They're both. They're selling a service to consumers, which they buy with their personal data. They then use that data to sell to advertisers in the form of better targeted ads.
They didn't even run ads for the first three years of their existence.
A chat client that takes multiple hundreds of MBs of RAM and sucks battery life prodigiously should be, if not illegal, at the very least a violation of unwritten international norms.
It's actually not the first to do this. Adium (AIM) and Colloquy (IRC) switched to WebKit theming in the 2000s, when computers were /really/ too slow to run it.
I've never experienced this very common criticism of slack on here. When I occasionally check, Slack is using around 500mb or RAM. A lot for a chat app? Sure. But it has little to no affect on either my 16gb or 8gb machines.
RAM alone isn’t the problem. The issue is that is so laggy and slow. Poor algorithms on 500mb of bad data structures can bring any modern machine to its knees.
Just reloaded the Slack tab in Firefox to clear down 1GB of RAM use.
As I do every day.
Every single day.
For the one single channel I join. with no PMs and no threads, no file transfers, no voice or video anything.
Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if it was astonishingly good. But it isn't. It isn't even basically competent, it's terrible. Terrible at scrolling back, terrible at editing previous lines, appalling at completing names properly, bad at search, and completely lacking at customizing when it displays 2MB animated gifs inline.
I would expect a 4Gb machine would mean I never have to check on a text chat client. Apparently not.
For me it’s a usability thing—I tend to lose track of SPA tabs, often by closing the window or not being able to differentiate them from content tabs. I do use web apps but I vastly prefer using my machine’s window manager and window buttons/lists.
I use a tool like applicationize (https://applicationize.me/) to make a chrome app for a site. It mimicks an app, but is running as a tab in chrome. Saves memory but gives the benefit of separate window and workspace management (I can tab to it, it can have icon etc).
Using lots of browser tabs instead of applications appears to me to be a step backward in usability. Instead of relying on the window manager to organise your work, you add cognitive load instead.
Eh, you can just put Slack into it's own window if you're going to use multiple tabs for it. Personally, I just pin it next to my email and it works fine.
I'm not a fan of how much RAM or CPU it uses. I tried the desktop app hoping it would be better, but it seems like it's perhaps worse (I use Firefox, so
Not great for web developers. We have enough tabs open and if every window is a chrome icon it’s a pain to find stuff. I’ve got karma tests running, selenium tests, incognito windows testing security etc etc.
> Why does anyone use the app instead of the site?
Because on Android at least the website detects that you're on a mobile device and switches to read-only mode. Correct, you can't even post a reply without fudging user-agent or installing the app.
As a web developer I’m often using my browser as a guinea pig. Hell a selenium test shut the whole shit down and hijacked it today. I’m not going to run slack in the browser.
You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy.
What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.
My personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards.
This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.
The internet’s previous models were doomed to fail. Service providers did not have a reliable monetization scheme. Client apps for open protocols have rarely had wide adoption and longevity, especially anything you had to pay for. I can think of plenty of examples of paid client apps from the late 90s/early 2000s... email clients, web, irc, etc. that just aren’t around because not enough people would pay for the client to sustain their development.
Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.
And yet, the Internet exists because short sighted profit requirements were kept at bay, and eventually the Internet managed to create more value for society than any online service ever by a margin so large that logarithm of the difference is amazingly large.
I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable.
Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top.
If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.
> as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society
Found the bug.
> there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards
It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols.
While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that governments can sometimes wake up and restore competition.
Perhaps in 50 years using open standards will be encouraged e.g. by providing a tax discount
> It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols.
I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.
This isn't really what we're talking about. A better analogy are laptops, phones and tractors - which you are not allowed to repair and only work within a closed ecosystem that you either have to opt into our out of, and where opting out has an extraordinary cost.
I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.
My Dad _just_ upgraded from an iPhone 5. Do you think his Xs won’t last as long?
I agree the laptop situation is a bit shitty. I hate the USB-C everything on my work laptop. Everything works fine on my personal computer but as soon as I plug my usb hub into a usb c adaptor everything stutters.
Love their privacy stance though. Best in the business for sure.
Also, what’s abusive? And what’s fraudulent?
Apparently their new monitors are very well priced. And building the same machine you’d get in a MacBookPro or different model ends up being more expensive or similarly priced.
I could be wrong, and I am, certainly, an Apple fan, but I will criticize when I think it’s appropriate and don’t hold views concretely.
I don't know much about the X since I stopped at the iPhone 7 and I am probably not going to buy any of their exorbitantly priced phones. That being said, in their pursuit of thin phones they ran into design issues with boards flexing so that BGA components will eventually fail. They became aware of the problem and then proceeded to make the same mistake again in later models rarther than fixing the problem. (The flexing problem isn't that they will break after one "bending event", but rather than they fail over time as your phone is subject to mechanical stresses of what is within the range of normal use. Typically because the tiny balls under BGAs will let go)
I'm mostly talking about their laptops and their iMacs. The USB C connectors are of course inconvenient, but I actually like them. Again, the problem is that in their pursuit of thinness they ended up designing keys that are very sensitive to dust (and not very nice to use). In subsequent models they kept at it, so the quality of keyboards doesn't seem to be a priority. Some laptops have a tendency to develop display problems due to bad design. For instance blowing hot air on parts that can't take hot air or laying out connectors so that they will fail more easily.
Now these are design flaws, which brings us to the "abusive and fraudulent" part. If you want to get these things fixed under warranty you _may_ be okay. Except the process appears to be entirely decided by chance. For instance they have put moisture indicators inside the macbooks that not only react to liquid damage, but which turn from white to red (indicating moisture) over time depending on the humidity in the air where you use it. (Most people don't know how these things work, so they'll accept it). So they'll accuse you of having spilled liquid in your laptop and refuse to fix it even when this is not the case. Accusing their customers of lying isn't a very good way to behave.
In many cases they will also claim that your laptop is in need to expensive component replacements. Either because they claim that the component cannot be repaired or when their service technicians fail to correctly diagnose the equipment. The repair costs quoted are supposed to make you buy a new computer rather than fix the one you have.
On top of that they have the gall to claim that independent repair shops are somehow less qualified than Apple. Which naturally rings true in the ears of most people; they designed it so they should be the best to fix it, right? However, this doesn't seem to be generally true. Especially since Apple and their authorized resellers appear to have very limited diagnostic and repair capability and the qualifications vary.
When you do send in an Apple device, you have to be aware of the fact that it isn't Apple that repairs your equipment - it is a subcontractor. And they are not always the best.
Wich brings us to the bullying. Apple do their best to kill the independent repair market any way they can. Often by filing lawsuits against repair shops and then putting them out of business. When confronted with this they us their go-to excuses. Like protecting the consumer from unqualified repair shops.
They do this by denying independent repair shops access to the supply line - meaning they work hard to make it difficult to obtain spare parts and components. Compare this to, for instance, Samsung, which sell parts online to make it easy for repair shops to get the needed parts. In order to get parts for Apple products there is an entire market for broken laptops that are bought and sold to repair shops in order to provide donor boards for components.
Of course, then there is the fact that they seem to deliberately make things harder to repair or upgrade. For instance batteries that are glued in unnecessarily, increasing the chance of destruction if you try to replace them. Or soldering in components that the user may want to upgrade later (like RAM and SSDs). For instance on my mac mini the SSD is soldered in, but fortunately the RAM is socketed.
I became aware of the systematic nature of this about a year ago when starting to watch videos to learn how to solder surface mount components (I do a bit of electronics). I stumbled over people who repaired Macs for a living. I didn't come there for the rants, but when starting to research the issue a bit and speaking to a couple of people who also do this for a living, it became obvious to me how terribly Apple are behaving.
Two things struck me 1) diagnosing and fixing macs isn't rocket science. People are able to even as Apple tries to starve them for information. 2) most people don't know how electronics are fixed so of course Apple will get away with claiming they are protecting their users by not allowing independent repair shops to repair their stuff. Diagnosing and replacing broken components and cleaning up fouled circuit boards is not all that hard. Sure, you need the equipment, ability to read schematics and some ability to diagnose electronics, but there are people who do that for a living.
And you really do want to be able to pick your computer repair people just like you pick repair shops for your car. I use a mechanic I know and trust for my car - a guy who walks me through everything he does with my car and even shows me what he has done, and what he thinks should be done. I never use the brand workshop simply because those guys only follow procedures (which aren't always correct), I have no idea who works on my car and I have no insight into what is actually done or if the car is actually fixed or serviced correctly.
If anything, my computer is even more important to me so of course I don't want some semi-qualified, random clown subcontractor of Apple, far away, to work on my computers.
The upshot of all this is that I feel very uncomfortable as a Mac user. Whenever I buy a Mac I am taking a huge risk. If something breaks I may not be able to fix it and the only option available to me might be to buy an entirely new machine. Even when the fault is due to a cheap component that takes 10-15 minutes to replace. Simply because Apple actively work to withhold spare parts from the market.
This is even more true if you buy one of their expensive models. The new Mac Pro may look nice, both in terms of specs, price and looks, but if it breaks, you have no way of knowing if you are going to lose your investment. Your machine may become completely worthless as a result of a trivial, cheap component breaking.
If I trusted Apple as a hardware vendor I would probably have upgraded my laptop to a newer model and I would probably have bought an iMac Pro rather than a Mac mini. But since I can't trust them I'm looking at starting to move away from Apple. My next laptop probably isn't going to be an Apple and my next desktop computer is probably not going to be an Apple since I need more power with less risk.
I'm really not fond of the idea of running Linux and having to depend on vmware to run Windows for a lot of the desktop stuff, but this may be the only viable route if Apple doesn't get their act together.
> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software.
You need to explain a claim like that.
On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?
>On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients.
It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully".
But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user.
The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances.
On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste.
On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.
I use Slack every day in the Desktop Electron app and the iOS app.
Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive.
OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a different window.
You use ⌘-k to switch channels. Partially drafted messages are retained. I think I prefer that to a mess of windows that I'd have to manage though of course I don't mean to impose my preference on you.
I have the desktop client open and it's using about 800MB memory between the main process and 3 helper processes. I agree it's a lot, but it seems 100% standard for modern applications. Everything seems to be built around the assumption that people have a $2000 laptop like rich westerners might. So I don't agree with it but I wouldn't single out Slack for criticism beyond any other modern consumer tech company.
Just my two cents, but I have to kill and restart the Slack app every morning because if left alone too long it starts eating 100+% of CPU and then becomes unresponsive (while still pegging the CPU). No other vanilla Electron app I've used does that.
It wasn't claimed to be "beautiful", it was that it "works beautifully". And if it's not accessible, for a serious amount of people, it doesn't work. At all.
Maybe people are generally jaded to to the slowness of cross-platform Javascript apps, but if you take a step back you can really see how bad it is.
I had people at my last job who had to quit Slack because of how hot it was making their laptops, and how much memory it was using.
At my current job, Slack is definitely one of my most rate limiting applications for how quickly I can get things done. Scrolling in chat, searching, switching channels- these are all actions that are extremely slow, and sometimes seem like they don’t work at all.
Ye. It's silly how single page text search is now a hard problem to get done right with JS text edit fields.
It's the same thing with the Swarm review CI tool. If you diff a big enought file, but still quite small for a conputer, it get slow or crashes.
Also the same thing with MS Teams. The prior conversion are not loaded at startup and if you scroll it shows place holders instead of the text for some seconds.
The fact that the performance of the application is awful. You would think that a $16B company could move away from Electron and make native applications for their platforms.
If you think Slack works beautifully you probably do not care about the things I find offensive about it. Like the slowness of switching contexts or the fact that it can only have one conversation on screen at any given time (which in turn makes the slow switching painful).
And this is before we get into the fact that it devours RAM and uses more CPU than is reasonable, making it somewhat pathetic if you think of programming as a craft.
* Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly.
* DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's inserting itself in the conversation.
Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.
> Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.
It takes a lot of heat because it is very customisable and get locked down in large corporation.
I worked in company that ran an old shitty very version on underpowered server and disabled feature like rich text editing but force you through a 5 page wizard with in total tens of mandatory field to fill for any jira ticket. People at that company used an excel file on a shared drive to escape the jira hell.
Also there is the crowd of Agile purist that complain that Jira is too bloated for agile and ignoring the extra feature is not good enough because mostly "trust issues".
More recently there are stuff like plandek that create metric on your jira usage. In the wrong hands, this is modern day LOC metric.
Agree 100%. Almost every Jira complaint I see is a byproduct of the way our company centrally manages and locks it down. Things like custom fields and workflows require submitting a ticket and waiting a few weeks. That said, it can still be customized and made to work well for most internal teams.
> DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection
since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that)
Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack
I'll admit I haven't been on IRC in 20 years, but while I remember fiddling with active/passive FTP settings and port forwarding every week at the very least, I do not remember any times where I had similar issues on IRC (using mIRC and later various Linux IRC clients, mostly Xchat and BitchX) in the 1890's. I don't know how it would have worked though, thinking about it.
(and I think from the above description of my typical computer use at the time, it's quite obvious what I was doing, and how that would have given me plenty of opportunities to run into all sorts of (compatibility) issues)
When using DCC send in passive mode the sender listens on a local port (59 by default) and sends the receiver a CTCP message (an IRC protocol PRIVMSG message wrapped in \x01) containing their IP address in integer format and the port number. If the receiver accepts their client connects to the sender's open socket and the file is immediately dumped through the connection.
In theory there must be some scheme for forwarding the port through a firewall on the sender side, which might be setting the sending device as "DMZ". Or you can put the burden on the receiver by using active mode.
mIRC should really support UPnP by now but I don't think it does?
Are you sure? Wouldn't it be a direct connection, just between two NAT gateways? With each using the ports to track which connection belonged to the host behind the NAT?
If the connection is already established, sure. How did you establish it though? There are ways to hook clients up that are both NAT’d, (STUN, etc) but DCC doesn’t use any of them.
You could have a point with Slack but Jira is really terrible. I used it for a customer years ago and I'm so happy any other customer is using something simpler. Jira could be OK if operated by a specialized team paid to do project management and to shield developers from the complications of the tool. It's not only the design, it's the sheer amount of functionality. We don't need all of that.
I'd go with Github simplistic issues all the time instead of wresting with Jira. YouTrack from JetBrains is a reasonable compromise. Redmine is also ok.
Every single one of my clients uses Jira, and nobody I've ever met had a problem with it. It works, it's flexible, it's pretty easy to use. It's the industry standard, and for good reason, as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Confluence is OKish. But Jira is absurdly bad. I'm talking about the UI for creating Issues and Epics etc. The front-end devs that wrote it simply didn't have the ability. The parser for entering markup such as preformatted code blocks just doesn't work a lot of the time. The newer "Visual mode" just doesn't work a lot of the time. It simply needs to switch over to markdown and use a 3rd-party parser and renderer. The Visual Mode preview doesn't render using a fixed-width font. have you ever clicked on the little "Link" symbol in the top right of the text entry box? Obviously that should copy the current URL to the system clipboard. But they didn't know how to look that up on StackOverflow and instead made it a normal link to the current page (so you reload the page accidentally), with the link title saying
> title="Right click and copy link for a permanent link to this comment."
! You enter `bq.` to quote a line of text. This is all just some crap that someone with no design sense or standards came up with after 10 seconds thought.
