
Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft - philk10
http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/3/13504932/slack-microsoft-teams-letter-wtf
======
Mc_Big_G
It's funny that Slack thinks they've perfectly balanced a unique and special
snowflake on the tip of a unicorn's horn when what they've really done is
added a pretty UI to IRC. It's a chat room. With channels. So, sorry to tell
you guys, but it's not innovative, it's lucky. We had chat rooms back in 1995.
Yes, that scrappy startup Microsoft will not have too much trouble
implementing a chat room and they don't need luck to get users. How were the
people at Slack not thinking "Holy shit, people are paying for this!" the
entire time like it was a dream. I'm sure Slack will continue with much
success now that they have their user base, so good for them, but to delude
themselves into thinking no one can do it as good as they do is a bit naive.

~~~
Latty
I'm really weirded out that people can't see the value Slack added. Having
your messages stored while you are offline is hugely valuable. If I have been
out of signal range on a train, I want to be able to look at history on my
phone once I'm back in range of a cell tower.

Beyond that, a well made UI for web, desktop and phone that is consistent is
valuable. 'Adding a pretty UI' isn't a zero-effort or skill thing.

No, Slack isn't a world away from IRC or email - but it's enough better that
people want to use it, that's good. I'm not sure where all the hate comes
from.

~~~
fizzbatter
Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two
companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo.

I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a
file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way
shape or form.

What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX.
It's why i love Slack.

There's no hate coming from me - i'm just a realist. Slack didn't do anything
amazing. It just did things right. Which is unfortunate for all of us users,
as it took so many years to do things right. Unfortunately for slack though,
they showed what is a good UX.. how hard do you think it is to copy that UX?
Not easy, sure, but the template is there. Spend some time copying Slack, and
i think you can manage to make Slack.Clone.

~~~
Latty
It sounds a lot like all the people that bash StackOverflow - "It's just posts
and a voting system, I could write that in a week!", ignoring all the
complexity and design behind it, operating at scale and cultivating the
environment.

If people need something to be 'amazing' not to put it down, and 'amazing'
doesn't include doing the right things to be highly successful...

If no one else did it, was it really so obvious?

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Microsoft has a well regarded developer network and Q&A system regarding
Microsoft technologies, at least in my (limited to primarily Azure)
experience.

Similarly, Microsoft has already operated a widely used integrated chat,
profile, and community system at scale. Given their recent pushes, it wouldn't
be entirely surprising for them to bring back similar platforms for business
users integrated with LinkedIn.

That would eat a lot of Slack's potential big clients, because MS has a
history of enterprise grade support on products like that, and Slack has scale
issues for large orgs.

~~~
blakeyrat
Does Slack even allow on-premise installs yet? That instantly disqualified
them from the last 3 jobs I've had. (All of which had data protection issues
that prevented them from using off-premises IM systems, mostly HIPAA
regulations.) Microsoft's got that market already sewn-up, right out of the
gate.

~~~
8_hours_ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft Team doesn't currently have a self-
hosted option. I hope it's in the pipeline because my company can't use an
offsite IM service. It would be nice if Microsoft added support and then Slack
followed. Competition is good!

~~~
it33
Mattermost is an open source, self-hosted Slack-alternative:
[https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-
its-o...](https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-
source-alternative/)

~~~
oddvar
There is also Matrix (matrix.org), an open standard for decentralized
communications. Our goal is to let all apps talk to each other - including
Slack, Mattermost, and Microsoft Teams!

Check it out using any Matrix-enabled app:
[https://matrix.to/#/#matrix:matrix.org](https://matrix.to/#/#matrix:matrix.org)

------
r2dnb
Wow... So if I understand correctly :

1) They decided to mess with a company having $500B in-cash

2) Which decided to attack their low barrier-to-entry market

3) And took the unusual revealing step of building its own instead of buying

4) And is playing in its comfort zone (productivity tools, Office, API, cloud-
scale integration points : azure, azure marketplace etc...)

5) While having a pool of 90M trustful paying customers and the ability to
provide them the same offering for free in less than 1 second.

The worst they could do was to help Microsoft define this offering as a direct
competition. But this is just what they did with this arrogant and high-
schoolish "Welcome" letter.

What really has me roll my eyes here is the way they think that they can be
frontal with a corporation like Microsoft playing in its comfort zone and
having the dollars we know they have.

This will cost them a lot. You can't easily backtrack from that and even if
they somehow manage to do it, by the time they get there, Teams will have
already seized a good chunk of their user base.

