I look at Slack and think, how hard can it be? Then I look at the graveyard of crappy competitors and think, ok maybe there's something special about Slack.
The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few particularly choice bits:
>"There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation."
>The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.
My point isn't that cloning is easy. More that it has already been done multiple times and Slack has very little lock-in. And enterprise software has less network effect. Our IT department could dictate use of Microsoft Teams next month and it would probably be fine.
It had been 'done' by IRC 20 years ago, Google had already been heavily in the space with their linking to Gmail and Hangouts and previous attempts with things like Wave.
Yet somehow Slack has come in and taken a massive share of the market in a matter of 5 years.