I'm talking specifically about the quality of the UI. It is far, far, below the quality of UIs put out by respected modern products.
Not that it really matters much, but a lot of the design issues you're highlighting are due to the age of the software and Atlassian's seeming commitment to not breaking backward compatibility. In particular, Jira predates Markdown, so the software adopted the text formatter of the day, which was textile[0]. This is where the `bq.` syntax comes from. Jira didn't invent it from whole cloth -- it was adopted because that was the standard of the day. Likewise, it predates StackOverflow by a good 7 years. Some of the JavaScript used is old enough to be a college freshman.
As and end user, you may not (and probably should not) care about the historical context of its design decisions. But it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers. They've simply placed a large premium on backward compatibility and are still around today in large part because of that. Having said that, they really should find a way to support both Textile and Markdown if for no other reason than Bitbucket uses Markdown and it's confusing as hell having to switch between the two syntaxes if your company uses both products.
Backwards-compatible with people's brains is one aspect of it, sure. No one likes a constantly evolving UI that shuffles things around. But, also backwards-compatible with already entered issues. I wholeheartedly agree they should support Markdown, but I don't think they can just dump Textile in the process either, since it'd affect a load of already entered issues.
As for the link issue, I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. I have an icon that looks like the Android "share" icon and that drops down a dialog with a link to the current page and a target user field. The link icon in the text entry field just adds a textile formatted link. I'm probably just overlooking something, but I'm not seeing what you described. And I never use the visual editor, so I can't speak to its quality.
I should note that I don't work for Atlassian and never have, so I don't have a horse in this race. But I have been using Jira since maybe 2004 due to its early adoption by the Apache Software Foundation. Jira is hardly perfect, but it's the least bad issue tracker I've used. At some level, I'm sure it's just a matter of preference. E.g., I know plenty of people that laud the GitHub issue tracker and I don't get it. It works well enough for small projects, but is too limiting for any project of non-trivial size, IMHO. I also find more than 2 or 3 labels in the issue list to just be a distracting sea of colors.
I hope you're able to find something that works well for you. I'll add that if you're using an on-premise version of Jira in your company, there's a high likelihood that you're running a dated release. I've found that some of the more aggravating issues people run into have actually been fixed, but not deployed in their environment. If you can find access to a running instance of the latest version, you might find it to be a more less frustrating experience.
I've never heard anyone call Jira the industry standard. There's way too much fragmentation in that market for anyone to be able to make that claim.
Jira can work well or it can work very poorly. It really depends on what you're trying to do with it and what resources you're willing to pour into it. That's why some people love it while others hate it.
It looks like the industry standard from where I'm sitting. Of all the companies I've worked for in the past 15 years, both as employee and as freelancer, I think only 2 didn't use Jira. 3 if I count my private projects (I used Pivotal).
In all that time, the only thing I've really heard people complain about, was when it was slow or down.
I don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even Facebook isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.
Free is there to be a sales demo without deadlines with a casual shrug for people who aren't going to pay, I wouldn't ever use slack if it wasn't my intention to play and slack wouldn't miss me.
I never used Slack out of choice either. I've used it because I was forced to due to others' decisions. So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.
...OK, so you chose to communicate on it in order to communicate with "others", presumably due to an employer wanting you all to use Slack. In that situation, your communications are often legally not your own property (though it is arguable, at least in the US).
If you're using it personally, the limits on message counts are made quite clear. Exceeding them makes export difficult or impossible without paying. So don't exceed them.
A huge chunk of Slack's value prop (after decent UX) is exactly the fact that they have all of your communications. No chat admins, servers to manage and back up, or networking hell to orchestrate non-text content sharing in a multiparty way. Also makes corporate folks who pay for it happy as they have pretty good auditability/retention controls--not perfect, of course, but better than a truly p2p/federated solution, and again: no infrastructure management needed.
You don't have to be happy with it, but those are features, not bugs, and are valuable to many.
You also just, y'know, don't have to use Slack. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. If the hill you want to die on is "I won't work for any company/team that uses this chat platform", well, that's your choice (hell, there's not even an argument to be made about ubiquity making it a false choice; Slack has plenty of competitors, both paid/hosted and FOSS/federated, in active use by big companies). But don't pretend that a lack of local history or easy export is some sort of highway robbery or hostage situation.
No, I'm not referring to employment communications or personal communications. There are other categories where I've had no choice but to use the same communication channels others were using despite the content of my communications being emphatically mine.
I actually had the same question. Maybe community or neighborhood groups or volunteer activities? I'd probably just call all that personal but I could see a distinction.
> So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.
I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments).
But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.
Well then you missed the entire point of my comment, which was specifically about the free plan, and specifically about when you haven't had a chance to run such a script incrementally.
Nah, this is a super slanted view of things. Their business succeeds because they've made a best in class amazing thing, not because everyone begrudgingly wants to see their history, lol
Just double checked this and exported the history from my free plan -- in Slack I can only see messages back to November 2018, but the export includes all messages back to our beginning in 2016.
As others have said, this 'Standard Export' doesn't include direct messages and private channels, so there's still some amount of 'hostage taking'
I miss this from Lotus Sametime: all of your conversations were stored in local XML files. It was very useful to "grep" through these to find some piece of information that someone told you years ago.
I don't know exactly what made them add that feature or when that happened (it was before 2011, I think), but AFAIK they never outright blocked you from even viewing older messages. And even then it was possible to scrape it I think, if my Googling right now is any indication.
Is that still the case? That there is no way to export message history? I'm trying to find a way to publish messages from my Slack channel to my website in real-time so that I can give visitors a look at what they are signing up for. Similar to how Pieter Levels has nomadlist.com/chat/ set up (if anyone knows how he does that, please let me know).
It was as far as I was able to tell when I checked many months ago. I've seen no indications that anything has changed, but would love to hear otherwise...
"Corporate Export
On the Plus plan, Workspace Owners can apply to access a self-service tool called Corporate Export. This type of export includes content from public and private channels and direct messages. If Corporate Export is enabled for your workspace, Standard Export will not be available."
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...
I don't use or even like Slack, but what is the problem with that?
I mean they are already giving you the oppportunity to use a limited version for free, you can't expect them to give you one of the most useful features imho when you are just using their resources and infrastructure in exchange for nothing; it doesn't make any business sense.
If I'm a non-paying user of Slack (or whatever other SaaS with a free tier) I am not entitled to anything whatsoever, I'd be grateful for the fact that they allow me partial functionality at all.
What does "well deserved" even mean? Does it just mean not evading your privacy to generate income via ads? Does it mean not being too aggressive / abusive of customers?
Personally, I would just call that normal / decent behaviour. Alone, it doesn't mean you deserve a ridiculous billion dollar evaluation
I think the whole argument of "unicorns exploiting legal grey areas" falls victim to Hanlon's razor. I don't really believe these companies set out to bend or break any laws, it was more a case of the legal system not catching up fast enough. Uber started as a service to hire limousines, not a platform company.
If governments weren't so concerned with party politics, infighting and staving off populist surges, we'd probably have a proper definition for a "gig economy" worker by now. A definition that would allow them to keep the flexibility that they appreciate so much, whilst still having proper worker protections for sick pay, holidays and all the rest.
It's strange that you explicitly brought up Uber and still hold this opinion. Out of all the companies, they have most aggressively skirted labour laws in every country they are in, and have been selectively banned from some countries and cities due to their continual breaking of the law. Not to mention lobbying efforts to minimise the effects of labour laws.
They didn't start as a company for the sole purpose of exploiting legal grey areas, but they certainly have consistently done so since their inception.
>>> More than 88,000 Paid Customers, including more than 65 companies in the Fortune 100; and
>>> We had 575 Paid Customers >$100,000 of ARR as of January 31, 2019, which accounted for approximately 40% of our revenue in fiscal year 2019.
If my math is right, 40% of their revenue is concentrated in <1% of their paid customers. Is this normal in the corporate SaaS market ? I can only think of this as a huge risk.
I also saw that this is a direct listing and not an IPO. Again, I can only see this as a risk, basically because no underwriter will push the stock to investors. Is this so ?
> 40% of their revenue is concentrated in <1% of their paid customers. Is this normal in the corporate SaaS market ?
Speaking from my experience of 6 months at a SaaS company this is about the norm.
Besides the usual 80/20 rule it gets more skewed at the top. And so even the product development was optimised to keep the top 1% happy. A ton of custom built features with hundreds of feature flags..
I would say this is only normal/healthy if you have a freemium business model--otherwise the revenues to me seem way to skewed (i.e. very/very far away from 80/20).
yep, if you owe someone a little money they have control. If you owe someone a lot of money, you have control. The whales use SaaS companies to develop things they dont want in house and demand features because they know they're one of the biggest customers.
I've noticed this too. I worked for companies that had one big customer; possibly branching out with two or three others. But if that one big customer ever went away, the company would probably collapse. They really should have just been bought and made a subsidiarity:
Sometimes that is the strategy: create something cool and hope to get purchased. Having worked at a company that was likely one of Slack’s “whales”, it is a bonus to have feature requests weighted more heavily, but if a tool doesn’t keep everyone else using it happy - you run the risk of some other tool becoming the shiny new thing.
I've worked for a company with a whale client like that (maybe not total shutdown bad but pretty close). The argument for why they never bothered to just acquire the startup was their fear of ruining the agility of the startup. That seemed like a reasonable concern as they were a massive, heavily regulated company.
Think about thousands very small customers you simply take the money from and have no effort but they are not the target of your sales team.
The numbers sound good to me.
Regarding the direct listing, I wouldn't view that as a negative - sounds like they had no need to raise additional capital, but wanted to provide liquidity to their investors and employees.
They've raised a _lot_ privately, and some of those rounds IIRC were described as just "opportunistic" by the founder - i.e., raise money while it's cheap. Also given that they have a VC arm it sounds like they have more capital than they can actually deploy in their core business.
Thanks for clarifying. My understanding was that an IPO creates new shares, while a direct listing just sells the existing ones. In the same sense, I thought that underwriters were responsible for pushing the stock through the distributions channels (funds, investors, etc) so that they make sure that an IPO is successful in its opening.
After some more searching on "direct listing vs. IPO", there definitely seems to be a lot of "DPO is not an IPO" so I'm going to enjoy having my foot in my mouth.
Those 50 largest customers are unlikely to move away within the next two years, and neither are most businesses. I can see someone worry about growth, but they're not going away in 2 years.
My company just switched to Teams (from Sametime). We had evaluated Slack, Teams, and Cisco/Webex Teams. To me Teams is a pretty crap chat tool, but it's integration with WIndows (and the macOS client isn't shabby either) is what made it a clear winner. We can chat, do voice, share files, collaboratively edit files, share desktops, all in one app. My only complaint is that the emoticons are typical Microsoft style and should be updated to something better. But this might be due to most Windows desktops not using a high DPI. On a Retina screen they look amateurish.
In large enterprises, it's hard to break into the enterprise but once your application is used you are in there for the long run until unless you have an outage while they have a major incident.
With Slack, if you have a few integrations setup or a bot or 2 configured, it's hard to move. Also the alternatives are terrible.
You guys really think that enterprise-tier Fortune 500's are going to switch from Slack to a free alternative? Why would they? The money they spend on Slack isn't even a rounding error in their budgets, there's no way that they would want to cut that out and instead have their internal staff try to support some free service instead
What's wrong with the UX of IRC? IRC is a protocol, not a specific client, and it supports a wide variety of server and client plugins. We had a really nice IRC going productively for a year or two, but we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text).
The nice thing about IRC is that everyone can use whatever client they like and it will just work. I preferred command-line UX (irssi) because most of my job is based around the terminal, others prefer desktop clients, while others prefer web clients, and all were available for our IRC server.
Our problem was that management wanted everyone on the same thing, and neither side (IRC vs Google chat) wanted to switch (they liked integration with web Gmail, we liked extensibility, and had already built useful plugins, like "run a build"). In the end, they didn't like our "less professional" plugins (Chuck Norris facts, gifs, etc), and we ended up compromising on Slack (we rebuilt some of our custom integrations).
We went through a year or so of adjustment, and now we're reasonably productive with it. However, morale is a bit lower, and I think we're a bit less productive than before, but that's really hard to judge. Honestly, I just wish there was some nicer looking IRC client. I don't like trusting Slack and would prefer the tried and true protocol that we can tweak and just pay for a flashier client for those who like such things. However, it's better than the previous situation where teams just didn't communicate in text because they couldn't agree on a medium, which led to more interruptions than the annoying Slack notifications (non developers tend to always @ the tech lead instead of letting it be answered by whomever happens to be looking at the channel).
I think it's wrong to blame IRC here. The UX of IRC is fine, it just doesn't have a flashy client (pidgin is really easy to use and available everywhere, but it's kind of ugly).
* No user accounts, except via a baffling NickServ process involving things like 'ghosting'
* Poor abuse tools, e.g. accidentally IP-banning web IRC gateways.
* No searchable history
* No scrollback / visibility of messages that arrived while you were offline
* No support for uploading images or files.
* No sharing of a single identity / session across multiple clients (e.g. phone+pc+laptop)
As a veteran IRC user I know you can mitigate these problems by getting a shell account on an always-on unix server and running Irssi in Screen over SSH with logging, automated NickServ login, a bot to provide !seen and !tell, sharing images via Imgur, sharing files by uploading them to my personal website, and so on.
Slack has simply looked at the big collection of bodges I just described and made them native features. And you don't even need to know to use Ctrl+Alt+2 to change between channels like you do with ssh+screen+irssi.
> ...we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text).
Clearly something was wrong with the UX if only one person was willing to use it?
I think they may have left off the "s" from developers, based on context it seems like there must have been multiple people who liked it enough to build plugins. Sounds more like a "developers vs. management" kind of thing rather than "our one IT guy tried to sell the whole company on IRC".
The point you were making is that a single rabid IRC fan was trying to steer the rest of the company, so actually I'd say the typo certainly does affect the point.
And the only company out there that was able to stitch together more or less usable UX for a group messenger is Slack. IRC has no such killer app (sorry IRC fans!..)
I can search my logs easily https://i.imgur.com/nTpoYs0.png (soon with even better integration, the prototype is a separate web app), and I can just open the web client or app on any device on this planet and instantly have all my logs and channels, and just chat: https://i.k8r.eu/54BPMQ.png
Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid.
Many other projects such as weechat and IRCCloud are also working on making IRC better than slack at everything it does — IRCCloud has a web client, mobile client, hosted team servers, a slack bridge, reactions, threads, emoji, attachments, and all you'd want from slack, natively.
Other projects such as IRC.com are also working on bringing the feq advantages Slack has back to IRC to make it more attractive.
The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing. They can call companies and spend a lot on money on getting more customers, due to the VC funding.
"The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing."
Respectfully, NO.
Providing a very useful turnkey set of features out of the box that are technically possible but fiddly and hard to use in IRC is in and of itself a huge advantage. This is why they're successful. This is why people use it. This is why people use it who barely know what a command line IS.
But when you use IRCCloud you don't use the IRC protocol anymore, you use the IRCCloud protocol. Which is the same as using the Slack protocol. Your features aren't available outside IRCCloud. Your account, your data, your history, everything is tied to IRCCloud. You haven't gained anything compared to Slack. You're advocating for the _exact_ same model and you don't realize that the only way to have the same features as Slack in an easy way is to basically do what Slack does. You're just agreeing with what the parent is saying.