~~~
asp_hornet
"Making my eyes roll" sums my feelings on this perfectly.

Dear Slack,

We built the cloud service, web framework, programming language and operating
system our Team app runs on as well as the IDE it was built with, the source
control its stored in and the office apps it integrates with, oh and 2 of the
browsers we tested it on. The chat part really wasn't that hard.

We'll probably be OK.

\- Microsoft

~~~
ryanwaggoner
And the relational database

~~~
asp_hornet
great catch!

------
fairpx
When Steve Jobs "Welcomed IBM" with a full page ad, it was fun. It fit the
vibe of who he was and the slightly rebellious marketing campaigns Apple was
running. Slack's "Welcome Microsoft" letter felt weird. It felt disconnected
from the company and product many of us love and use every day. Might have
been stronger to silently add a feature to Slack that lets you communicate
with Microsoft Team's members.

~~~
twblalock
Slack's letter appears to betray defensiveness and fear of competition, rather
than a tongue-in-cheek attitude like Apple's ad did. I think that's why it
seems weird.

~~~
mbesto
It doesn't help that the snark from the CEO was awkward too:

[https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793969175807098881](https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793969175807098881)

------
antisthenes
ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger and IRC were all entrenched at different points in
time.

To give a parallel, so were Teamspeak, Ventrillo, Mumble, Raidcall, Xfire or
whatever have you (for gaming at least).

Chat rooms and VOIP solutions are commodities and have been for a decade or
more. Sure, some companies do some more value-add than others in terms of
service and support, but at the end of the day it's still a commodity and no
amount of rationalization and wishful thinking will change that.

Which is why their mimicking of Apple ad seems condescending and arrogant.
Personal PCs were at the top of the technological know-how in the early 80s.
Glorified chat rooms haven't been new or high tech for 20 years (IRC is how
old?). In fact the only innovation in recent years seems to be end-to-end
encryption, which Microsoft seems to be on board with.

------
nilkn
Our entire company switched to Slack within basically a day. While that's a
big selling point for Slack's ease of use, it also means it'd be easy to
switch away to a competitor within a day too.

~~~
stephengillie
My team has built numerous chatops bots and automation around Slack, mostly
because of their great API. In a way, we're building our own lock-in, as any
replacement would have to provide the same level of API access, from in-
channel announcements to channel scraping for parsing by other systems. And it
would require retooling the bots too.

~~~
otterley
Respectfully, that sounds like an engineering failure on your part. There are
enough similarities in the APIs among different chat systems that the business
logic can be easily decoupled from the event loop; had you abstracted the
interface, your system would be more easily portable to other providers.

~~~
rekoros
Except... other than Slack, nobody has a sane API just yet (I work at
sameroom.io).

------
joshu
My prior experience with some of the now leadership of Slack indicates that
they don't have sufficient moral authority for this kind of commentary anyway.

~~~
CptJamesCook
I've been treated unethically by four relatively senior employees of Slack
myself. It never occurred to me to complain until they started acting so
holier than thou.

~~~
davesque
It's funny how achieving great success more as a result of luck than ingenuity
seems to go hand-in-hand with arrogance.

------
JustSomeNobody
Does Slack even understand that there are MANY enterprise companies that don't
use Slack simply because it's NOT Microsoft?

Hubris is rarely a good quality.

~~~
blakeyrat
More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use
HipChat instead, because it is.

