What a patronizing and condescending piece. All I got from this is that Microsoft has launched something in this space that is really worth taking a look at, if it prompts a competitor to write and publish something like this.
I got similar it felt... like... how do you think you can compete with us, we're the best.... it's a tough space, you shouldn't even try and get out... when Microsoft's actually looks like it could be a slack killer - a lot more functionality because of everything combined, heck if I was a CEO of my own company I'd probably ditch gmail and get the whole outlook business essentials package for everything and move to microsoft's cloud instead of google's.
I agree entirely. I don't particularly like slack in any case (it's just far too 'busy') though I'm forced to use it for work, and find the 'daily messages' etc completely cloying. This piece, with some of it's blatant mis-speaks (open platform, yeah right) makes me want to give them a good slap.
This was published in the Times today and it came across as passive aggressive and insecure to me, but I'm curious to hear what others think of this stunt...
Historically, letters like this don't bode well for the company writing them. People are drawing comparisons to Apple's "Welcome, IBM. Seriously" ad from 1981. Rdio sent one to Apple when Apple Music was launched too.
Yeah, this is perfect! Even while there are many tech-savvy people who can’t tell what is this in response to, surely a printed newspaper ad will just help everybody understand.
This is really terrible. Since nobody's name is actually on it, I assume their marketing team wrote it.
I understand that Slack's valuation is based in part on the idea that they can convert large portions of the enterprise market, and that Microsoft has a pretty great track record of burning that market down. It makes sense that they'd want to write something to maintain their claim on the enterprise market.
But this piece can't decide who it's talking to, and so it's probably pretty cringe-y to everyone.
Microsoft already has the beachhead into the enterprise, with their Office 365 offerings. We're seeing most of our Fortune 500 customers move their email, at least, to Office 365, and almost none of the smaller businesses go through the hassle of managing their own Exchange infrastructure.
Once they are on Office 365 for email and Office, they basically get Skype, Yammer, and all the other things thrown in for free. I'm sure that this will fold into that same pattern, assuming it's, say, 75% as good as Slack.
I work in a Fortune 500 company, our CTO has already announced on Yammer that we will evaluate Microsoft Teams, because anyway, it is included in the Office 365 package. So yes, the bundling strategy seems to work.
"We’re glad you’re going to be helping us define this new product category."
Wow, and folks give Apple a hard time about acting like they invented stuff. The hubris of Slack thinking there's some moral high ground for them to take is astounding.
But their post does have me searching the web for Microsoft's offering. Because I don't know what the hell Slack is on about, and I'm thinking what Microsoft has might be better than the disjointed web-app-in-a-native-wrapper thing Slack has going.
EDIT: found it, thanks to whalesalad's post in this thread. Okay, given that the MSFT client looks a hell of a lot like Slack, I can see where they're coming from. Still, it strikes me as someone who wrote the ubiquitous to-do app and then buys an ad in the NYT when Apple includes the Reminders app in iOS, welcoming Apple as they "define this new product category".
> I'm thinking what Microsoft has might be better than the disjointed web-app-in-a-native-wrapper thing Slack has going.
As others have mentioned, it will probably be an Electron app. But VS Code is also an Electron app and most people have positive things to say about it, many Atom users say it is a lot faster than Atom. So I feel like there's a decent chance that Microsoft actually makes a good Electron app here.
While I would love more competition in this space, I doubt if MS will offer a native app. They have recently moved Skype to an electron app (basically the website in a wrapper)[0] so I don't expect this to be any different. While this is in alpha (and only for linux), I expect them to move all their other clients (apart from Windows) to this electron app.
The Slack desktop app works pretty much the same way - native wrapper around an HTML UI that is almost identical to their web UI. (I think they may use the platform's native webview though, not Electron).
It has its pros & cons... one nice thing is that if you use the desktop app most of the time, using the web UI on the go doesn't feel like much of an adjustment. It has basically the full power of the desktop app because it's the same UI code.
You know, I really should think about my recent experience with a company's product before making comparisons. Because I forgot about the Skype app (don't use Skype much, but their recent releases for Mac were bad), and a few other recent examples that were less than stellar. So I guess a good experience with the Microsoft product isn't a given lately (I'm looking at you, Lync for Mac).
Anyone else find it a bit ironic (?) that they say "an open platform is essential" but haven't open sourced their core code base? That feels like a bit of a misstep to me.
I though their growth was just fine. I think the fact that you do not need to host it yourself is a force and it also lets them concentrate on exactly one product. I can imagine that providing a supported on premises platform must increase your support team size considerably.