IRCCloud can connect to normal IRC servers, and normal IRC clients can connect to IRCCloud servers — and you can export your logs and import them elsewhere.
That makes it much closer to the open ideal than Slack is.
> Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid.
That sounds exactly like the infamous first comments on the HN Dropbox post. I'd rather pay someone to use their app than go through the pain of self-hosting and administering yet another service.
Quassel on the other hand is to Slack what Seafile or NextCloud are to Dropbox — definitely not as comfortable, as you need some knowledge to self host it, but it's easily doable for everyone on this site, and once it's set up, it's just as comfortable.
Of course, if one wants to use a hosted service, there are solutions like that — IRCCloud is pretty much identical to Slack, except based on IRC, and in addition to paid team workspaces, you can also connect to any IRC network and use the same features there.
So, you see, while it has some hints of the same attitude as the original post — and definitely, neither of these products is as polished as Slack, after all we can't make 380k$ losses a day, while Slack can — they fulfil pretty much the same purpose with pretty much the same ease of use
And of course work on single-click deployments and hosted services for more such products has already started
> but it's easily doable for everyone on this site
And that's where you lost sight of the big picture. Slack is _not_ for people on this site it's specifically for people out there: people who don't know and don't need to know what a protocol is, who don't care about netsplits, who couldn't be bothered to install some random stupid stuff on their machine and spend an afternoon configuring it just to be able to talk to their co-worker. We're not the target here. And yet it has convinced some of us because it ticks so many boxes by default.
You can, if you log everything... and there are many websites that provide search engines for public channels... you could do the same for your private IRC server. If you don't mind having all of your data in the cloud, use slack.
I realize I'm feeling (objectively?) "defensive" as an everyday professional IRC user for the last 10-ish years. That said, having tried many of the recent obese chat tools (which do have some nice properties), I still maintain the stance that IRC's clutter-free nature brings a certain tranquility and clarity.
Sure, IRC absolutely has its problems. However, as noted elsewhere[1], despite its flaws, IRC's strengths still shine with great luminence, when it comes to plain text-based communication.
It reminds of something I recently read in an essay called Coon Tree (written in 1956) by the inimitable E.B. White:
"Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world is remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions."
I didn't quote the surrounding context (which itself is quite enjoyable) for brevity. But do read the full essay if you can.
You have every right to think that Slack is amazing and that IRC is "complete trash" (although I completely disagree) - but please don't attribute it to UX.
UX isn't just graphical design, it's also feeling responsive, fast, and accessible. Something that Slack, in my opinion, gets horribly wrong.
I just think it doesn't actually fit any purpose. For quick chats irc is faster and more accessible, and for long thoughtful discussions Slack is lacking a lot of features so that you might as well use email.
How is IRC in any way faster or more accessible than Slack for quick chats? Does IRC fit a purpose? If so, what? And how does it do anything better than Slack?
Slack is certainly no email replacement, and nor will I ever use it for such but in my experience and for the purposes I use it for, it is far, far more featured than IRC, unless you're using some uber IRC client that I'm unaware of.
I'm genuinely trying to understand out how anyone would think IRC is better than Slack and I speak as someone who used IRC from the early 90s up until only a few years ago when the communities I'm part of upped sticks and moved over to Slack.
Personally, I cannot make a comparison between Slack and IRC because I have never tried the former. From the discussion, it is clear that Slack has many features and attractions that are not available or harder to obtain with IRC.
However, for me personally, a major attraction of IRC is that I can easily use it from within Emacs, and automatically have the same Emacs key bindings available that I also use for navigating and editing files.
With IRC, I can therefore quickly copy and paste text between chats and programs, search the history etc., all in the existing Emacs session, using the same key bindings, with direct access to built-in features such as autocompletion, dynamic abbreviation and spell checking, and — importantly! — without switching applications.
There is an emacs Slack client, though I don't know if you'll find it a seamless migration or as polished as what you're used to with IRC: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Slack
I think that was something available to Slack in the past when it had it's IRC gateway. Sadly they closed that down.
We all have our own ways of doing things and I personally prefer to have applications run independently so I like my Slack client and my IDE and terminal etc. etc. separate.
I've always found if one tool can do it all, it's generally a worse experience than dedicated software applications and doing a Cmd-TAB (I'm on a Mac) is just as simple as switching to another window in a single application
Just to follow up, I work for a distributed company where everyone works remotely. It's an essential tool for us to communicate quickly and easily, when talking over skype/video chat is not necessarily suitable or necessary every time one of us has a question. For our organisation, Slack fits the purpose perfectly.
> Curious as to what specifically you think Slack gets wrong?
Personally: responsiveness. Slack's native app on linux is slow. Switching channels has a noticeable delay, switching Workspaces takes seconds if you haven't used the workspace for a while. Starting the program takes ~8s on my machine (three workspaces, i7 with SSDs and 32G RAM).
For most IRC clients or Telegram, startup times are about as fast as Slack changes a channel, and there are no noticable delays when switching channels/IMs etc.
Haven't noticed any issue with responsiveness with the official Slack client but my boss was kind enough to set me up with a pretty beefy Macbook Pro with more RAM than I'd ever need to use.
It may be an issue with their linux client (pretty much all developers I work with are on linux), though I have heard complaints from windows users as well (but it's windows and the users are from the design team, so who knows what their computers do).
It is a large and complex piece of software that enables great productivity gains if used correctly. I think a few second startup time is a small price to pay for that.
I think the criticism is that it is hard to understand _why_ it is a large and complex piece of software. It seems like it should be small and relatively simple and load fast.
10 years from now IRC will finally allow you to upload images and documents in the discussion while the Slack competitor will have figured the perfect blending between instant chat, asynchronous long-form communication and concurrent editing for documenting the decisions that were taken. It's easy to keep a protocol alive when the protocol does almost nothing.
IRC doesn't have the virtue of having millions of dollars spent on clients for it.
And we are comparing a service provider/client/protocol to something that is simply a protocol which is a bit apples to oranges.
Assuming the same kind of provider exists in your company (IRC+BNC+searchable logging) and you standardised on something like weechat, then perhaps a comparison could be made.
Slack Pros:
- Voice/Video chat
- slackbot "remind" notifications
- Number of highly polished integrations
- Rich integrations (button prompts etc)
- Webhooks for bot integrations instead of needing to subscribe to RTM
- User tags ("out of office" markers, "in meeting" markers)
IRC Pros:
- Your data doesn't have to leave your site
- You can force connections to be on your intra-net
- Simple, well understood protocol
- Which is open, and not going away
- More potential to integrate authentication with your normal authentication provider.
- Rich moderation story
- Flexibility of client, even if we take weechat as the standard it's still possible to run another.
Is this fair? Maybe we should weight how much they're worth.
But for sure if IRC had the investment slack had then it wouldn't be "trash", there's work to bring it into 2019 too[0]
IRC is missing a LOT of the features that make Slack actually useable for its purpose. IRC just isn't a replacement for Slack in most situations, due to its lack of things people take absolutely for granted.
One massive one being keeping history. Another is not being limited to text only, something people absolutely expect in this day and age.
> IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.
To me, that sounds exactly like someone defending AppleTalk, AOL, ICQ, or Minitel. Focus on usability, not interoperability. That's what people want, right?
When it comes to communications, what matters even more than user experience, in the long run, is being compatible with everyone, even your competitors. There will always be customers who don't use your system, so lacking compatibility or federation will be a thorn in your side for as long as you exist. I've run out of fingers to count the incompatible proprietary chat systems I've seen die off.
Even Google has killed off a few of their own, and Hangouts is next. Just being a young smart agile tech company does not make you immune.
In 10 years, I bet people will be communicating over email, IRC, POTS/SMS, plus 4 or 5 new tech startups created by people who are in elementary school right now. Nobody's arguing that $(proprietary_system) doesn't make you more productive today (that's the point!), but they always have a sell-by date.
Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.
People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died.
I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?
There’s no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols. Without money to be made there’s no funding. Without funding there’s no way to create great experiences. Without great experiences nobody will use the thing.
Great experiences are dependent on funding? Going back to IRC, many of us had great experiences on there. USENET was a fountain of great experiences. All text mode. Or do you mean "great experiences" as in the kind of thing depicted in Subaru commercials where they are selling the car as a gateway to beautiful mountaintop sunsets and beach picnics?
Great experiences come from true utility and functionality. Not putting lipstick on a pig and calling it The Next Best Thing That Will Make You Happy And Productive.
Try to get the average office worker to use IRC today and see how far that gets you. It really behooves Engineers to put themselves in the shoes of actual users once in a while
Nobody is saying IRC is the greatest thing in the world today. It was very effective in its time, and it existed (and continues to exist!) without a profit-driven motive.
Great experience for a tech nerd vs great experience for your average desk jockey. Nobody is stopping us from making new protocols, continuing to use IRC, etc. The reality is software is no longer a niche thing - its just another part of mainstream business. There are still "power user" versions of formerly-niche domains.
On the other hand, I don't think anyone accused slack, with multi-megabyte webpages and even worse mobile app, of being a great experience. I think I used it once, and said no more.
I've met only a few programmers IRL that complained about slack, and even then it was for ideological reasons, not user experience reasons. Everyone else, most programmers and all non-programmers I know like the user experience.
I haven't had any real issues with desktop or mobile apps either.
I use Slack for work, and while it was an order of magnitude better than the dumpster-fire of Hipchat (which it replaced for our team), I still think that the interface is kind of "meh".
Custom emojis are fun, inline markdown is useful, but it takes a lot of memory for something that, to me, seems like it should be lightweight. We've had IM since the 80's, after all. There's a part of me that has a visceral reaction to seeing an IM client taking more than 100mb of memory (though to be fair they seem to be getting improving that a lot.
The Electron-ness and memory usage of the app on desktop are certainly annoying, but the UX is still far better than any terminal-based or open source GUI for IRC. It was better than HipChat when my company moved to Slack 4 years ago.
Overall Slack is a net UX improvement over everything that came before.
I'm not sure what about the experience you had a concern about. Slack is the de facto user experience standard right now, with everyone from discord to teams copying it.
They do. Non-engineers just tend to blame the age/quality of their company issued hardware rather than the problematic software causing performance issues.
With QUIC, even TCP is getting replaced because of the need to innovate despite protocol ossification. It's almost impossible to improve TCP at this point due to non-compliant endpoints and middleboxes.
It's a similar "lowest common denominator" issue with IRC, XMPP, mail and many others. Yes, XMPP can - in theory - do almost everything Slack does, but there's dozens of clients supporting a different subset of the protocol. Of course nobody wants to use it.
I don't get how your point is a counter example to the parent's argument? I think there is a lot of money to be made in building on HTML and HTTP. For one, a faster HTTP protocol directly means more cost efficiency in hosting and streaming content, better customer conversions, etc.
IMO, HTTP and HTML are counter-examples to the statement 'There’s no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols.' because they're open protocols that have attracted a great deal of money, and plenty of people creating and building on them.
IRC was created in 1988. There have been several chat protocols created since then [1]. A few notable protocols that tick a lot of "modern" boxes:
- Jami
- Matrix
- Signal Protocol
- XMPP
The better question: why aren't new and existing technology companies embracing these protocols and making them ubiquitous?
Personally I think it's because companies have a vested interest in creating walled gardens. The more users that are forced onto a platform, the more money they make. It's against their business interest to create a product that works with their competitors.
>It's against their business interest to create a product that works with their competitors.
There's more to it than a simplistic "business interest" to explain it.
For example, the Signal protocol is free to use. No payments for patent royalties or software licenses required. Moxie Marlinspike's company Signal LLC (Open WhisperSystems) is a non-profit entity.
But notice that an organization that isn't pressured into making a profit and that's using an underlying free protocol -- does not want to federate with LibreSignal[0].
This an example of where the "openness of a protocol" runs into a hard reality of "closed wall of implementation". The protocols themselves can cost $0 but implementations (e.g. cpu+disk+bandwidth+staff) cost more than $0 which leads to complaints of it being "not really open".
If people do not examine the economic forces surrounding any protocol, they will always be perplexed why the internet is not as free & open as they think it should be. Even non-profit entities are not immune from economic forces.
It might be because Slack has support, a great UI, lots of users, and 'just works'. A company I worked with tried to setup Riot and Matrix and they were having all sorts of problems. Even when they tried to use the Riot.im website there were bugs and features from Slack they needed that were missing. What Matrix and Riot.im is doing is still good though, I hope it takes off.
> why aren't new and existing technology companies embracing these protocols and making them ubiquitous?
Because they don't want to be at the behest of protocol maintainers to improve their product? Their goals and the goals of maintainers would never align.
Open source is great, but open source moves at slow pace compared to what a revenue-driven company can. There's a reason that most of the big open source projects have a company backing them.
Which was driven by Netscape, a revenue-driven company.
Complaints about corporations capturing HTML are not new; Google is merely the latest in the line. (That's not to diminish the fact that it's still bad every time. It's just this isn't the first time.)
>The death of the protocol.
People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died.
People ascribe too much credit to a protocol. The real issue is the funding model to support spending money on that protocol.
By focusing the lens on the funding, the web wasn't as "open" as people think. The so-called "open" web was a government project which wasn't fully open to the public until about ~1995. Before then, you had to work on government-funded projects (ARPANET & NSFNET). The "open" web was actually quite closed off to people that didn't belong to an institution to give them an ".edu" or ".mil" address.
>I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared.
The "conditions" were government sponsorship to pay for protocols.
- Vint Cerf developed the TCPIP protocol -- but he was funded by DARPA (USA government). Mr Cerf didn't have to go to venture capital firms on Sand Hill Rd and get funding to pay the salaries of his team to build a proof-of-concept or "MVP". He didn't have to worry about not making payroll if his TCPIP protocol project failed.
- Tim Berners-Lee developed the http protocol and also HTML language -- but he was funded by CERN...which is one step removed from being funded by a consortium of governments[0]. Therefore, TBL didn't have to wear a "salesman" hat and pound the pavement begging enterprise customers to buy his "http protocol stack" so he could buy his expensive NeXT workstation[1] to help build and test the protocol.
Those are prominent examples but it doesn't mean people can't create new protocols on their without government help. The SSL protocol was developed by Netscape -- a commercial business. I believe the the git protocol was developed by Linus without a government grant. (Also note that http v1 was funded by CERN (government sponsored) but http/2 & http/3 appears to be mostly funded by Google (non-government sponsored).)
But notice what happens with "open protocols" like SSL and git: they eventually run into a wall where somebody has to spend money on it. The SSL protocol is free of royalties but the Certificate Authorities issuing certificates are not free of charge. The git protocol is free but enterprise accounts for Github are not. The ActivityPub protocol is also free but Mastodon servers are run by altruistic admins spending their own money or requesting Patreon donations. Somewhere, money has to be spent and that ultimately constrains what the "free web" will be. Releasing a "free to use protocol" is not enough.
Therefore, it doesn't matter if the old IRC protocol is free of charge. People still have to spend money on auxiliary features outside the scope of the protocol. Slack spent money on those extra features (e.g. searchable history, etc) that nobody spent on IRC.
IMHO there need to be balance between open source and revenue, protocol and products. Just because everyone is going one way, doesn't mean it is correct. I have a friend from banking use to make fun of Richard Stallman 15 years ago. However, looking at it not what he said is quite prophetic. What I’m most concern about is cynicism.