Either way, this is a HUGE market Slack hasn't even begun to touch. (Although
I see they now have a "coming soon!" banner on their homepage.)

~~~
stable-point
> More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use
> HipChat instead, because it is.

Just one data-point, but: my employer went with HipChat because we needed an
on-premise solution. (We were moving away from IRC because we needed
persistent chat history for remote employees. Using IRC bouncers was
considered too high of a barrier-to-entry, given we wanted non-technical
employees to join the conversation too).

------
CptJamesCook
What a smug, sanctimonious piece of writing.

It's hard to imagine that anyone who read this came away with a positive
perception of Slack.

------
627467
Between this and the debate around the new macbooks/surface-studio, Microsoft
is having very good week in terms on gaining some mindshare and good-will from
the technorati and the (traditionally) anti-microsoft press.

Slack is great. I'm part of many slack communities and until they move I'll
stay (although they are all in the free-tier). While the many millions who are
already part of the O365 subscription base (and who probably don't even know
slack or why they need them) won't have reason to start a community on Slack I
think Slack is safe in the short-run with those who don't pay the "MS-tax" or
those who are already part of existing slack communities.

And while Slack is a great product (as the IRC on steroids that it is) it is
easy to replicate and so MS now did.

------
fcc_authorized
> Or maybe it will evaporate into the ether, like Yammer, which Microsoft
> spent $1.2 billion on to seemingly no effect whatsoever.

Ah, Silicon Valley. Where growing slowly is the same as being already dead

~~~
draw_down
Nah, that thing was a clunker its whole life. They spent the billion because
Twitter was much more fearsome at the time.

------
metilda
I dunno, I just want to stop hearing about it here on HN, this single letter
has been posted a dozen times in the past day:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dear%20microsoft&sort=byPopula...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dear%20microsoft&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story)

~~~
cdubzzz
Hey, if it takes a little away from the barrage of boring, half-reasoned
opinions about the MacBook announcement, I'll take it.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story)

------
binarytransform
What a badly written letter. No aim, no structure, no class.

------
muad
Slack is the most overrated startup of the last couple years.

A native ui for IRC with some extra features.

Their valuation is laughable and is a prime example of the bubble forming in
vc tech.

~~~
randomsofr
> with some extra features

That's what got them where they are right now.

------
wubalub
I've been using skype for text messaging pretty constantly for the last 3
years, and I'm not sure why people hate it so. it has groups, 1-1 chat and
video. Searching history can be a bit of a pain, but everything else seems to
be there. Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing.

~~~
uryga
I associate Skype with being slow and heavy for some reason. However it's
possible that I picked this opinion up from other people and just started
repeating it.

~~~
mxuribe
No, no...you are correct: skype (for business) is slow and heavy. At least it
is for me.

------
lifeisstillgood
The essential issue here is this - starting with the Fortune 500, how far down
the business size stack do you have to go before this question stops being a
laughing out loud no-brainer:

    
    
      "Shall we buy more-or-less the same chat application 
      from Microsoft or Slack?"

~~~
jdmichal
Let's really talk about a no-brainer... How far down that stack do you have to
go to before the Microsoft choice isn't included as part of some already-
priced-and-paid package? _Free_ Microsoft or _paid_ Slack...

"Nobody was ever fired for choosing IBM."

~~~
lifeisstillgood
At my Fortune 500 client Office communicator / lync/ Skype for whatever is per
seat chargeable. But as it's 3 bucks no one even blinks at signing it off.

MS actually has done rather neatly out of that one

------
sebastianconcpt
Surprised by the tone of this. It's Slack declaring cultural war to Microsoft.
All values subverted, what is praise is actually negative admiration (envy
basically), probably based on fear. Kind of gramscian stuff what they did.
Very unexpected and unnecessary. Unless they wanted to do some noise because
of marketing? I guess they got scared but doesn't sound like Slack needs that.
Wonder why they bought this battle this soon.

------
_pmf_
Microsoft can just copy everything that Slack does right, give it away for a
fraction or for free and there's nothing that they can do about it.

~~~
test001only
If they give it away for free (as part of office365), is that not effectively
anticompetitive behaviour?

~~~
hrayr
Well, now that slack has so "genuinely" welcomed microsoft as a competitor, I
don't think they can turn around and argue the opposite for the same offering.

~~~
twblalock
Slack is going to look dumb if it ever sues Microsoft.

"But, your honor, Slack told the world they welcome competition from us in
this infamous letter from November 2016!"

~~~
kirubakaran
I get your point, but, if an anti-trust suit ever happened, it would be DoJ
that sues MS, not Slack.

------
romanovcode
I didn't see such a catastrophic marketing decision for a long time.

------
rrdharan
Seems like the Slacklash I've been expecting has finally arrived.

------
mbarty
So does this mean that Microsoft is 'UnDead'?

