over the years, I've found that most users actually want more features.
Most of them want more business value. And that there is value in having
features integrated/builtin instead of external.

When I tell people "no, we don't do that, but you can use that other tool in
combination with mine" most of them are like "what? I have to use TWO tools"?
The "simple tool that does one thing" philosophy mostly appeals to a small
number of hardcore nerds, but the rest of the world wants more features, more
integration. They don't want theoretic purity.

The fact that I didn't add features and only focused on bug fixes actually
hurted the reputation of my software in the grand scheme of things. So yeah,
I'll be adding more features from now on.

~~~
woah
Look to Adium for a counter-example

~~~
FooBarWidget
Counter example? I wish Adium would add more features. It's been stagnant for
years and the only reason why I'm still using it is because there's nothing
better.

For example, MSN file transfers have always been broken. They never managed to
fix that before MSN's shutdown.

Google Talk file transfers are similarly broken.

No support for Skype.

No support for webcams.

All these issues have been open for years. They only introduce basic bug fixes
but not much else.

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orthecreedence
It's a Slacquisition ha ha.

Been using Slack a lot the past few months and really love it. Pairing it with
Trello has given us a powerhouse of open communication and task management.
I'm interested to see how it scales for our team as we grow, although the way
Slack sets up channels I think it won't be a problem.

It will be interesting to see the screen sharing stuff too. Maybe it could
replace Skype, which I cringe whenever I have to open (slow desktop app + tons
of ads + incessantly begs me to update almost every time I open it).

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dnfriedman
We're big users of both Slack + Screenhero at Thinkful for our students
communicating with each other in real time (Slack) and pair programming with
mentors (Screenhero). We were even spec'ing a feature to make Screenhero the
only tool for mentor sessions. Congrats to the Screenhero team – you built a
great product and deserve this, but it's sad we'll have to switch to another
product. We can't wait months to have something available, and it's not clear
the new features will do what we need :/

~~~
Grae
Yeah, congrats to both teams. I agree wholeheartedly with Dan's comment; I
love each of your products separately and look forward to playing with the
integration down the road, but I'm disappointed to lose the existing
Screenhero now.

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slantyyz
My business partner and I have been using Slack as our primary messaging tool
and been somewhat stuck with Skype as a secondary tool for voice and screen
sharing. I am definitely interested in seeing where this goes, and it's
definitely a feature we'd pay for.

~~~
socialist_coder
You could have paid for Screenhero before. Maybe if more people did, they
wouldn't have sold to Slack.

We used Screenhero when it was free. It is better than Skype. But, it's not
really worth the price when Skype is free.

~~~
slantyyz
To be more clear, I'm actually hoping that it becomes a tightly integrated
feature within Slack vs. using it as a separate service.

~~~
socialist_coder
Me too. Seems like it is and that will be awesome =)

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imrank1
I used Screenhero a lot when I worked remotely. It's a great tool. Shared
screens from the East coastto West coast (US) with hardly ever experiencing
problems. Great service.

~~~
jsherwani
(Screenhero co-founder here) I'm very glad to hear this! Your screen sharing
(and voice and video communication) experience is going to get even better in
the coming months. Stay tuned :)

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ringmaster
I have to agree with the frustration of the apparent minority. We've been
using HipChat corporate-wide, and the subset of users that have been using
Screenhero aren't going to be able to change to Slack now (even if we wanted
to).

And it seems that the wondering our remote development team has been doing
about what happened to progress on Screenhero's video codec (pumping 800kb/s+
over my line when nothing is happening on screen is a bit excessive) is now
answered with a resounding, "We've been trying to get acquired." Well,
congrats on that.

Back to VNC and Skype with no cursor of my own, I guess. But at least it's
free and has less chance of my ISP throttling my home connection due to
saturating the pipes with Screenhero all day.

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q3k
> Cross platform: Screenhero supports both Windows and Mac.

It's like there isn't any other operating system...

We do both, country AND western!

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wamatt
As a user of both Slack and Screenhero this makes me happy.

I've always felt they would make a cute couple. That said, integration seemed
kind of sparse (limited to /username in Slack). We also struggled to have it
work reliably in daily use.

Thus we mostly reverted back to the Skype/Slack combo. However this has proved
to be suboptimal, partly because links and chatlogs shared in Skype are not
archived in Slack for easy retrieval.

Hopefully this marriage will bring about a bunch of deeper and more polished
integrations for users.