ActivityPub (AP) has the advantage of running on top of HTTP. You don't have to convince people to install a new browser. All the tools that communicate over AP run on familiar technologies. The hardest part is convincing people to make an account, so most growth is from people following friends--the key incentive--to Mastodon instances. It's not a big problem in practice. Monoculture concerns aside.
AP doesn't have to run on HTTP, but any alternative has the same problem as anything else that needs its own client. Even browser support for FTP is on the way out, and it used to be standard.
I don't know about that. There's a flurry of open protocols being built on Blockchain and maybe there's a golden age ahead . . .
> "Historically many key protocols, such as TCP/IP and HTTP, have come from researchers. Subsequent iterations of these protocols were often handled by nonprofit organization that tried to wrangle with more or less success the various commercial interests that sprang up around this protocols (the companies that were making and selling software and hardware based on them). The more money was involved the harder this became.
> "Now, however, we have a new way of providing incentives for the creation of protocols and for governing their evolution. I am talking about cryptographic tokens . . .
> "I can’t emphasize enough how radical a change this is to the past. Historically the only way to make money from a protocol was to create software that implemented it and then try to sell this software (or more recently to host it). Since the creation of this software (e.g. web server/browser) is a separate act many of the researchers who have created some of the most successful protocols in use today have had little direct financial gain. With tokens, however, the creators of a protocol can “monetize” it directly and will in fact benefit more as others build businesses on top of that protocol.
Given this new incentive I expect a lot of resources to be devoted to protocol innovation."
Not by mobs of angry students, but protocol managing entities like Microsoft, Novell, IBM, and others sure could make your interpretation of the protocol invalid. Particularly if you had some competing software out in the wild...
matrix is exactly this, at least from an client/server interop standpoint. email is the first massively successful federated application. matrix just needs an easy to use client/webclient. Riot.im is close, but needs some UX love.
I'm a big fan of Pythonista. When I do a search for a topic Google often takes me to a post on the user forums. There's also a Slack channel, but Google can't see it so anything useful in there is much harder to access hence I don't use it. I don't want to encourage content migrating to a proprietary silo. That's why I don't mind Reddit, for all it's faults it's at least still an actual web site.
I dont think federation has anything to do with it. There were no incentives to bring it to consumers though (in contrast e.g. to email), and by itself it is not easy to use for vast majority of end users.
Federation prevents experimenting, iterating and developing the protocol forward.
Yes there are all sort of workarounds like protocol extensions and what have you not, but then you add massive new friction to the system ("No sorry my client doesn't do OpenVideoCall2.0 it only does LibreAVConference0.3"). That type of friction isn't that hard to deal with if you have a bunch of tech savvy people with time on their hands. But it is no longer appropriate for todays web that is used by everyone.
> Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It’s what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.
There s nothing wrong with extensions unless they break the entire system, but seems there was no One IRC company that would essentially dictate extensions to everyone else. Google has changed HTTP and HTML a lot, and email too. Slack could have done the same with IRC (maybe someone else will do in the future? ). Yes, walled gardens are a recipe for success , but despite massive walled gardens we still have not switched wholly to those gardens, because they come and go.
so does IRC. I believe even if it adopted IRC as a protocol, slack would still be successful, it's all about the UI being dumb-proof, friendly and capable and seemingly in-vogue. Discord, even more.
If Slack adopted the IRC protocol, it would be subject to the same issue Microsoft had with the early web -- either implementing proprietary extensions to the spec to enable features, kludging in new features by abusing existing functionality, or waiting for spec consensus before expanding.
And furthermore, it'd be reimplemented almost instantly by Facebook / Apple / Microsoft / Google.
So I can see why they decided to chart a different path.
Make something idiot-proof and the world will make a better idiot. And it looks like I'm the bigger idiot here because I don't understand the interface at all.
I'm in two servers for two open source projects but my ID seems to be different for the two servers and not federated for some reason. Or is it? I don't really know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah because u re smart enough to understand the IRC so you naturally expect a single identity. Try to empathize with us mere mortals who still have not fully grasped the concept of the emoji.
That's not an intrinsic problem with IRC-the-protocol. The only technical issue with it is the lack of server-side channel history scrollback which makes it inconvenient for users who aren't connected 100% of the time. This could have been entirely solved with a single extra server command - "/fetch-channel-history". But I suppose no one was convinced of the need.
If you wanted to make a modern, user-friendly chat application that relies on central servers, there's no reason not to base it on IRC.
Next >$16B opportunity: bring something close to Slack, but that actually works, to China.
China is chat-first culture, but neither DingDing, nor Wechat Work achieved the status that Slack has in the US/EU.
Problems with Slack in China: it's often blocked, it's unbearably slow, the apps are not in the stores, it's Chinese search is lacklustre, it's UI is centered on "longer" messages but Chinese language is very short so it could be optimized somehow.
You'd probably need it to be very efficient in order to run on some of the cheaper mobile devices, and of course only a Chinese company would ever be allowed to succeed at that scale in China.
I could easily imagine a Chinese company coming up with Slack-but-fast-and-easily-monitored, making that >$16B in Asia, and then coming at the US/EU markets with it.
In the age of 8-core Snapdragon 660 phones that cost barely north of a hundred dollars this is not much of a concern. Besides, most "office" types update their phones every major release.
I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long term viability. It’s just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a company once the old one gets too noisy.
Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before something shinier comes along.
Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded.
They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options.
Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.
It is currently abhorrent. They do appear to be updating regularly, but so much of the UX should have been fixed at the beginning.
- Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile.
- UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information
- teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there
- this means nobody uses teams but chats, which are only recently pinnable (!?!?)
- the pages, plugins and sharepoint files is great, but too restrictive.
Compared to Slack or Zulip, it is still very behind. However, once our 70k organisation moved to office 365 and started using teams, we sheepled and didn't want the team to use a fragmented tool and bit the bullet. So yeah. Watch out for teams.
Yeah, we use teams and have had none of those issues. In fact, I'd say it is better than Slack now, which is what we used before switching to Teams last fall. Plus Teams is in the whole Microsoft enterprise bundle already. Slack's biggest challenge will be Teams. Or their enterprise market share will boil down to, enterprises not using Microsoft, .. so Google...
One little detail: the MS offering should work adequately.
If Lync (Skype for Business) is any indication, building well-working enterprise messaging is hard. Unless cost-cutting is your central concern, you want your internal communication to use the best, least-friction tools. Here Slack has quite an advantage.
Yes, I know, but it seems most of the value Microsoft Teams provide is in its video conferencing capabilities. Why is Slack said to be competing with one and not the other?
You think enterprise companies switch a product they’re already using with all the integrations to another (possibly inferior) product just because of price? That’s not usually been my experience
That’s the definition of Enterprise Software - the buyer is not the user. They are already paying for Office. Why pay extra for Slack? You really don’t want to go head to head with Microsoft’s Enterprise sells.
> The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough”
Also, Google Chat. AFAIK it's free if your company is already using the work version of Gmail, though don't quote me on that. It's out now, and does the job well enough.
My current employer went with Google Chat, I think mainly due to the cost difference with 10k+ employees.
I've never worked anywhere where Salesforce was available outside of select teams. In fact, last time I had access to it I kept finding my access had been 'lent' to another user because the per seat license was so expensive.
My very-large project switched chat apps in one weekend (backed by a few weeks of prep by IT team). We had JIRA integration on day one, and one or two missing things within a week. It wasn't that big a deal.
I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.
They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark.
There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.
Wouldn't the Slack bot integration provide a better moat. If they can get orgs using a lot of bots for CI reporting, etc switching gets more difficult at least. Not sure how many teams get that tightly integrated with bots though.
I don't really know I've been at the same company for a while and we've only used Skype for Business and before that Sametime for our chat infrastructure. I've seen a couple articles written about making them but not sure how many people actually use similar bots with the ability to kick things off or change things.
Building the integrations is easy, if all the integration is is a notification. I've got half a dozen custom slack integrations that i've written for my team, it's no more than a day of work sunk in so far, including the infrastructure in our product to figure out who, what and when to notify.
If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.
- deal with APIs of the many platforms that are being integrated
- maintenance and SLAs
I honestly doubt you can create half a dozen good integrations that require more than just notifications in a channel (for example, PagerDuty notifications and the like).
I'm not sure they'll be able to compete against a worse but integrated solution like MS teams long term. No doubt it's worse but the bundle is cheaper with when you're already paying for Windows and Office. Same story with G Suite.
MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.
I use Teams in a very large org. Sometimes, the lack of integration and capability is a benefit. People don’t message me unless they actually need something.
Agree - there was a lot of talk about Slack in our org, until everyone realised we had Teams already as part of O365 and it delivers on most of the use cases you set up from Day One.
It's actually pretty good for managing discreet work streams, and even for organising personal work (kind of against the "Team" ethos, but having a channel for myself keeps my work visible and tabs keep important things to hand easily).
I have _never_ used teams. I have seen it creep up in enterprise focused orgs but I have still never used it.
As a remote worker Slack is my office, essentially, and I think it's done an amazing job at being an office for remote first companies. I can't speak for Teams.
I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
Why do you make it sound like some shady back-door deal? Our grey-beard entirely Linux using ops staff would drop Slack for MS teams at the drop of a hat to get that money back in the budget. You can only waste so much money when the entire office demands Office.
Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will always come out cheaper than Office + $other_thing.
Can confirm. Desktop Linux-using ops staff here, we're moving from dropbox to onedrive in the next ~month, and I'd switch from Slack to Teams if it didn't suffer from the same problem all MS IM products (UWP/Chromium Skype- & Lync-based alike) seem to face: intermittent failures to push notifications.
We route alerts through IM primarily, and are remote-first. I get that some folks here complain about their inability to ignore chat notifications, but there's a decent chunk of us that need to find our uninterrupted time where we can, not when we want.
> Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive.
A few weeks ago the startup I work for started using NextCloud as a stop-gap till we get O365 and OneDrive. It is ridiculously simple for us at-least to just copy over our entire Dropbox folder to the NextCloud one.
I hear that. I wish I could deploy Nextcloud at my company. We have plenty of resources and storage. Not paying per user per month would be so so so nice.
My company is already paying for Teams as part of our O365 Installation. We won't use it, simply because of the network effect the Shared Channels have created.
We have shared channels with Integration Partners, Suppliers, Enterprise Customers... These are extremely valuable ways of communication once setup, especially with simple file-transfer thrown in, etc.
Leaving Slack would mean slamming the door in the face of these entities, something we're simply not ready to do for the cost-savings that ditching Slack would mean.
I don’t know a single enterprise client that enables external Slack users. People are far too careless with what they share in IM (like private SSH keys and IP addresses), and Slack history is a juicy target for hackers diving for secrets.
Enterprise users usually just use it for internal messaging.
If that's what's best for your company, great. For others, competing against MS Teams means that they will face an uphill battle on the sales side - to put it mildly. In terms of the cost savings aspect once MS reaches feature parity-ish, there will be significant pressure on the CIO to consider a migration away from Slack. Both of these pressures raise valid questions about the valuation and future of Slack.
Microsoft isn’t Oracle. They put Teams in the bundle and slowly break whatever they are replacing. In this case Skype.
If you’re big enough for Microsoft to care about you, you already have embedded SEs compensated based on OneDrive and Teams adoption. Your IT middle management pushes teams.
Your CIO is getting the cyber pitch based in the insecurity of your O365 implementation. The fix is to buy Azure AD or the next bundle (EMS), or maybe the E5 O365/Windows subscription.
While messaging apps have tended to be cyclical, I'd argue Slack has become much more than a simple messaging app at many large companies with their integrations and bots, and they are intrinsic to many teams' workflows (e.g. "ChatOps" is a real thing).
I see Slack as more akin to something like Excel, where people who really depend on it (in a way much more than person-to-person chat) go beserk if it's taken away.
Companies switched to slack because hipchat didn't work very well. Slack works pretty well. It would be much harder for there to be internal political motivation to change unless someone does something significantly better which I cannot imagine.
Messaging apps are cyclical. I remember icq! Slack should become part of Google.. that would help Google widen its user base and perhaps a robust video conferencing system can piggy back on top of it.
The product is compelling enough that Microsoft is trying to position their clone as the lynchpin of everything in O365 that isn’t mail.
It’s a platform that is attractive to all sorts of players. Apple has a huge enterprise business that they completely ignore. Google, Cisco, other enterprise plays are easily imaginable.
Basically M$ is pushing hard to switch off Skype For Business (SFB) in favor of Teams, especially when still on-premise.
The new features are being developed only for Microsoft Teams and the user base is a click away from a decent Slackish app.
Another killer feature of Teams (inherited from Lync and SFB) is the trunking possibility with a legacy SIP PBX (so called Microsoft Team Direct Routing, or some form of similar creative name from Redmond market intelligence).
So, I think that the future of Slack is probably the same as the future of Spotify, both like the article says incidentally direct-listed at the NYSE (and not via a formal IPO).
Both will have a trusted user base, a better interface, but motivated tech giants competing into the same market.
Slacks biggest paying customers are enterprises using it for internal chat. Not very sticky overall since enterprise customers are used to vendors constantly raising prices.
The thing that really struck me about Slack was its level of polish, esp compared to other software around the time of its release.
The overall level of polish on similar apps has risen since then so that’s less of a differentiator, but I still refer to Slack as a great example of polish and consistency in product, with mostly great UX as well
Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free.
I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert have already been converted. I expect CAC to go up and payer conversion to stagnate at best. I don't see how they can 2-3x their revenue this year (unless there are drastic, risky changes).
In addition, the slow iterations on the mobile and desktop clients, and the meteoric rise of Discord are enough cause for concern. I don't see how this investment would have legs.
How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on?
I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.
Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels.
But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples:
I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows.
FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).
And you still cannot leave a channel in Discord. You can mute, but that's not the same thing — it still clutters your sidebar, and still downloads contents from it.
Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot messages you get over time.
Discord bots are out of control. They remind me of the days of IRC and eggbot scripts and eggbot hosts: every channel went out and bought a cheap VPS or eggbot host to run their scrappy little bots. Except somehow worse and incredibly annoying.
I don't think Discord is ready, or even trying to be ready, for enterprise use. Not yet!
Obviously downloading contents from muted channels is not an issue. Also you can both mute and hide the channel which effectively leaves it. And obviously slack bots are just as powerful as discord's so it's just a matter of servers electing to add crazy bots or not. Everyone bitches about giphy... these are some real stretches if these are your actual complaints about enterprise readiness, rather than data/admin policies, account segregation, etc. Do you have a vested interest somewhere?
For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable.
Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.
The historical context of discord, is that every gaming group would have some sort of chat app (mainly IRC, more recently hipchat, yammer, slack) as well as a push-to-talk voice app (ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, ...). Discord is merely combining the best of both (slack, and all its api support, with built in voice channels).
Nobody has to use voice. In many communities, most don't. But as the above said, it's a super frictionless way to talk if needed and is a lot less formal than "starting a call/meeting". You just publicly hop into one of a dozen visible channels and anyone else can hop in with you to discuss an issue or just hang out mostly-not-talking.
It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room.
Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...
TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines.
> How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community.
At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack.
It's not particularly tailored, but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business.
The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every day at NuCypher.
Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
> I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional.