Ref: Paul graham : Microsoft is Dead
[http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html)

~~~
romanovcode
Looks like you didn't follow the news. Microsoft is the new Apple.

------
dfar1
Can someone link me to a hi-res image.. or do I have to buy the newspaper in
order to read the ad?

~~~
kjbflsudfb
[https://slackhq.com/dear-
microsoft-8d20965d2849#.1o0pg14v2](https://slackhq.com/dear-
microsoft-8d20965d2849#.1o0pg14v2)

~~~
dfar1
thank you thank you!

------
kwikiel
Tangentially related. I'm using rocket chat - it's open source (MIT)
alternative to slack.

And i think it would be easier/safe for companies to adopt self hosted
solution or use already trusted company like Microsoft.

Slack had great UX - but one cannot compete only with that because it could be
copied. Maybe Slack have some comparative advantage that could not be copied.

------
StreamBright
Let the IRC wars begin. :) Seriously, I am not sure what to think when a chat
company is worth 1 billion. Sure it has nice UI but so does HipChat and a
bunch of other tools. For me, Slack is just one of the many communication
platforms I used ever since, starting with IRC, ICQ and other apps and
protocols from the 90s. I am not particullary fond on Microsoft but they
deliver. I cannot forget the initial uproar when they introduced their
entering the gaming console industry with Xbox, and look at them now. Slack
has to offer a bit more than just a nice UI for async messaging to be relevant
in the corporate communication space in the next 5 years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#History)

------
smegel
> threaded conversations

How does an instant messaging app _not_ have threaded conversations?

------
mdevere
This is an opportunity to MS to reply in kind and demonstrate a sense of
humour.

------
bdcravens
Slack-like chat in an integrated offering isn't new. Zoho has offered this for
some time: [https://www.zoho.com/chat/](https://www.zoho.com/chat/)

~~~
blahi
Yeah buddy, but Microsoft has more employees than Zoho's customers.

When practically every office employee on the planet is your customer, it is
kind of different.

------
chiefalchemist
Apples and oranges. The MS product is a paid version within a particular
target/universe. That said, evidently, MS didn't study the never-rose and fell
story of Google Wave. In short, collaboration needs people. Any people. All
people. One outside within the team and a platform becomes irrelevant to the
matter at hand.

In addition, the communication market is bigger than the market for soda.
Genuine or otherwise Slack and the market will benefit from competition.
There's still plenty of upside for Slack, Microsoft and perhaps one or two
more.

------
sleepnaught
Why are we analyzing this as though it's supposed to be an honest statement
from Slack (ie. arguing they're not an open platform or that Slack isn't
actually as special and snowflakey as the ad makes them out to be)? It's pure
marketing. Could argue it comes across too insincerely for positive impact,
not sure if that will be true for the general audience reading it or not.

------
nikolay
Slack copied Yammer and HipChat... and now it's angry that Microsoft stole
some of its unique features - such a hypocrisy!

------
davesque
The letter just makes me feel like the people calling the shots over at Slack
are immature and can't handle the realities of running a competitive business.
It just comes off as a disguised advertisement and I doubt it really earned
them any more customers.

------
rcy
I think the intended audience of this ad is people who haven't heard of or use
Slack but are interested in this new thing Microsoft is doing with the hope of
poaching some users. It's not actually intended to convince Microsoft of
anything, obviously.

------
intellegacy
terrible judgment by the CEO to send this.

------
asurty
Microsoft has lost my trust in them after what happened to me with Skype. I
was one of the many victims who had their account hacked. The worst part was
how their customer support handled the issue. They almost gave me an ulcer by
trying to convince me that it was probably a virus on my computer causing the
problem. Look at your own Skype forums people! Be transparent, own up to
having problems, and fix it!

Communication is extremely important to me. That said, if all the employees in
my company were only using 'Teams', 'Skype for business', 'Lync' or any other
POS out of Microsoft then I'd be looking for a new job.

~~~
aidbiuasbi
You seem like a real joy to work with.

------
intended
> "All this is harder than it looks," Slack warns. And then the company straps
> on its wax wings and flies into the sun.

That was a very nice turn of phrase.

------
draw_down
I can't believe _this_ has become a scandal. It's a bit tone-deaf. Okay. There
are worse things.

------
yarrel
Welcome IBM. Seriously.

------
throwaway1892
Or Slack may just die?