From what we've seen at Mattermost (open source Slack-alternative, https://mattermost.com/) supporting on-premises deployments with an open source community is actually pretty awesome.
We have over a thousand people on our forums helping each other out, people are building installers for Mattermost in Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Docker, etc. (just web search to find them).
Providing APIs for third-party integration is what Microsoft is almost too good at (hence why Word and Excel are so scarey). The idea that Slack would be so dumb as to believe that Microsoft will do poorly at this is shocking.
Their secret sauce seems to be in how they can convince so many people to use it despite similar products existing for decades. I really wish I knew the answer to this question, I admire it a lot.
The UX is top notch. Not only is the UI polished, but big details like mentioning someone and an invite link appearing is awesome. Or force-pinging someone on DnD because of an emergency.
Slack is seriously user-centric, all the way down to how they run their Twitter.
Have you used it on an under powered laptop? It's dog slow and gets exponentially worse the longer you have it open. Don't even thinking about scrolling back through the history.
They didn't start with all that, but somehow amassed a lot of users anyway. I believe it's more about the personal networks of the original team, but that's just a guess.
To develop an app using the Slack API, you do not need to register with Slack and download an API key for your app. Anyone can just develop whatever they like without having to ask permission first and there's no easy way to selectively shut down apps that Slack doesn't like.
Slack really needs to gift open source projects with a large userbase who use Slack 100% free, with the catch being no private rooms or something, fully web searchable.
I remember an article about not using slack for FOSS projects, but it was not from Slack. Would you happen to have a link for your claim? I would be quite interested why they would not want to be used by somebody.
That being said I do believe that Slack is a poor choice of medium for a free project, mainly because of the limited history and no publicly searchable transcripts.
I've written stuff to send notifications to slack channels and to XMPP. Slack was distinctly easier, so IMO they have a decent argument that Slack's more open than XMPP.
(You might consider other aspects of openness more important, of course.)
And yet, it does a similar thing as every chat application ever, be it IRC, MSN, Skype (previous work communication tool), Lync, probably some HP and IBM solution, and what have you. I don't know why Slack seems to be perceived as that much more distracting. Maybe because they're doing something right and making everyone want to use it much more for everything?
I'm no big IRC user, but when I joined some of the open source IRC channels, there was activity all the time; how is that less distracting?
Also, do not disturb and 'quit' are always an option.
MSN/Skype/etc. are all IM-style clients, so you have to actually select a person to talk to rather than just dropping an @everyone. They vaguely support group chat but it's not the default. I would like Slack a lot more if they emphasized individual and ad-hoc group/topic chats. They support them, of course, but large channels are the main focus and the UI steers you there.
Actually, the terrible UI may well be a benefit. I've worked in a company with heavy investment in Slack, too, and its ease of use I think contributed heavily to the low S:N ratio of channels with high population. Lync's group chat is so painful to use that, unless it's important, we don't.
Because people use it as an alternative to email? They obviously weren't saying "Slack literally took away my ability to email" they were referring to how everyone is actually using Slack to talk to each other
I think the application can be quite cool, but this video... ugh, it reminds me somehow of the infomercials where people struggle to do the basic tasks.
Not really sure what the message is here. Somebody from MS could just answer:
"Thanks for the advice. We've been there before. We swallowed whole industries without chewing and we have killed more competitors that we can remember. We hope that you will still exist in the year to drive our creativity. Sincerely, MS"
You're hanging onto that still? We used to build a number of products for Sametime, but IBM appears to have written it off and is hemorrhaging customers jumping ship, to Lync/Skype mostly, or Jabber, to a lesser extent.
their only hope is what they hope for in this writing, MS f's up somewhere in the process and create another yammer. I hope they won't, competition is healthy. ;)
Several commentators here seem unaware that "open platform" and "open source" are distinct concepts. From the Wikipedia article on "open platform" [1]:
"In computing, an open platform describes a software system which is based on open standards, such as published and fully documented external application programming interfaces (API) that allow using the software to function in other ways than the original programmer intended, without requiring modification of the source code. Using these interfaces, a third party could integrate with the platform to add functionality.[1] The opposite is a closed platform."
An open platform can be closed source. A good example is Microsoft Windows.
I think the time they spend agonizing over how to slip some humor into their release notes would be better spent making their platform faster or improving their convoluted message search.
If MS can nail the creation and organization of "micro channels", that would be a huge innovation in this space that Slack has not been able to figure out yet.
We are a 100% remote company and we use Slack and Teamspeak as our primary communication tools. Our biggest problem with Slack is when multiple conversations are happening in the same channel. There should be a way to segregate those convos into separate "theads", without having to make new channels.