I don't even know if I know what that means in 2019. As far as appearance, Discord is much more fun. Is that what you mean?
Slack doesn't seem particularly professional to me.
> Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?
It's not as disastrous as this person makes it seem. It's a rest call you can use to have slackbot do or say whatever you want for integration purposes. You can customize the name of the bot as well as its icon, which would allow you to "impersonate" someone.
The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration.
And since we're talking about Slack's use in business, if someone does that you fire them. It might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
> t might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
But these two are not mutually exclusive. Many business use cases eventually require a public community chat, and Slack is a dead-end for them. Discord on the other hand has served us well.
For my purposes, voice chat is not a useful feature. I want our team's communications to be in text form so that we can communicate asynchronously, people don't have to be online at the same time and it's easy to read back through what has been said previously. I'm communicating with people all around the world, a very different use case to a team all working in the same office or time zone.
We switched from Slack to Discord in our community and I prefer it. It feels faster to me, the Slack app on a Mac got really slow after a while.
I wish Discord added Telegram style voice messages and it would be perfect.
To be totally honest I still think forums like phpbb where much better but they didn't really transitioned to the mobile world. I miss them.
This isn't the whole story. Discord also mines user data and sells it to advertisers:
"Information You Provide: We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature."
"Data We Collect Automatically: When you interact with us through the Services, we receive and store certain information such as an IP address, device ID, and your activities within the Services. We may store such information or such information may be included in databases owned and maintained by affiliates, agents or service providers. The Services may use such information and pool it with other information to track, for example, the total number of visitors to our Site, the number of messages users have sent, as well as the sites which refer visitors to Discord."
"If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Discord Service, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance."
I say this as an avid user of Discord, which I use on a daily - dare I say hourly - basis. I'm perfectly fine with them collecting data on my gaming habits and the harmless stuff I talk about with friends. I don't think I would be okay with running a business through them, especially one in a similar vertical.
I'm guessing the answer is "yes", but have you taken a look at their S-1 filing? There is tons of addressable market out there for them, and their paying cohorts (year-by-year) have been accelerating in next-expand ARR (page 68):
I do agree that product iteration has been slow. That's been a big problem for Slack, and it's my biggest speculation on their valuation. As someone who has seen inside the company (don't work there), their engineering teams have a ton of technical debt they've been making their way through and trying to set right.
My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the existing, extremely locked in, userbase.
It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.
I'm biased because I like Slack, although I haven't tried Discord so I'm only comparing it with the usual competitors that are terrible, but it does feel very sticky to me. It's replaced email for my JIRA and Google Drive notifications, it's replaced Google Hangouts for most of my team chat and 1:1 video calls. And I'm not even using all the plugins many of my colleagues are using yet.
They really seem to have gotten a lot of Google Wave ideas to catch on and have even kept some IRC bits. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Congrats to the team on this massive valuation. Makes a lot more sense to me than Snapchat at $19B...
Another area it's very sticky is 'SlackOps' - i.e. putting your devops commands and notifications into Slack.
Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.
I wish you luck! This is a pretty smart wave to ride, I think. Having gone the DIY route setting up my own bots backed by lambdas etc, which was a fair amount of work, I will definitely say there's an obvious market opportunity here for an easy 'set up in a few clicks' solution that hooks into a bunch of the obvious services (CI, cloud, kubectl, etc).
I’m starting to see Slack show up in all sorts of places far beyond software development teams. Accounting firms, non profits, and even a home inspector I worked with... I can’t imagine they’re even close full market penetration.
No me neither, totally agree. Both are channels for growth. I just mean I see the expanding existing users channel dwarfing the acquiring new customers channel in terms of speed of growth. At this point I see it being significantly easier for them to 2x an average user's subscription through more services than 2x their entire userbase.
I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
This is why being able to aggregate multiple channels into a single window would be a huge win. Right now you have to flip between multiple "tabs" to find anything.
Anybody who thinks they know for sure that slack can't possibly be worth $16B should go back and read some threads from around the Facebook IPO (like this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320585). It's very easy to write reasonable sounding things - making accurate predictions about the future is much harder.
Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture a guess that Slack is going to do very well for itself, though it may dip and swoon over the next couple years before it reaches that point.
An even more applicable comparison is the HN thread about the Dropbox announcement. "What? This is just [IRC|rsync] with gimmicky bells and whistles."
Yeah. Twitter is 'just' a one-line text field and a page where you can read what other people have entered in that text field. But there's something more to its success than just that bit that any newbie web developer could clone in an afternoon.
And even though blogging, threaded forums for discussion, chat rooms, email, etc. all already existed, it still has been enormously successful despite seemingly being drastically inferior to any of them in every way.
Things don't have to be better or even good to succeed, they don't even have to be difficult to clone. A bit of luck at the right time followed by a snowball effect and they can be huge. $28 billion for a textfield? Sure, why not?
I think it's telling that I've seen that Dropbox comment mentioned (and here distorted to the whole thread) probably >100 times yet can't remember the threads it was mentioned in.
In 2010, when I heard that Milner's DST is investing in Facebook at $10B valuation, I thought, with a complete certainty, that incompetent russian investors were getting defrauded.
Since then, when I think that some startup has a blown-up valuation, I recall that moment.
Well, I've been saying Snapchat can't possibly be worth $29bn when it did IPO. And surprise, it lost most of this value. Snapchat is a lot like Slack - it's a feature, not a product. Once Facebook copied the feature, Snapchat was doomed. Same will happen with Slack (in this case I think MSFT will be its undoer).
I really don't understand why companies like Snapchat and PayPal don't do the reverse - add Facebook-feature to their product! Surely Snapchat would be more useable if it had profiles, friends, etc. (i.e. if it became Facebook-lite, in other words, Instagram clone). Sure, (some) users will revolt, but you don't need to force it down their throat... make it opt-in, or privacy-preserving, or something, and make sure that it's genuinely useful!
Not really comparable. Facebook has been a full-blown ecosystem for end users even before their IPO. Slack is a productivity tool that your tech job forces you to use. I envisioned Slack's exit being a Microsoft/Amazon acquisition.
It's pretty hilarious that first Stewart Butterfield tried to make an MMO (Game Neverending), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Flickr. Then he tried to make another MMO (Glitch), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Slack.
Caterina Fake talked about this on Tim Ferris' podcast [1] and Gimlet's "Without Fail" together right, they applied for a government start-up grant when building the MMO and didn't get it. However they had accidentally chosen to automatically resubmit the application a year later.
Around the time the MMO failed, they received the grant from the second application. They had something vaguely similar to photo-sharing chat in the game, related to discussing inventory items, and decided to transition to that as a photo-sharing IM client and use the grant to get it off the ground.
> As part of the game, they’d developed this interface where players could create an inventory of objects that they would pick up. That inventory looked like this sort of shoebox of photos. You could drag those photos into group conversations for other people to see and you could annotate them. And you could share the photos with other people. And that was the idea that Caterina and the people on her team wanted to transition to.
(from 2.)
As an aside, I highly recommend listening to the full interviews, as she has an interesting background and some good perspectives on tech in general. She also just launched a podcast that considers the ethics of some new tech developments [3].
I was replying to somebody who was annoyed that somebody was surprised there was a photo uploading and sharing feature. It’s a surprising feature because it isn’t a major mechanic.
I think this might actually be a really nice insight: they adapted by shifting their focus based on user/customer feedback/learnings to the extent of completely changing the core of what they are doing/making.
This level of adaptability might explain part of their success. Rather than naively sticking to your original vision, identifying where you have the opportunity to create value and changing direction based on that insight.
My experience with Slack has been the mixed bag of "I love this", "Turn it off", "I couldn't be global without it".
What makes me long on this stock is their position as leader of the Work Graph.(0) SAP and Salesforce have strong positions as trailing indicators of workplace knowledge (this is the information/ process that matters most to us) but Slack and to a lesser extend MS Teams are leading indicators of WHY the information/ process matters.
I wish them all the best. But I do hope they stay small in spirit and nimble.
One of my favourite things about slack is /feedback and the fact that someone will get back to me within 24hrs. There is no product of this scale that has such a low barrier to feedback/questions/bug report.
Except in my experience they don't actually fix the bugs. For literally years the Slack app would get into a zombie state if your network changed in any way: switched WAPs, got on/off the VPN, switch from wifi to ethernet, etc. The app would still think it had a network connection but it actually didn't. The only way to fix it was with a hard refresh. To this day I still reflexively do a ctrl-r whenever my network changes. Because after reporting this bug to them over and over and over I got fed up and just moved on. I honestly have no idea if the bug has actually been fixed, ctrl-r has just become complete muscle memory for me now.
Interesting, I'm on MacOS and in a similar environment (switching vlans etc.) and the socket just reconnects fine both on the web version and the 'app'.
It’s possibly fixed now. I first encountered this in 2016. Many coworkers complained of it and Slack always acknowledged it was an issue they were looking into whenever I reported it.
Because I find it to be already better than Slack. Took a few commands to set it up at work on our own server. Convenient, fast, and has the good bits from the Slack UI.
Mattermost is a fantastic open source alternative to Slack, nicely integrated with Gitlab.
We used Slack on a few projects, but the thought of using a third-party to host corporate development discussion was an absolute no-no in the long run.
It's staggering how fast people are to pay for something when there's a cheaper (or free) alternative out there, these days.
> Mattermost is a fantastic open source alternative to Slack, nicely integrated with Gitlab.
> We used Slack on a few projects, but the thought of using a third-party to host corporate development discussion was an absolute no-no in the long run.
> It's staggering how fast people are to pay for something when there's a cheaper (or free) alternative out there, these days.
How can you characterize the price as free? Do engineers at your place of work have so much free time that they can spend it setting this stuff up? What happens when chat goes down? Are you going to invest in becoming experts in running the app? All these are considerations that factor into the total cost of ownership, which oftentimes is far higher than the posted sticker price.
You're right that it does take some effort to self manage. We try to make it as easy as we can with a single Linux binary and lots of documentation.
One of the most common scenarios for Mattermost is deploying into a private network, that's invisible to SaaS services.
The software that runs manufacturing plants should never touch the internet. Neither should the backends of financial services companies, and many other industries.
Developers in those companies need to have some way to collaborate, and integrate with their DevOps toolchains and legacy backends, and Mattermost is getting increasingly popular there.
Every open source Mattermost server has all the core features of Slack, including Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, and Slack integrations via webhooks. Every Mattermost server can host hundreds of Slack-compatible teams, and every month over 10,000 servers are downloaded.
Also, if you've installed GitLab already, you just turn on Mattermost as a feature in omnibus. It's really simple to start. When you get to a few hundred users and IT needs to add some more admin and permissions there's some additional setup, but then you can go to hundreds or thousands of users from that setup.
I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but Slack could already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
Even if we ignore the time value of money, Slack needs to quadruple its revenue and turn it all into profit to justify a 16B valuation. I can see it happening since so much is being integrated into it from 3rd parties, but it's a very tall order.
Slack isn't a consumer company, they are an SaaS enterprise company. Most SaaS enterprise companies trade at far lower multiples.
A decent comp for Slack would be Dropbox, which has $1.4B and rough valuation of ~$10B
It is overvalued, but then so are a lot of tech companies. I think Slack is a good app, one of the tech startups of true value from this boom cycle, but it’s overvalued. When the likely market adjustment happens, it’ll get a haircut, but it will deservedly survive and prosper.
Solid revenue and solid growth. I was not saying Slack has no monetization, but getting from 400M to 16B is 40X growth. To expand that quickly would require monetizing your existing users most of whom use the free tier. How does Slack really plan to do that?
And how many of the free users are the same people? I am active on 7 or 8 slacks (all free) with at least 5 or 6 different emails. Sure they can easily link my from my device, but do they when they can inflate numbers?
The thing that drives me nuts is the pricing model. Why don't they just let users pay for themselves? Then I could be paid on all of the slacks that I use for $10/mo or whatever they charge.
> For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1]
My question is where the hell is that money going?
That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It’s the GDP of some minor lower/mid-economy nations’ cities. Their losses are equal to half the entire GDP of Palau.
Maybe I’m detached. But I don’t understand the cash flow in chat apps today. It’s absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and will easily be replaced in a few years, as always happens.
Overpaid executives. I worked for a darling in the security space that has not posted a profit ever in it's 7 years post-IPO (they could at this point, but choose not to). Yet the company paid the CEO, multiple years I was there, over $300M annually. The current CEO makes a "base" $128M and has incentives of over $400M dangling in front of him. Yet any time the company misses guidance do you know what they blame? Paying the "field" (sales and field engineering) too much in commission and stock grants. Yet if you roll up all executive and board grants on an annual basis you're north of a Billion (with a B) in pay. Yet... No analyst has the nerve to ask that question point blank on the earnings call.
Beyond executives and the board? Marketing. I'm now at a much smaller F round startup that blew $350k+ on the RSA conference and another $150k+ on expenses for said show. The return on that is miniscule.
Where does the money go? I feel like most startups I've been in have been very good at funneling the funds exactly where they want it. Profitable doesn't seem to be the goal anymore, but more of to sink as much cash into executive pockets as quickly as possible.
Their CEO is paid ~$10M (total comp) [0]. The other listed executives are paid much less. Even if they cut executive compensation to 0, they would still have massive losses.
>No analyst has the nerve to ask that question point blank on the earnings call.
Ooooh, I need to Google to see if this has happened. Obviously investors and analysts would prefer to have those talks privately to avoid alienating anyone important, but it has to have happened sometime.
Slack targets the same market that made Microsoft big: the corporate sector. For big companies, even recurring licensing costs for Slack are trivial, and it gives the managers of the bigger companies a feeling of importance to be able to negotiate big bulk discounts. In this corporate sector market, all you need to do to get rich is to be the established player, which Slack very much seems to become.
As for the easily being replaced part, Slack will just buy up any competitor while its small. Just like how Facebook did it with Instagram and Whatsapp. Facebook is deemed uncool by the younger generation but not Instagram and Whatsapp.
Why is it so bizzare? Do you think that Palau has enough people engaged in producing goods or services that deserve more than their current GDP?
I think comparing the valuations of a US company HQ'd in one of the most expensive cities in the world, that has created a tool that is used by nearly all organizations around the world for communication is well worth the crazy valuation.
I’m not talking about their supposed $16b value. I’m wondering where the money they’re actually spending is going.
They’ve lost nearly $150 million in a year. How? What does that money even go to? Even paying their devs incredibly generous wages and benefits, server costs, advertising, deals with businesses, etc, I can’t imagine the losses being that big. It’s insane amounts of money to burn through.
That doesn’t seem like that big of a number for a large corporation that Slack is now. Tesla had a net loss of 700mm[1] last quarter. Their business is more capital intensive for sure but still. Just looking at a 150mm net loss and saying it’s a big number doesn’t tell you much.
Since when has a company making poor over-priced decisions ever justified a better valuation? It's the complete opposite.
If Airbus decided to pay twice as much for planes would you say they should be valued higher?
While there is intangible benefits that come from deciding to setup shop in one of the most expensive cities on Earth I'm far from convinced a messenger app company couldn't thrive elsewhere.
What they offer is not unique nor difficult to create. Doubt they'll ever manage to pull in $1B a year to justify that price, the required business model for it would have their customers looking elsewhere overnight.