~~~
jsherwani
(Co-founder of Screenhero here) Thanks! We do think we look good together ;)

A great integration is _exactly_ what we want to make happen. Stay tuned for
awesomeness in the coming months! We are super excited to make something that
you will love.

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Killswitch
Been a long time user of Slack and absolutely love it... I've seriously got a
bromance with this company. It's adored throughout the company I work at, and
one of our pains is that we do all our communication through Slack, even if
we're next to each other, we still have headphones on and we talk in Slack.
But we still have to go to Skype to do stand up meetings with our remote
users... Would be so much better if we could do video over Slack.

~~~
jsherwani
Give us a few months...

~~~
Killswitch
I'm patiently waiting. Keep up the awesome work.

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agentultra
Screenhero has been amazing for pairing remotely; something I do often. A co-
worker was amazed when his custom keyboard layout worked seamlessly with my
terminal session. Once people experience it I find it's not hard to convert
them. It will be interesting to see how the Slack integration will improve the
experience.

One thing I've always wanted though was integration between Screenhero and
Sqwiggle. Any chance we'll see something like that, Slack?

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bradenb
Our entire company uses Slack for most communication since everyone works 100%
remotely. It has been fantastic. Finding a good tool for screen sharing has
been difficult, though. I pair almost every day, so I need a tool that is
stable and has a good quality-to-speed ratio.

For people with good connections, Screenhero works well; only downsides are
that we get a lot of crashes in the beta app and sometimes the mouse sharing
changes window focus or mouse position for the other user, but in general it
is the best tool we've found. For those without good connections, we have to
use GoTo since it sacrifices refresh rates for quality.

Overall, I'm excited to see how this works out. Right now it's a small subset
of people in our company that use Screenhero, but I expect to see that number
jump with this announcement.

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shenoyroopesh
As a slack user, I think this is awesome. This is one thing that we do miss
currently, a video calling facility.

I mean we can log into skype or google hangouts something else, but having it
in slack would be totally cool!

I've never used Screenhero before, but going by the comments here, I wish I
had!

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e0m
What does this mean for Sqwiggle? Are you guys the next Slack acquisition?

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nikhilpandit
I used screenhero for some remote work. It's great for pair programming and
helping debug a problem remotely. Since our team used Slack, I really wished
Slack would add similar functionality to their product. Glad to see that it's
going to happen now, and will be built by the people who built the awesome
screehero product. Congrats guys! hope to see more awesome work from you!

~~~
jsherwani
Thanks! We are looking forward to doing more awesome for you :)

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cobychapple
Blog post from Screenhero:
[http://blog.screenhero.com/post/109337923751/screenhero-
join...](http://blog.screenhero.com/post/109337923751/screenhero-joins-slack)

Thread on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961845)

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adieth
We tested Slack some months ago, but rejected it due to lack of solution for
VoIP and video conference.

I am not seeing this acquisition is changing this. In order to have a meeting
with multiple participants, we will still need Skype/Hangouts/Lync/WebEx.

~~~
joelandren
Our team has been using the Google Hangouts integration for months and it's
worked flawlessly.

~~~
jacques_chester
Hangouts has a maximum number of participants. For large phone conferences
it's not usable.

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StevenKW
So if I am an unpaid slack user how do I screenshare with a user that is not a
slack user?

If I am an unpaid member of several unpaid slack teams how do I continue to
use screenhero?

Can I opt in to a paid single user and use screenhero across my multiple slack
teams?

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porter
is there anything else out there that I can pay for now that's like
screenhero? This actually looks like something I need, but now I can't sign
up.

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robertwalsh0
As a screenhero and Slack user I'm excited to be able to experience one
experience across both products. They're both best in class in my opinion.

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lbotos
Screenhero reps, do you have a gameplan for being able to "invite" users for
one time sessions? This is what I often need Screenhero for.

~~~
Anjin
This would be amazing. I use Screenhero all the time for work, but every so
often I need to help my mother with something on her computer and there is no
free solution available that is better than Screenhero.

I'm just not going to pay for another subscription just to help my mother out
with tech support once a quarter...

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kendallpark
I am extremely excited about this.

Pair Programming++

