
Stride, Atlassian’s Slack competitor, opens its API to all developers - mansilladev
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/20/stride-atlassians-slack-competitor-opens-its-api-to-all-developers/
======
hkchad
Long time hipchat user here (both DC and Cloud), the rollout of Stride rubbed
me all kinds of wrong ways. They 'replaced' HipChat w/ Strie but didn't keep
many of the same features/integrations and then FORCED you to switch by a
deadline. I get upgrades and progress, but how about rolling upgrade, swap out
the client, move everyone over automatically and not pain your users? For my
team, we said screw it and 'migrated' to Slack. Give us a chance to switch, we
switched.

~~~
wwalser
Inaccurate.

Data center has not been sunset. [https://www.stride.com/help-
center/frequently-asked-question...](https://www.stride.com/help-
center/frequently-asked-questions/stride-and-hipchat-data-
center#faq-64bbd492-e920-4693-9abf-1688729a2bab)

I also don't think anyone was forced to switch but I could be wrong. An email
requesting or encouraging some action is different from being forced to do
something.

~~~
hkchad
I was just saying I have used DC in addition to Cloud. We migrated to cloud
from DC about a year ago, and was forced to switch last week.

------
tootie
What happened to HipChat? It was already the same thing as Slack for less
money.

~~~
hartator
Stride is just re-branded HipChat.

~~~
patrickaljord
I know it sounds silly but I believe the main reason for HipChat failing is
mostly because the name was so uncool.

~~~
bpicolo
More likely it's just that HipChat isn't a great product experience.

As an example, the only way to edit a message is to use a sed-style
"s/foo/bar", which is absurd. Because of this, you can't edit messages other
than the most recent one, and if you want to edit one instance of "foo" but
not another instance of "foo" you're out of luck. That's a terrible piece of
UX even if you're in the only subset of users (software devs familiar with
sed-style search and replace) where it makes any sense whatsoever

~~~
Fishkins
One time I was trying to correct and "its" that should've been an "it's", but
I didn't realized there was a preceding, correct "its" in the post. I ended up
changing that "its" to an incorrect "it's", while also leaving the following
incorrect "its". It was inconsequential, but very frustrating.

As a sibling comment said, the main reason my team abandoned Hipchat for Slack
was Hipchat was hopelessly buggy and unreliable at the time we tried to use
it.

~~~
ec109685
Um, you should have sed’d the whole sentence! J/K: totally absurd.

------
bgibson
Haven't used Stride yet but as someone who hates always-on chat I could see
myself really appreciating its deep work oriented features: mute
notifications, allow others in the channel to mark things as "task",
"decision", "outcome" so you can go back and find important things you missed
while deep working.

[https://www.stride.com](https://www.stride.com)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Something about this comment feels very much like an ad.

~~~
sotojuan
Especially because you can always mute Slack or use do not disturb as well.

~~~
bonesss
But can Slack help you rethink team communication, or redefine the way teams
move work forward, together? I know I want a messaging tool that _delivers
results_.

[https://www.stride.com/](https://www.stride.com/)

------
dasil003
Just don't fuck up Trello guys, for the love of god.

~~~
antoniuschan99
Trello seems to have lost it's use after it got made into a separate company.
It seems to have gotten worse after it got bought out by Atlassian. No real
intriguing features.

Also, Atlassian used to be loved by developers, after it ipoed it just seems
not loved

~~~
bovermyer
This is not my experience. Trello has continued to work just fine after its
acquisition by Atlassian.

------
crad
Sad thing is there isn’t even baseline feature parity. Not sure what’s going
to happen when they give my org a date to move by. Without some of the more
enterprisey features, we can’t move to Stride.

Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute.

They should have released it as a UI improvement for HipChat, not a whole new
ecosystem.

~~~
Rychard
> Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute.

I certainly didn't appreciate it. As someone who invests significant portions
of time building integrations between various systems in our development team,
I quickly hit the brakes the second I heard the Stride announcement.

Since our organization is being forced to move from HipChat, we're reviewing
alternatives rather than blindly continuing onward toward Stride.

I strongly doubt that this will have any impact on Atlassian's bottom-line,
however.

------
jakelarkin
biggest gripe with Atlassian is all their products are slow as hell. Hipchat
was sluggish and buggy but at least they were steadily improving. Now everyone
has to start over on a new platform (?) Confluence, how freakin long does it
take to return a static info page, Seconds? As if visiting the HR subdomain
wasn't painful enough already. Heaven forbid you click on something makes a
POST request in JIRA, RIP developer.

~~~
throwaway5752
Agreed. If anyone from Atlassian is reading this, the changes to Jira and
Confluence make me think something is wrong there. I have been a faithful Jira
user for over a decade and it has gotten markedly worse as a product in the
past year. Maybe it's more profitable with app/marketplace, but the experience
with multiple integrated apps is dog slow. Navigability has gotten worse.
HipChat had uptime issues to the point my company moved to Slack. I am worried
for you guys.

~~~
atonse
I agree with this. In 2006 I was a huge fan of JIRA and it just felt like such
a well designed app.