> Not a fan of Slack but they do have more than chat: voice and video, screen share, drawing on screen, shared control
Most of the features are a no-go in large enterprises and from what I've seen, enterprises will also choose better tools for some of that functionality (like zoom over slack video).
It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.
Slack didn't clone text chat. They took the best parts of text chat, Facebook (reactions), Reddit (threads, edits) and terminals (simple UI for applications) and merged them into a single tool. I'm currently using HipChat and the difference is night and day. Slack makes large, busy chat rooms coherent in a way that just isn't possible with other text chats. And because of that, it opens new completely new possibilities (channels to support customers, channels to use as long-term references, etc.)
I haven't used Slack since 2016 so I don't know if it's changed, but the threads were such a disappointment when they came out. I suppose everyone was hoping for some similar threading that Flowdock has, but Slack threads simply just hide the discussion.
I agree that Slack beats HipChat and IRC for work communication, but that's about it. I prefer even the new Google Chat over it, and that definitely has warts of it's own.
Yeah threads still suck. They claim they've investigated it and it was the best solution but I totally get lost with twenty threads over five Slacks with ten channels each.
IMO the small changes they've made have really helped. I like how they keep off topic conversations from overflowing into the channel, and the little notification about unread threads helps me not forget them. Plus you can go back to conversations you missed and add to them.
That was a great ad for Slack, but I don't think it's true. I've never had any issues with any other chat app. Many people still use Facebook chat and IRC and the functionality is basically identical between each of the new chat apps (well, except you can do way more with IRC).
I want to respectfully challenge this - many people do still use those tools and still will. But the user experience in Slack is objectively better, especially with large rooms with frequent content (as the OP mentions).
I lived in IRC in the late 90s and early 2000s. IRC is fantastic and open and federated. But if I want to get things done with a team, I'll pick Slack everytime.
Objectively better than the garbage the GP mentioned but objectively worse than Telegram.
After using Telegram for work at my previous job, switching to slack now with a new company is jarring. Their absolute dogshit electron apps constantly hog system resources and take forever to load. Also Telegram is free and has a far better audio and video chat and again, free...
I find it mind boggling companies pay for chat. Both discord and Telegram provide all the same features, incl bots and do so for free, what gives?
Still, it is not worth $16B. It's straight forward existing ideas crowbarred into a modern webapp that really any 10-headed team of highly talented web programmers could come up with and implement within a month or so. So it is maybe worth 10 * $100 000 / 12 = $83 333, so it is overvalued by a factor of 192 000. Highly indicative of an economic bubble.
I know, valuation in tech is most often about reach, not so much about the technology itself. This raises the important question whether anything should be allowed to have as much reach.
After months of trying, I still haven't figured out how to have two coherent support conversations in the same public room/channel at the same time outside of using Slack.
I can't say that I'm a fan of Slack, but in a sense, what they did to IRC (and associated tools like logging bouncers) is what Dropbox did to rsync. Take something that works for people willing to give it time and effort, centralize it, make it a bit flashier and minimize setup to make it accessible to more people.
The user experience for both these tools haven't been great for me, but streamlining them for casual computer users evidently has a lot of commercial value.
This is the point. People keep saying "it is just IRC" but the thing they forget is it is IRC+ with practically no setup. If you want Enterprise or consumer adoption, you must make it easy. Just like what you said with Dropbox. Install client, data automatically available everywhere I log in. That is the product and it actually solves a problem people have.
However, as we have already seen Dropbox has already been commoditized and is looking for a reboot. I see the same thing happening with Slack. It will be the king for a while but it has no moat.
I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can really do anything about it. So, I congratulate them on their success but I, too, am utterly mystified.
Back when Slack came out, my company was using HipChat. It was okay, but clearly outdated and not great -- barely a step up from AOL Messenger. I was invited into a Slack by some former colleagues, and it was a breath of fresh air. Someone finally upgraded the chat UI to something modern and un-clunky. It didn't hurt that it had a web UI, that it was free, and that it had configurable integrations that could work right inside the channel. Another thing that I think helped it take off was the simplicity with which it handled embedded media. Post a YouTube video or a tweet or a GIF, and the thing came alive on your screen, embedded right in the channel. You shouldn't underestimate the power of GIF sharing.
There was nothing groundbreaking about Slack, and there still isn't. There are a lot of naysayers on HN scoffing at Slack for basically being a worse form of IRC, which is silly and wrong, but also right in that there is nothing groundbreaking about the tech. But products don't need to be groundbreaking to win. They just need to be better than the rest, and perhaps generate the necessary "reality distortion field" that convinces people that it's the next natural evolutionary step. Once you convince people of that, they don't go back to HipChat.
One thing that can’t hurt is that Stewart Butterfield is well connected, and got all his friends to push Slack at their startups.
I was at a startup, we used a mix of Hipchat (business types) and IRC (developers). A marketing/social media guy who was buddies with Stewart joined and insisted we should all switch to this, and there we were, dogfooding Slack (this was closed beta days).
Slack and IRC are incomparable. Slack has authentication, message retention and search, multimedia attachments, mobile application with notifications, conversation threads, etc.
You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.
Except for message retention and search, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible with bouncers.
Mobile applications with notifications, conversation threads with +draft/reply (IRCv3 draft), multimedia attachments (IRCv3 idea), authentication with SASL and standardized account management (IRCv3 draft), etc.
Look at what IRCCloud provides, and what IRCv3 is doing.
Going to irccloud.com, creating an account, and connecting is "implementing it yourself" how again? And IRCCloud has all that in a single solution.
Even if you want to self-host, there are solutions — get any server, run
docker run \
-v /path/to/folder/where/you/want/to/store/the/config:/config \
k8r.eu/justjanne/quassel-docker:v0.13.1
and connect with quassel or quasseldroid to that server (the setup wizard guides you through everything else). It's about as simple as it can get for selfhosted. (Quassel gets you message retention and search immediately, and the other features are already being worked on).
Well, irccloud.com must be doing something wrong if they're using a pre-existing protocol, have solved its problems and yet Slack is the company worth billions.
That’s the part where VC money comes in. 99% of the VC funded companies worth billions weren’t the first, or the best — they just managed to get VC money and out-spent everyone else on advertising, or used the money to give away their product until they were the largest.
Uber is still making losses in almost all markets it’s active in. Slack is making a 380'000 $ loss per day. Amazon hasn’t made a profit a single time in their entire history.
The Silicon Valley model of "let’s gain a monopoly by giving away a product and outspending everyone on advertising, then monetizing it" doesn’t reward the best product. Never has, never will.
And companies grown the traditional, honest way, making actual profits of course can’t compete with that. If I opened up a supermarket giving away everything for free, of course I’d have more customers than the supermarkets who have to make money.
> I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat
Stay up? I was at a company that was on Hipchat, and we really liked it, but the amount of downtime got to be semi-unbearable. We switched to Slack and it had much better uptime.
Productization - The act of modifying something, such as a concept or a tool, to make it suitable as a commercial product.
Making big money requires productization. Sleek UI and interface that the end users see, plus marketing and selling.
Even when someone is the first with tech and prioritization, it does not mean they succeed in the long term after the field matures. I don't have high hopes for Slack in 5-10 years. Neither do I see Dropbox or Netflix justifying current valuations in the same time period.
Slack is not just reinvented IRC, just as Dropbox is not just reinvented rsync and Docker is not just reinvented cgroups.
If the basic tech behind those products met the needs of business users by itself, these companies would never have succeeded.
It's not about just the technology. It's about wrapping that technology in a good user experience for end users and an easy management experience for business customers. That is really difficult, and Slack deserves credit for doing it so well.
My cofounder at gliph was convinced of the same and I do not blame him for it. We were in the heart of secure messaging / starting group chat when we ran out of money pursuing a marketplace. Justin Roiland even hosted his official Rick and Morty group chat with us.
I think to many highly technical people Slack is a “reinvented” irc. But I was ok IRC stealing mp3s from bots in the 90s. And I’m on Usenet now.
Does anybody have any idea how pricing of this will open up compared to an IPO? They are doing a direct offering (DPO), which essentially means no new shares are being allocated and there is no underwriter which typically means the price can be way more volatile on opening day since no underwriters to control and establish pricing. DPO as I understand you are buying shares directly from people who already have them.
To me the succes of Slack also shows how invaluable it is.
Companies jumped to it very easily. Everybody just started using it. And the moment something better comes along Slack will be forgotten.
I think this is different from Facebook. Company employees come and go so they don't value what they put on Slack very much. And for companies the history on slack is also not very important.
Well that's how I see how Slack is being used inside different companies.
I don't necessarily think Slack is worth $16B any time soon, but I actually do feel like my searchable Slack history stretching back ~5 years is one of the most valuable resources I have at my fingertips on a dailt basis. The search quickly pulls up stuff from years ago even stuff from before we changed the subdomain for the org.
Before Slack, that history might have been contained in email. Which has always been available and goes back decades in my case. Slack worries me in the sense that when it’s gone so is my data, but email I’ve always got my copy.
"Might". There's a lot slack channels that I'm somewhat privy to, but otherwise would be out of the loop on if it were an e-mail. It gives me access to a lot of institutional knowledge in my organization.
It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got Twitter!), but Microsoft is investing in React Native for Windows which could prove really interesting. Hopefully Microsoft doesn't settle for just making Electron better.
I don't even think they need to make a native app; I use plenty of Electron apps day to day, like VSCode, Atom, GitHub Desktop and they're all fine.
Slack however is borderline unusable. Ghost processes, background workspaces silently closing and not delivering notifications, processes pinned at 100% CPU, silent crashes, pauses while typing, and even sometimes character drops.
I've tried it on three laptops from two vendors all with 16gb of memory, 100% SSD and an i7.
I've got Mac user friends that tell me they've never had any of the above issues, and I believe them. I've used it on a Mac, though not as a daily driver, and it's fine.
It just feels to me like Windows is a second tier platform for Slack, where they're fixing the bare minimum to not lose market share.
The pain of forking development into multiple separate teams with completely different technology stacks, bugs, and coordination overhead is just not worth it for most startups. It slows you down when you need to be able to adapt quickly. A lot of unicorns in the past would have addressed this by simply focusing on one platform initially but for an application like this that is not feasible. Even Linux support is not optional for a company like Slack since a lot of the decision makers on stuff like this tend to be in the IT department which in many companies would include at least a few Linux users. By going all in on Electron, they ensured access to all relevant platforms from day one.
The reality is, that most of their user base is completely fine with performance as is, which I agree is not ideal. But it's good enough. My guess is that they will gradually fix issues by benefitting from Electron improvements, swapping out bits of js for more efficient WASM based stuff, etc.
Mostly native app strategies are an extremely bad idea for small start ups these days. You triple the cost (or worse) of your development and inevitably you are going to do better on some platforms than others. I know people obsess about native on platforms like IOS but I find it interesting that there are quite a few unicorns out there succeeding with glorified electron/react native code bases. Slack is basically shipping a web app packaged up as an electron app on Android, IOS, Mac, Windows, and Linux. You can run the thing in a browser pretty much without loss of functionality.
I just explained you how not doing that was crucial to their growth strategy. Not having to coordinate bugs, features, and releases across multiple teams with different tech stacks is really nice when you are trying to outpace your competitors. Most of these follow a similar strategy. Pure native chat apps are not that common anymore.
I think from an app developer's perspective, web-based apps are definitely the way to go. That's because it's so incredibly difficult to build a good web, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android app. I'm hopeful that one day making good native apps will be as easy and accessible as web development.
It’s significantly easier to build a good native app than a good web app.
However, it’s significantly harder to build several native apps for each OS/platform with the same level of polish and functionality than a single web app that will work on all of them.
Do Microsoft and Apple really want native apps? I've got the opposite impression: they've tried very hard to herd desktop apps into Apple Store model. Third party vendors, like Adobe, are also forcing clients to adopt subscription schemes.
Those are still native apps. I believe parent is comparing to bloated Electron crap that requires an entire Chromium instance to put a GUI on what is basically IRC and text editors.
Sorry I wasn't clear. The underlying problem is piracy. Big players like Adobe can still use the subscription model. For most vendors, the easiest choice is going the web route.
Deployment is another PITA that makes App Store model desirable for the vendors. For Apple and Microsoft it's even better because they get a cut, they curate their platforms and have the upper hand over vendors lest they become competition.
I would replace "the future" with saying that it's much more profitable for vendors and less convenient for users, so it's being adopted as fast as vendors can overcome users's resistance.
It is actually much more convenient for users. They can switch computers/phone/OSes and have the same experience. The same is not true with native apps.
I don’t want the same experience cross platforms. I don’t want the “Mac experience” when I am using Windows (see iTunes) or the “Windows experience” when I am using a Mac (old versions of Office).
No, what you want is the same experience. Which is what the web gives you. What you are describing is native apps trying to replicate the same experience and failing because they are native.
Edit: Native apps require more maintenance which adds to the delta in experience. If a single app is created (web) there is no delta.
It's more convenient for some applications, but it's not the case yet for many applications. Evolution of browsers will probably favour web platform for everything except the more close-to-the-metal ones.
Yup, you used a web app to post your comment. Apple dropped Flash for native web HTML5. Is the future really to develop an app that can only run in 4 places (Windows, mac, ios, and android) dominated by three major companies?
Not really comparable, the web already has massive adoption, just needs to get better at high-performance client apps. And with WebAssembly + PWAs, and WebGPU in development, it's getting very close.
This valuation depends on the continued incompetence of Google and Microsoft, who both offer Slack competitors as part of their productivity packages that most of Slack's paying customers already subscribe to. Their offerings are so bad that people pay money to Slack not to use them.
This has been my experience. Every few months or so we sign in to Google Hangouts Chat in hopes it has made some progress so we can stop paying for Slack, but it is always a disappointment.
Is this another one of those companies whose S1 says "We're not profitable and may never be"?
Why is that the right time to go public? Once the company has an obligation to move towards profitability, doesn't that expose its investors to the risk of another startup subsidizing the same product or service with VC money, undercutting the new established brand?
Like if slack wants to become profitable they probably need to push more people to the paid version of the app, but then won't another company just make a clone and convert some VC cash into a runway with which to poach slack's userbase, and eventually file an S1 saying "we're not profitable and may never be"?
I'm struggling to understand why this keeps working, because no one seems to have a problem with it at all.
Well, you aren't wrong. But I think there are unicorns that are good investments, particularly cloudflare and juul. There are other unicorns I view as highly speculative but potentially viable. But slack? No way. Not at this valuation. If it ever makes this much money, let alone this much profit, I'll eat a hat.
Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.
Yes. Working in a fully distributed team, irc+pictures is great.
It's on you to manage your interruptions (it's easy to kill them totally, or to customize what you see). If you just take it all, then yeah, I can see that being a living hell. So like, don't do that.
Some people at my company get interrupted by slack all the time, and they complain about it.
I disable all notifications except for @-mentions and DMs (and then I only have desktop notifications; mobile is disabled). If I'm expecting to not want interruptions at all, I go to DnD mode for a bit.
And yet, when I tell people this, they just somehow claim they can't do what I do for some hand-wavy reason, and continue to complain.
Maybe because when you disable notifications you still get the god damned red dot/badge thing. They make it very hard to find out where to disable that.
Absolutely. It’s allowed my 10 second questions to take 10 seconds, instead of 10 seconds of talking after 10 (non-contiguous) minutes of trying to guess when the person will be at their desk.