That would be a huge win for whatever chat product can solve this pain point. Unfortunately, innovation is probably not a huge payoff since the competition would simply copy the feature =(
Beginning of this year Slack was the new internet and now no one cares. For me it is just another chat client/server: not sure what the fuss was about. And not open source does not help nor does the non native client. Good to see companies continue trying as the revolutionairy collab tool does not exist yet.
Yeah! Everyone was foaming at the mouth about it. My BS detector was strong, now when I log into slack, look at my various channels, including the company. I just see tumbleweeds.
Of all the platforms my team has used, Slack has been the most "polished". Lots of things come under that, but its hard to define exactly. Speed, Design details, consistency etc. Product quality is just very high with Slack. Only Whatsapp comes close in some of those matters.
Good to know! I only have two teams on a Macbook. No issues so far. These are things that will matter if they want to continue growing at the rate they were used to.
One slim advantage of Sametime, at least the ancient, pre-Eclipse clients, was that you could actually run multiple instances and sign into two accounts at the same time.
While I was aware of the MS product, I never took it seriously (I mean, it's from the same company that rebranded Lync to Skype for business).
Now that Slack has posted this, I intend to give this a look and a trial (hopefully it does not require an O365 subscription) as it just tells me that Slack is either annoyed or scared of Skype teams (either one being a good enough reason for consumers to check it out)
I think they're scared that Microsoft Teams will take part of the enterprise market segment. The part that already uses a lot of other Microsoft products. So Slack will likely lose out on that now. People who don't use anything Microsoft will likely not take a second look at Microsoft Teams.
I'd personally probably rather look at something open source and self hosted, if I was going to move away from Slack.
The only real thing that I image Microsoft Teams would be able to do that Slack can't, is integrate with MS tools better and easier.
If you want to do something like this right, the way to do it is the way Data General wanted to do it when IBM, then the 800-pound gorilla of the computer world, entered into DG's minicomputer market. (Which is described in Tracy Kidder's classic book The Soul of a New Machine (https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316...)
The ad they proposed was much simpler -- a full page that said only the following:
They say IBM's entry into minicomputers will legitimize the market.
Sometimes it's worth not writing things like this ...all Slack managed to do here was draw more attention to Microsoft's announcement. A way of marketing $$ if you ask me.
Since all the posts here seem pretty negative about Slack's response, I'm genuinely curious...how do you think a smaller company should respond when a huge company decides to enter their competitive space?
I ask because I've been an employee at multiple start ups before and seen this kind of situation happen multiple times. I have not yet seen a response that gets received well. And silence gets perceived by existing customers as weakness or fear.
Yammer died the minute that acquisition went through. I was working on a data compliance tool for Yammer at the time, and my employer had a handful of large enterprises lined up to purchase it. When the news broke that Microsoft had bought them, they all went noop and abandoned Yammer.
Four years later, Yammer looks exactly the same, and the data access API that I was using, which was supposed to be facing imminent deprecation, is still there.
> Yammer died the minute that acquisition went through.
Somewhat comically yammer was just rolled out to my company this year. Perhaps we got free licensing for it. I'm not sure.
For offices with mostly remote users slack or even yammer might be a great option for dialog. I'm in the email camp for a running dialog of well thought out replies or a group IM for rollouts or some other conversation that can't be done face to face.
News to me that MS is launching a new product. I hate slack to begin with, but after using 'Skype For Business' my expectations are pretty low with this new product.
I'm assuming it's going to fail much like Yammer did - the screenshot looks like a rip-off of Slackanyways...
Slack somehow became the de facto standard for "internal IRC" but i do think it does many things not particularly well. Then writing an article like this as if their product is the reinvention of human communication feels patronizing and VERY cringy (to me anyway).
This was one of the most stupid post I've seem a company publish. I don't know about what he is talking but I'm going to search it with a feeling that this guy is a looser.
Edit: more stupid than I thought! They bought a full page ad.
Edit 2: I hate M$, but Slack doesn't help either.
Thanks to Slack we now know that MS is launching a competitor.
Never mention the competition, always focus on your shit.
But yeah, we get it - first Facebook Workplace, now MS Team. Slack might get pushed into the feature/addon category faster than it can move into full product. Hard to reach the crazy valuation that way.
Yes, I found that strange. After reading the first few words ("Congratulations on today’s announcements.") my first thought was, "What announcements?" .. then after reading for 30 more seconds the second reaction was, "Slack is scared and not happy about this", which is something that wouldn't have crossed my mind had they not written this.
