
Slack Faces Giant Tech Rivals - ranvir
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/slack-employee-messaging-workplace.html?ref=business
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code4tee
750 employees? I don't get it.

Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys
this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's
totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche
product, but then they can't be a 750 person company.

That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the
leadership team look a bit clueless about the situation they are now in.

UPDATE: Some saying it's not super easy to copy Slack. I see what you are
saying but the truth is that it's easily to copy Slack to a "good enough"
state. If you think the "best" and "most brilliant" software wins the
enterprise market then you don't understand the enterprise market. Wish it
wasn't like that, but it is and that's Slack's challenge (and what the article
is saying).

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superquest
> incredibly easy to copy

I feel obliged to post this tweet
[https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218](https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/837735473745289218)

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stagbeetle
If that's all Slack does, then it is incredibly simple (I realize this is only
one part). It has saved me the time of figuring out what pieces make the whole
and how they interact with each other (i.e the skeleton). Now, I just I need
to slap the nervous system (code) onto it and call it alive.

 _Do it in a weekend?_ A codemonkey could do it in a day.

This argument would be different if it were for something like Dropbox, where
the internals are really "something else."

But, I agree, with what I believe you're implying, that HN users throw around
"I could code it in a weekend," even if it doesn't apply here.

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cmahler7
I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free
market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works,
then copy it and kill the startup that did it first.

With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how
tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've
basically become too big to fail.

~~~
csydas
I like(d) slack as much as the next person when my last workplace used it, but
we used it over gchat for some reason, right around when Hangouts had just
been early released for Google Business/Apps for Education Users. Slack was
slick, nice, and definitely fun, but we already had a chat system that more-
or-less did the same thing.

I don't think that Slack's issue is so much that other companies are just
copying it, it's that they were a nuisance in an already existing space
(collaborative chat) and they hit on a few key features that devs liked. While
the Slack features are great, and the slack-team is great [1], [edited
content: it's yet another item to keep track of], and that's a hard sell when
you're an org of 100+ employees and you already have stuff like Lync or
Hangouts or Skype around as part of the standard employee loadout.

I hope the best for Slack and sincerely think they'll be able to dazzle people
with their support and with good responses to user feedback.

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/6vPcn](http://imgur.com/a/6vPcn) It's small, but this
sense of humor and fast response time from the support team is just hard to
hate.

Edit: Removed comment on extra account as below comments pointed out Slack has
SAML SSO, which I was not aware of as it was not in use at my last place of
employment. Changed it to current text, as I still feel that the idea that
it's Yet Another Chat that users have to decide on, but definitely a plus that
it's not another account.

~~~
bitexploder
I don't think it is fair to classify them as just a "fancy IRC". I see
technical people myself included think of them that way, but why isn't a
slightly fancier IRC dominant?

Seamless mobile clients, integrations, animated gifs, etc. Slack has a lot of
small but very sticky features.

~~~
majewsky
Exactly. My workplace is currently evaluating Slack and Microsoft Teams vs.
"bolt on chat to the existing internal social network". I'm presently trying
to figure out how to explain to the engineers running the evaluation that the
value of Slack cannot must be understood by the quality of execution, not just
as the sum of its features.

"How will we get people to use Slack if it does not have $feature [1]?" \-
"But hundreds of people _are_ already using it, so your point is moot."

[1] e.g. SSO integration

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bshimmin
Looking at that office makes me feel so glad that I work from home - look at
all those people hovering about and interrupting!

~~~
afandian
It is interesting. It might go some way to explain the culture that the app
embodies. Lots of 'cutesy' things like MOTD on the loading screen, emoticons
everywhere, application messages that include the word "yay", integration with
Giphy which seems to be a random Gif roulette. It all feels rather
unprofessional sometimes. And like they're trying to crowbar the Slack culture
into my own office culture.

When tools are straightforward in their utility they can empower, but when
they have so much baggage, they can also influence culture. Of course being
able to communicate more fluidly can change the culture of a workplace to be
more open. But it sometimes feels like an extension of flippant social media,
except you can't escape because there's critical stuff on it.

I used to work in a place that used XMPP, and before that Microsoft
Communicator. They didn't bring as much benefit as Slack does, but sometimes I
wish for something a bit more unobtrusive. I don't want a tool to try and make
friends with me.

~~~
microcolonel
I've been trying to figure out what it would take to make SMTP the last
business IM protocol. Today's fancy email applications are basically laid out
like IMs anyway. It just seems like a matter of getting delivery latency down,
and demanding some level of compliance with modern email standards (STARTTLS
only, must have spf and dkim, must have FCrDNS). If we're playing by IM rules,
we can even have people establish contacts, which should make spam filtering a
lot lower latency.

The other sundry things would be video transcoding, and reference-type
attachments (for stupid nonsense like attaching a giphy to your message, or
possibly-useful things like embedding google docs info).

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rrggrr
Slack's UI and desktop footprint makes me nuts, but we are already on it and
forced our vendors to join. I miss the tiny IM clients of old.

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OliverJones
I'm a member of a team that pays for Slack. Don't forget, if you don't pay for
the product, you are the product. I am sick, sick, sick, of being somebody's
product.

And with Slack, I don't have to be somebody's product. I don't have to already
use Lookout xxx Outlook. I don't have to cope with messages from recruiters
sending spam. Any fake nuz that shows up was faked by somebody I know.

Go Slack. Please figure out how to make your business sustainable: you're
helping make our business sustainable.

~~~
Sir_Substance
So the problem slack has is that chat is so foundational to the web that it's
one of those things that doesn't really make sense to farm it out to third
parties.

It's not hard or expensive to run yourself, and it's not difficult to securely
expose on the web. That's why Lync has such a head start and why Atlassian's
on premises option is gaining traction. Ultimately I suspect Mattermost is
going to end up the main winner here. Slack, Teams and Hipchat will all have
their userbases, but they'll have been in a three-way bar fight to get them,
which is expensive.

Meanwhile, all those 12 person offices that farm their IT out to third party
support companies? They're gonna start getting given Mattermost servers,
because that's easy for the IT shops to license and install, yet also still
under their direct control, which is important because IT support companies
don't have a tonne of bandwidth to educate all 100 client companies if slack
suddenly changes something.

~~~
empath75
I'm going to tell you how hard it is to get chat right. I work at the company
that more or less popularized internet chat. We use slack internally pretty
much exclusively, and have for years.

~~~
inopinatus
Goodness me. I had no idea that Mirabilis still existed. What is is doing
these days?

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shouldbworking
Eh, I think they'll be fine. A solid product and existing userbase. They'll
either get auctioned off for a few billion or showered with enough money that
they can't possibly fail for at least five years.

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sofaofthedamned
800 employees?! How?!

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tribby
how: they've raised over half a billion dollars.

my own question is "why." slack is by no means a trivial business to run but
800 does seem awfully high.

~~~
stevenwoo
Is Whatsapp a good comparison in terms of product? I remember reading the
engineering team there before they got purchased was less than 50 members.

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throwanem
> “We’re trying to build empathy at scale,” Mr. Butterfield said.

> “There are people who will die, get divorced, have children with cancer,”
> Mr. Butterfield said. “You really have to put yourself in their frames of
> mind. If we preoccupy these people for a minute longer than we have to,
> we’ll lose them.”

~~~
stagbeetle
It's definitely not the most eloquent way to put it, but I think it gets the
point across.

"People are in a rush these days, let's not get in their way."