I definitely don’t feel pressure to answer Slack messages when I’m actively working on something, though. I imagine it’d be pretty bad if we had that kind of environment.
Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity.
Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.
But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.
> Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity.
> Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.
> But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.
Voice chat is almost always faster for me as it is easier to have a discussion and potentially whiteboard. If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.
> Voice chat is almost always faster for me as it is easier to have a discussion and potentially whiteboard.
Where I find the opposite. The ability to stop and craft a message that is precise gets the job done immediately, rather than the continual back and forth to confirm that each party understands what happens to be uttered in the moment that is inherit to voice chat.
> If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.
A personal one shared by everyone, I guess. Meeting length and frequency has increased substantially. And not only the meetings that I personally take part in, but observed company-wide.
I imagine familiarity is key. If you come from an environment where voice communication is the de facto method, you are going to get good at that style of communication through practice, and then anything else is going to seem less performant. In my case, we spent many years conducting textual communication and gained plenty of practice at it. Now, voice communication is the unfamiliar ground.
Here's a small tip for others that might help this problem:
Don't use the application versions of any of your apps. Instead, open up the web version of all of them and keep all their tabs in one browser window.
For example, my "notification window" includes my gmail, slack, outlook, and the web client for my mobile texts. I keep the window minimized until I have a need for it, and keep the vibration off on my phone during work hours.
Oh, yes. 100%. I can't imagine how we would work in the last two major companies I worked at without it. Everyone is on slack, great place to ask simple questions, create a channel to discuss an issue, add images and video, and provide feedback when you are ready.
Yeah it's a total hog of attention. At the company I just left, you could walk through our office and 90% of people were just talking on Slack. What a waste of engineering time.
We were pretty invested in ChatOps which I thought was great. Being able to issue commands in any sort of war room situation with a group of people was definitely helpful for that sort of triaging. Of course, the downside being that depending on Slack to be up to do effective operations isn't super appealing to me.
Of course people have been doing this with IRC forever, but Slack is a definite improvement on this front over Skype.
Not specific to Slack (we use MS teams) but the concept of a channel/group/team is great for white noise comms, these types of comms are going to happen (e.g happy birthday) and if it reduces email load (which means the email channel can then be kept for higher priority comms and record keeping especially for later searching), it’s a good thing IMO.
Having broken things sent a webhook to an #alerts channel is so very excellent. Various channels for home and work and they have been great. I’m sure there are better tools out there, but this has really changed things for the better for me.
We're a small team of a bit more than 10 people and slack has definitely improved our lifes.
Before there was always someone moving around to talk to someone else or internal E-Mails which are equally bad.
We use slack sparingly and only have a few channels with many people. Most things happen in private channels. We always "idle-ping" other team members first and do not expect an immediate response.
The result is a much calmer office. People move around less and there is less chatter. And we still have the option to use group chat if required.
We even added a channel where new commit messages are automatically posted. A wonderful thing to keep informed about what's going on and you can take immediate action if you see something strange.
I think this all falls apart if our team size would increase. But I believe for teams with less than 25 people slack is perfectly fine. Above that size notifications probably start to be annoying.
Yes. I really like it. Since roughly 1998, I've done work chat on IRC, hipchat, MOOs, and a web-based chat app I built with a friend. Slack is the best of any of them.
Honestly I feel the same way about email. I work in an office culture where rapid email replies are strongly encouraged. But as a project-based worker, that kills my momentum. I've generally gotten away with semi-ignoring it by checking email morning, mid-day, end of day, and strongly encouraging people to call me in the interim with anything truly urgent.
Don't forget, it is YOUR choice to have Slack open. Nobody is forcing you to. It might be an unspoken rule to do so, but I value productivity more. In the event someone has something important to say (rarely the case), come up or call me (or PM me on IRC).
Anecdotal but most companies I’ve worked with that use Slack,
1. Don’t give devs company phones (and no one should ring my personal cell)
2. Have remote people they communicate with frequently (ask the remote people how slack has included/enabled them more than ever)
3. Only use email for non-urgent, one-way, or external messaging (although bringing high-value 3rd parties into Slack has been great in my experience)
No matter your concerns about Slack, once you’re in a company using it you have no choice but to embed yourself completely.
Set standards on when people use the group notifications is a start. But in general just having standards that people agree upon for channel message priority is the way to go.
I think Slack is a bit undervalued more than over valued. The market is big enough for Slack + Microsoft, Amazon Chime, G Suite and so many other players to coexist. Also Slack to me feels like a good enough messaging apps.
P.S: I hate it's knock-knock chime when engrossed in work and the fact that i have to keep the app running to get notifications.
Slack is a great product (vs email or public chat alternatives). I wish them the best expanding their user base.
Are they worth 16B? None of the armchair investors here know their financials (addressable market size, user growth rate, expected ARPU etc). Until a careful analysis done, I would caution you against coming to a quick conclusion.
Why do you say that it's good vs email? In my mind they're for different purposes.
Slack for urgent matters, email for asynchronous communication that isn't quite as urgent. Email is also better for things that the recipient may want to refer back to in the future.
Regardless, I wish that my co-workers would stop sending a message only saying "hi, name" and then waiting for me to stop working to respond before they type their actual question. "not only am I going to interrupt you, but I'm going to make you acknowledge the interruption before making you wait while I SLOWLY type the actual incomplete question".
<Grumble, grumble, I hate when people misuse Slack>
We tried HipChat for a whole day before bouncing. It was so bad. Had hilariously poor UX, using commands like \code to get a single line of monospaced text, iirc.
Weirdly enough, I had heard that HipChat used to scale better than Slack. Supposedly Uber used to use the former rather than the latter because once an org hit a certain threshold in thousands of users, Slack was no good. This was years ago, however.
Uber did use HipChat instead of Slack, but mostly because Slack was uninterested in standing up servers for Uber. My understanding is that Slack basically ran a single server instance for each Slack team.
Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional. It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone.
Uber eventually replaced it with a (forked) Mattermost cluster.
" It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone."
That was my hipchat experience a few months ago. Thankfully I don't have to use it anymore
Slack usability has steadily been decreasing over time.
On desktop I am not getting the "unread" grouping but mobile I do.
The drafts feature is on both and can't be disabled.
Both of them break habits of where my channels are. It is terrible UX.
The "threads" feature on the sidebar allows you to reply to a thread but if you get a counterreply you need to click to see it. A better flow can be found if you click the channel name on top of the thread -- there's no indication like a timestamp or anything this jumps you to the thread in the channel -- and then click the thread link in-channel and then answer in the sidebar -- now the conversation flows without further clicks. Do I need to mention how terrible UX this is?
The threads feature is pretty close to useful, but it still buries information and it isn't clear to other users in a channel when a thread becomes "live" again unless they explicitly follow the thread or make a comment. Both of those actions require excessive clicking on the desktop client (at least for Ubuntu).
The most frustrating part for me is that keyboard navigation for threads is nonexistent, and it forces you to weave in and out with your mouse.
Maybe now they have some money they can finally afford make video chat work on mobile.
We ended up switching to zoom for video chat because it worked on phones as well as computers and handled slow connections (US<->Australia) much better than Slack's electron chat.
The fb foray into a phone market with that device was an utter disaster and a joke.
The fb phone basically introduced one “feature” ‘the circle profile pic’ and the physical phone was chintsy and lame....
Go back in time to the danger device. The hiptop was cool, and all, but even then there was a miss. Regardless of the fact that danger became android... there was still a miss.
We beed a messaging only platform device.
This need has not been solved.
If a slack-first device existed where i have topical channels for things and branch channels, but i can dm and pm and mm people.... thats the device i want.
Just give me a slack-first os on a device and ill be ok.
I like the human story: Stewart Butterfield co-creates Flickr, revolutionizing online photo sharing; sells it for what at the time was "real money" but quickly discovers he could have held out for a whole lot more; burns through some VC failing at games; and then has that Eureka! moment when he realizes the Enterprise will eat any damn thing you feed it, and he hatches his plan to join the nine-zeroes club he missed out on in 2005, software quality be damned!
These declarations of valuation should be followed by a little note explaining what multiple of earnings (or, failing that, sales) this represents, and how fast it is growing.
Is that high? Low? about right?
Well, it depends if Slack made $100 million in sales and is flat, or if it did $2B in sales and is doubling every year.
(I assume that it doesn't have earnings because its still growing and plowing all that money back into the business)
My company is in the middle of switching from Slack to Microsoft teams. The water cooler talk is that we're paying Slack $1000-$2500 per year per user.
It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.
I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.
We started using slack just for our dev/eng teams at work, and the interest grew to some of our customer side teams and non-technical teams, but management have been reluctant to expand Slacks licensing. Then we realized Teams is included with our MS licenses, so now we're giving the non-dev/eng side of the company that. It's only a matter of time before someone with a little sway asks "Why are we paying for this when we have Teams?" the murmurs have already begun, it just has to hit the right ears, so the days are numbered.
Both my current company and the one prior to that did the same switch.
We all preferred Slack but the cost was just ridiculous and no one could justify it. Teams came for 'free' with all the other Microsoft stuff we were already paying a licence for.
Why/how is your org paying that much per user? I was under the impression that Slack topped out at well below that figure even for all the enterprise bells and whistles. I assume there are additional services/features that I’m not aware of? On-premise or dedicated hardware? Special data location requirements?
Well they work out their own deals per business. Their standard rate is 180$/user/year (without pay-up-front discounts) but that doesn't include SSO or terabyte storage per user. I'd be curious to know what add-ons a corp might stretch the budget for, I can't find details for what they charge for SLA
When i moved companies, i went from Slack to Teams also. Dont notice the difference really. Our company did it because of the same reason they use outlook.
Probably Atlassian. It's not the quantity of products so much as the desire to use them and their establishment as the product to use for a given purpose. Slack doesn't have that many competitors that are as useful. Whereas Atlassian has a lot of products no one has ever heard of and a lot of competitors other people have heard of.
With all these IPOs coming to market at nearly 50-60 times their earnings remind me of the dot com era. Bond yields are inverting just like before the previous crash in 2008. I see another wealth transfer on the horizon. The smart money is securing the bag.
Experiment for slack fans: Start talking about something in a channel with ~20 people. Then ask a friend to ask another question in the same channel. What happens? A mess. You now have 2 conversations modeled with a single stream of single-line messages, with no context. One someone starts a conversation in a channel every single other user in that channel now has to wait. (or risk being pushed up past the fold, which people never scroll to)
Chat just isn't how work gets done. Or how knowledge is transferred and, most importantly, retained.
Rocket.chat and Mattermost are also great open source alternatives. I was surprised I couldn't find an open source plugin for live chat with Slack. Rocket.chat has that built-in and I host it on a VPS.
Congrats and all. But the app still sucks. Since last update, on windows, randomly quits but leaves an invisible process behing consuming 25% cpu. Changing organizations the first time in the day takes ages (imagine when you have a dozen).
One aspect of many SaaS companies that I am concerned about is their exposure to economic downturns. Slack charges on a per-user basis, so if their average customer reduces their workforce by 10%, Slack's revenue reduces by 10%.
Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history.
- They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.
- They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS.
- They managed to make a lot of people absolute convinced advocate of Slack so that a lot of hyped startups have now to use Slack de facto or risk mutiny and have people create Slack channels on behalf of the company without any oversight.
So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. I'm convinced that we will see Slack retrospectively as something that destroyed productivity.
I will agree that Slack can be useful when used correctly but I never saw a place that used it without it becoming that "attention driven" growing monster.
I see this complaint a lot, and I'm very sensitive to dopamine addiction myself so perhaps a few of my tips can help someone else make Slack less frustrating:
1. use /mute judiciously. especially on the main chats. only unmute important "#500" style channels. People immediately learn to @you when relevant.
2. disable notifications for everything on mobile: DMs, @here, @channel, @yourname, anything. No notifications whatsoever.
3. Put "Notifications disabled -- in case of emergency, please call me: <phone nr here>" in your status. I've had one person call me ever and it was completely justified. He saw the status, called me and said, "sorry I'm calling but it's an emergency and your status said to call." Great.
4. Disable all notifications on your desktop app, as well. On Mac OS X, don't even have the red app button show up for unread messages. Just check Slack once an hour (or what you want) and deal with any DMs / @mentions / outstanding chat. In reality, you'll automatically check whenever you have mental downtime, or during a conversation. This just allows you to stay in the zone when you are.
This has significantly reduced my Slack-stress. I enjoy it far better now, on my terms.
Most importantly: if someone is frustrated by your poor response time, explain! "I'm very bad with distractions, I need this to cope. If it's an emergency, please call :)". People are good people, they understand.
> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an "attention driven" work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.
I see where you're coming from. But anecdote time.
The immediate communication fixed something for us which would previously be a more disruptive tap on the shoulder, or alternatively an only once a day processed e-mail.
Slack gave our devs time to finish their thought, write out that line of code, before tabbing to Slack to see what's up.
Because you see, I love my team, but they're not perfect. Just like the vast majority of people they're imperfect beings working with imperfect information.
And in order to get them to output quality code (as in, does what it needs to do, bug free, without incorrect assumptions about data) they need to communicate to each other and me.
We can't wait until a PR to catch they didn't fully understand these data models setup by another guy.
Nor can we wait until a PR to realize someone took the wrong approach trying to fix a problem.
Someone getting disrupted might mean someone else can progress with their task.
What I'm trying to get at, I need my team to communicate and communicate often.
We have plenty of issues, just like any team, but most of them come from the lack of communication.
Slack, or any other similar platform allowed to strike somewhat of a happy medium where the barrier to communicate isn't too high nor too low.
It's less formal and faster than an email. And keeps a better log than an in-person conversation would.
Added bonus, it also helps us to have a more liberal 'work from home' policy.
What previously was a tap on the shoulder is now a message and a tap on the shoulder after three minutes if there is no reply.
Slack has become the worst possible amalgamation of email and telephone. When previously minor things were discussed asynchronously over mail, only major and immediate issues warranted a phone call. Now all kinds of noncritical correspondence gets pushed to an instant messenger application, where every issue has to be paid attention to immediately.
It's not just productivity. It can also damage quality of relationships and introduce unnecessary conflict - as any written communications tool does - because people also fall for using Slack to discuss tough issues. It doesn't replace actual in-person conversation, but especially younger workers and managers don't know that and suffer a lot due to lack of emotional fidelity of actually using their bodies to talk.
Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back. If it affects younger workers more than others, then that's because they haven't learned this skill yet. It's one of many things which people new to the workplace have to manage.
Some of the other more obvious emotional issues include procrastination and imposter syndrome. Everyone experiences these emotional swings. Experienced workers learn how to manage them. The earlier the better.
There are lots of things broken in the space of "work." Teaching younger workers how to deal with emotions is one of them.
>Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back.
That's close to saying "bullets don't kill people, the hole in their vital organs does".
The thing is, text-based communication tools are problematic compared to face-to-face communication, even in people who know how to "manage their emotions", because they hide non-verbal clues and make statements easier to misconstrue.
In a professional setting, you can fall back on the rules of the workplace. My boss might be angry, but I don't need to read that he's angry. I just need to keep doing my job. Or I get fired. I'll survive either way (losing a job and finding a new one is part of the game.)
I don't need to care about the emotional states of the people I work with. There's base-lines of professional conduct and courtesy. If I reasonably follow those, then I'm good.