Now it has some kind of Designer disease, where it looks beautiful (truly, I
love the style and fonts and colors), but I simply can't find my way around
it. And I get very frustrated trying to do basic things because the app is
also really slow (clearly 500ms+ per request). It's clear that it's still a
server-side app and not a SPA which is the kind responsiveness everyone
expects nowadays.

So our two person team went back to using Excel. Jira just takes too long to
get things done with.

------
shitloadofbooks
Stride's WYSIWG editor is really unpleasant (and had several showstopping bugs
which they're only just ironing out).

I have an open ticket to have a profile option to disable it, but ...crickets.

------
sjellis
Michael Tiemann used to say that he wasn't interested in trying to pitch to a
company unless he thought his product (Red Hat Linux) was four times better
than what they currently had: the costs and risks of a switch can easily
negate the value of changing to a product that is only somewhat better than
the incumbent. Unless Stride does _something_ massively better than Slack, I
don't see how Stride can compete.

~~~
jpalomaki
Slack's challenge is that it's just Slack. It's an extra monthly cost, extra
thing to the manage.

Atlassian can sell you the integrated package. One price, one invoice, tight
integration between products.

I don't have any data on this, but I think one reason for Slack's success was
that people could just start using it without going thorough the IT. I'd
assume there's still a huge number of companies who haven't made an official
choice on this space. Those might be tempted to go with offerings from
Atlassian or Microsoft.

Slack could be interesting acquisition for Dropbox (haven't thought out if it
could work financially).

------
cmaureir
I didn't find any reference to encryption or security matters on Stride,
anyone?

I want to believe that keybase will be soon mature enough to compete against
Slack and other similar services...

------
jgh
I don't know what it is about Atlassian's branding but it always feels
uncomfortably corporate to use any of their software. I'm worried that if I
start using Atlassian software I'm going to have to buy inexpensive business-
casual clothes, commute an hour and 15 minutes both ways, make small talk with
Janet from accounting by the coffee machine while my mocha latte brews, and
get Greg my middle-manager my self-assessment by EOD.

~~~
fusiongyro
The primary function of Atlassian software is to say "Access denied." You tell
Greg he needs to give you permission to do whatever. Greg says he'll do that
after he gets your self-assessment. He later writes on your self-assessment
receipt that you're a whiner lacking self-motivation.

I've used Confluence for two years. It's slow and the editor is buggy. The
primary function is to prevent me from making a document public. I've used
JIRA for 8 years. JIRA's primary function is to send email.

I'd say your assessment is accurate.

~~~
hiccuphippo
Wait, people actually read jira emails? I just filter it to my 'ham' folder.

~~~
fusiongyro
80% of my coworkers do not read them. I read the ~5% of them that contain more
than "Status: -Open- Assigned." Of my remaining coworkers, there are a dozen
that reply from their mail client, which just makes everything worse.

------
jgalt212
Hipchat 2017 works perfectly fine for a chat app (which @tootie said have been
basically the same for 30 years).

We have not been forced to migrate to Stride yet, but I am bummed about this
can I keep kicking down the road.

I don't care how much better Stride is, Hipchat is good enough for us.

------
anfilt
I don't understand the point of all these stupid chat apps... Discord, Slack
ect...

If you need real time there is IRC. Otherwise, just setup a mailing list.

~~~
u801e
> If you need real time there is IRC.

The problem with IRC is that you cannot get chat history of a channel unless
you configure a bouncer to do it for you. On that note, what's your opinion on
XMPP? We used to use a XMPP server for internal company communication and the
server was configured to replay the chat history to a client when it
connected.

> Otherwise, just setup a mailing list.

That has a similar problem to IRC which is that new members cannot easily
access messages sent before they joined. A better option would be an
internally hosted NNTP server.

~~~
anfilt
You could do that as well with IRC.

I like IRC since the protocol is so simple you could almost type in a raw
telnet session live.

That simplicity also means it's not to hard to add additional things to it. If
you want.

~~~
u801e
> You could do that as well with IRC.

You mean replaying channel chat history on the server side without having to
use a bouncer?

> I like IRC since the protocol is so simple you could almost type in a raw
> telnet session live.

That is true and it makes writing bots relatively easy. From what I've read
about XMPP, it appears that most languages have libraries to abstract the XMPP
protocol to make writing a bot easier.

------
tcit
Sad to see no one's mentioning Mattermost.

------
lev99
Did anyone else notice the Easter egg in Hipchat's web client when using js
debugging tools?

------
notatoad
everybody here seems to be griping about it, but from the overview on their
website it seems like a reasonable alternative to slack, and the free tier
includes group video chat and screen sharing. that sounds pretty sweet to me.

------
asda22sdasd
did they ditch hipchat?

------
devhead
it's safe to say this won't be killing slack in any meaningful way. wow,
that's a terribly atlassian UI they plopped on there. no offense to the dev
team(s), i'm sure they had no say in making it so cluttered. slack wins
because they make focus on communication not mandatory UI components that have
no place in a chat app.

~~~
bhtru
I've not ever used Stride however I've now just tried it as a curiosity to see
this UI that you find fault with. It feels figuratively just like Slack. I'm
actually surprised just how similar it is in so many respects. So I'd love to
hear your elaboration on the poorness of the Stride UI.