And what if your boss is just an asshole? What if the reading you take of the person on the other line isn't just a misunderstanding? This person really is being a jerk, then what? You be a professional. You don't have to take excessive abuse, you can quit. You can warn the customer that you will end the call (and you can carry through with the threat.) Being a jerk isn't necessarily abuse though.
Don't take things personally. Do your job. Work the process. Quit if things aren't working for you. This requires an orienting yourself to an environment which works differently from your home. It requires managing your emotions so that you aren't taking an existential threat level analysis with every non face to face conversation.
It's a different situation if I'm talking to my wife or children. Those are personal relationships.
Unlike being poked in a vital organ, communication is a repeatable exercise, so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.
Face-to-face communication may be ideal, but it has huge overhead and limits. Compared to the scale of communication text (especially one over the wire) enabled, I think the world is much better off with the tech than it would be without it.
Yes? I mean, I don't have issues communicating over text on HN, or the subreddits I frequent, or the Slacks, IRC channels and the mailing lists I'm on, ...
What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace. I know what's going on over at YouTube comments, or /r/all, but such people are all mysteriously absent from my meatspace circles, with no effort on my end to specifically identify and avoid them. I sometimes see them speaking unreasonable things when I pass them by on the street, but that's the limit of my exposure [0].
It's kind of similar to what Scott identified[1] as "dark matter people", except they seem to be inhabiting all the non-niche Internet forums.
Point being, if you exclude unreasonable people, text-based communications are fine. If you include unreasonable people, I wouldn't trust face to face communications either; if someone wants to abuse you with words, they can do that just as well in physical proximity.
--
[0] - Actually, the closest I've ever been to talking with such people was the couple of times during my university years when I ended up on some completely random party with people I didn't know. This suggests to me that there's a strong but barely noticeable filtering/selection effect in meatspace social networks. School selection, or workplace selection, aren't random enough to break out from it.
>What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace.
And it doesn't occur to you that it's the nature of the communication (online vs face to face) that might be a factor in this?
- Chat apps have been around for a while but now that Slack has been so widely adopted working remote has become a lot easier.
- Screen sharing for pair programming where everyone has the client installed and we don’t have to convince anyone to pay for it is great. (I’m very sad Slack is shuttering this service though)
- When I’m in the office I find that people who used to interrupt me by walking up to my desk and completely detailing my work are more polite with a Slack message now. That is much easier to delay even if only for a few minutes when needed.
- large meetings where it is tempting to completely tune out can still be productive if I can interact on slack.
Your points are all valid for some but it’s only one side of the coin.
> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.
I experience quite the opposite. With in-person communication, people barge in, demand you drop what you're doing now and answer their question/conversation.
With slack, you can answer them when you need a break or have finished something up.
No, on Slack (or any other similar chat) I can jump in and answer a co-worker that had a question when I'm available, if they are also available they reply and we have a short convo that takes much less time than e-mailing back and forth which usually ends with a "let's talk this in person".
Having realtime chat has saved me countless hours of participating in e-mail threads that end nowhere, at the same time as helping me be less interrupted as I tell people to send me a message first and if it's really urgent to interrupt me.
I don't care about Slack as a company but I'm happy that a IRC-like chat ended up in the mainstream and is useful for my day-to-day.
Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own "label/category/folder/whatever your e-mail client calls it" on a sidebar so I can keep track of activity happening in which mailing list.
In Slack or any IRC-like chat I can keep track of the channels that interest me, I keep track of live operations, my team's public channel to see if there are stakeholders having issues with our systems, our private channel for internal team discussions (even more when I'm working from home). The engineering announcement channel to keep track in realtime of changes being performed to other systems or our infrastructure and getting quick status updates.
Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.
> Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own
There's a field on emails called subject.
Linux kernel is still developed using mailing list, I can imagine only a few things harder than that, still the kernel team manages to work on it just fine, without being in the same physical space.
Channels are just another way of labeling stuff...
> (even more when I'm working from home)
emails have been distributed, async and remote-aware since the 60s.
I'm really genuinely curious to understand why people keep making this point, while that's one of the most irrelevant feature of Slack.
I'm not saying email is perfect, just saying that your points are not a unique feature of slack, anyone of them have existed for decades.
> Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.
Just like channels on Slack after a while.
BTW https://www.mattermost.org/ offers the same features Slack offers, but I guess people are not switching because mattermost is not a recognized brand.
Just like people don't buy Nike shoes to ditch them for equally comfortbale but brandless flea market shoes.
Like I have previously said: I have no personal investment in Slack, I couldn't care less if it was Mattermost or whatever.
Unfortunately for us, tech people, business decisions are taken on ease-of-use and other features that we don't tackle when we focus on the technical aspects of products, companies don't want to invest to roll out their own infrastructure, for anything, that is why the cloud is a thing. It's the same with a chat app, if a company can pay another company and offload all of the liability and responsibility to an easy-to-use product, they will do.
I don't know why you are ranting with me. I have used mailing lists before, I have used IRC before and I know what kind of workflows each can improve on my 15 years of career.
E-mails don't cut it, it's not the same ease of use, I don't care if technically I can achieve the same results, the interface and interaction is different and this is enough of an improvement for a product to have its place over another.
Good for the Linux Kernel to keep being developed on a mailing list, the rest of the world doesn't and is better if another tool can improve communication, be it IRC, Mattermost or Slack.
Create a product better than Slack and push it around to solve this problem, don't try to preach this to me, a mere cog in the system that is trying to be productive.
We're working on getting more awareness around Mattermost as an open source Slack-alternative.
We just raised another $50M to invest in our product, on top of $20M we announced 4 months ago. Compared to the $1.2B Slack's raised, it's not that much--but we think dollars in open source can do more.
Our market is enterprise, particularly enterprise DevOps, so there's not as much brand marketing going on.
If Slack were Nike, I think Mattermost would be like the manufacturer of business-style shoes people wear into banks, governmental agencies, manufacturing companies, etc. where sneakers don't typically go.
We want to be just as comfortable and functional as Nikes, but our priority is to make our users and customers look good, and make them successful and build their brand, not promote our brand.
Yes and no, but the problem with (and benefit of) email is that it's a bit more formal. It's like writing a letter vs calling people.
Email threads tend to become illegible messes too, at least in the circles I'm in. Different formatting, different quote styles, and there's one email chain nowadays where the background color turned black so I can't read it without highlighting the text. There's also the thing where it's far too easy to CC people, which, granted, is a thing in Slack as well possibly but it's not yet ingrained in Slack culture in most places to make big group chats with all kinds of managers and only tangentially involved people. A lot of email is written in cover-your-ass mode with excessive formality and CCing a lot of people.
I'll take a direct message anyday when it comes to day to day stuff. I prefer important announcements, events, etc to still be in email though.
> So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this.
While I understand where your complaints are coming from, I encourage you to think about the fact that so many companies are "falling" for them.
You and I might care about disturbances, "attention driven" work culture, open protocols, etc., but not everyone is a software engineer. The world is bigger than that. Clearly, some people quite enjoy Slack. I'm not saying it's the most optimal product, but perhaps being optimal is not as important as it seems.
Many people enjoy candy too, doesn't mean it's good for you. Not everyone is a software engineer, but everyone has limited attention.
Slack's chat nature as the OP points out favours instant messaging over batching up replies, which, like many bad habits, appeals to the reward portion of our brain but is genuinely unhelpful in structuring work. There's a reasonable (and increasing amount) of evidence that multitasking and context switching can lower your working IQ by 10 to 15 points. Deep Work by Cal Newport does a good job of going into the detrimental affects that distraction from workflows has on people.
you put it better than I did in my initial post. They managed to hack that reward part of the brain with immediate interaction at the expense of deep meaningful work that require long periods of reflection before producing anything.
My beef with Slack is that everyone in this comments section is pretending it's an async communication tool, but that is only true people that are used to working without context switching and acknowledge that interrupting someone has a cost. For everyone else, there is an expectation of prompt responses, or you are considered untrustworthy if you take too long to respond.
I suspect a lot of frustration fundamentally revolves around trust. If there is a lack of trust, it must get compensated with an increase in visibility. Slack just happens to be a decent tool to provide visibility.
Story time: in a company I worked for, the Most Senior Engineer requested to be exempt from participating on Slack as the only person outside management, and skip the daily stand-ups. He did get a lot more done. I envied him quite a bit - mostly because our stumbles and challenges (just normal development stuff) were very visible and prompted lots of nervouse queries from PMs and sales people via Slack about why our tests are failing and why we needed to refactor code, whereas he only needed to show the end result of his work after a few months. Even if we had both experienced the same amount of 'challenges', his way of working gave him a lot more credibility because he got to control the narrative where his solution emerged working as designed (because any development hurdles he may have had were invisible to our PMs and sales). However, he did have a lot of pre-existing trust with key people to pull this off in the first place.
I hope I get to a point in my career where I can operate like that.
We're a small team of a bit more than 10 people and slack has definitely improved our lifes. It's easy to use, has lots of integrations, looks good, is free to use without the unlimited archiving of messages and works on desktop an mobile. Everyone can use it, developers, marketeers and managers alike.
Before there was always someone moving around to talk to someone else or internal E-Mails which are bad, too.
We use slack sparingly and only have a few channels with many people. Most things happen in private channels. We always "idle-ping" other team members first and do not expect an immediate response.
The result is a much calmer office. People move around less and there is less chatter. And we still have the option to use group chat if required.
We even added a channel where new commit messages are automatically posted. A wonderful thing to keep informed about what's going on and you can take immediate action if you see something strange.
I think this all falls apart if our team size would increase. But I believe for teams with less than 25 people slack is perfectly fine. Above that size notifications probably start to be annoying.
As a long-time IRC fan (I found many important persons in my life there!), I'm also a bit salty that open protocols didn't triumph and so many people salivate about features of Slack that were already in IRC in the nineties. But I don't get the horror stories about Slack poisoning work culture, I haven't experienced them.
At my workplace, we are a team of 7 (in a research project, it's academia but I don't think our way of organizing things is too different from a small startup), we have been using Slack for like a year and we have a sane relationship with it. Yesterday I think there were like 2 or 3 messages in our Slack, no more were needed. At other points (with looming deadlines, etc.) there is more activity, but it's always activity related to work that needs to be done, and my feeling is that it mostly reduces the amount of email, and sometimes also substitutes private messaging that some of us were using for work-related issues. Which is a plus for work culture, because we keep work and leisure separated. And as there are no notifications outside working hours, I think it has actually been positive for work-life balance, compared to using email or other messaging systems.
I don't know if it's a matter of team size (I can imagine that Slack may be more prone to becoming a behemoth in a huge team?), the personalities of the people using it, or that companies/teams where Slack is problematic already had a problematic work culture in the first place. Maybe it also helps that we don't have the paid plan at my team, so since logs are not stored, we use it for immediate teamwork and we instinctively shift to email or other means for important stuff that needs to be on record or consulted later. But for whatever reason, for us it hasn't become a growing monster. I'm curious about the factors that make it a blessing or a curse.
1. you don't have to reply right away
2. chat being a set of open protocols has been a pipe dream of nerds for ages, the reality is that slack is your universal protocol now and everything preceding it forgot that actual humans had to use it
3. you seem unable to comprehend that people actually...like Slack???
Probably by having a product people like to use. They never used any crazy marketing as far as I saw, so kudos to them for building something people wanted to advocate for.
I wonder how startups come up with valuations. In this climate it seems the market is ready to fill in any valuation and convince itself that it was the right one. Seems like they could easily have gone higher
Zoom works perfectly every single time. I've managed to make Slack's audio call feature work only rarely. I wish Slack had decent shared whiteboard, screenshare, and audio/video conferencing but that is a hard problem and they are currently not able to deliver. Zoom does flawlessly.
So given a required rate of return of 5% - $16B is how much you would pay for consistent risk free, net inbound cash flows of $800m per year, in perpetuity.
One way of getting that would be 800m users generating profit after expenses of $1 each every year.
This is a chat app that is completely and totally replaceable with irc. No really it is. $800m per year in clear profit.
Is that really feasible in any way? How? What's the bait and switch here? (With facebrick it was the surveillance nobody knowingly agreed to. Is there something like that here?) Can anyone do a back of the envelope calculation to make this price make sense?
> Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it's hard for people to understand why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying it for themselves.
It isn't.
I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people, but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their business is hoarding users to the point that it's the "default" app in their given context.
I'm not saying it's bad. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it anyway.
Eh, maybe I'm in the minority here, but I've been forced to work on MS teams for a project and it's atrocious compared to Slack. Not to mention the lack of a client for linux, their web app doesn't work in chromium for no reason (it does in chrome), and the UX is just shit.
Slack just works and their UI/UX is on point, everything is intuitive. Their client is slow and eats RAM, but I totally see that it's more useful than other chat applications.
MS Teams works well enought for me at work. All I want is having a chat window with the old messages on top to be able to send copy pasted variable names and chat abit.
Skype for Business doesn't save the conversation and is useless (it mails it to you ...), for example.
Slack macOS application is without question the worst performing software I use. Launching slack causes my cpu usage to skyrocket to 100% for 5 or so seconds.
They will be “successful” once they become profitable. Until then, they still haven’t proven that they have a business model where they can charge customers enough to cover expenses.
They could be profitable tomorrow by decreasing their advertising spend. Their current customers are absolutely profitable, they're just choosing to use some of that money investors are throwing at them to keep growing.
Venture capitalists are cashing their investments by IPOs - sure sign that the next financial crisis is starting soon :) Dotcom Bubble 2.0 is ready to burst.
EDIT: I do not imply that venture capitalists poses some insider knowledge. It is not necessary. It's just the fact that when bullshit companies with bullshit product, that generate losses instead of profit get valued at $16B (other recent examples include Lyft and Uber) it means that economy is in crazy state, and it does not take much to induce panic. My guess is one of these unicorns will fill for bankruptcy soon, thus pushing the market over the edge.
Yet, I have no real evidence that points me to its truth. The thinking seems to be predicated on VCs having inside knowledge or excellent speculative skills. That might be true, but presumably they're not the only strong speculators.
Are we seeing other major players move out of tech? We're certainly not seeing massive liquidation in general.
I would encourage people to read the Pets.com 10-Q to understand what the dot com bubble was like from a corporate finance perspective, because there are deeper lessons than "Some companies with substantial Internet operations IPOed."
Slack, unsurprisingly because it sells software, has positive gross margins rather than negative gross margins; they're healthy at ~80%. They appear to be able to turn $1 of sales and marketing spend in Year 1 into > $1 of software revenue in year 2. Their churn rate on a dollar basis is 43%. Excuse me, -43%; a cohort of SaaS customers paying $100M in year 1 will pay $143M in year 2 due to growth in number of seats more than offsetting churning accounts.
There is no price at which a rational person should want to own Pets.com. There is, very clearly, a price at which a rational person should want to own Slack.
I don't think people who say this were even around at the time of the dotcom bubble. There were public companies adding "tech" to their names and seeing their values rise 10x in a day. THAT was a bubble.
megaremote seems to be located in Australia and was looking for work in May[1], the claim they work for slack seems to be complete fabrication/wishful thinking/cynicism
I hear people mention Slack once in a while on various forums but I have no clue what it is. I do not know anyone who uses it so it's not something I, or anyone I know, feels a need for--otherwise we would be searching it out. And therein lies a problem. $16B for something few people need or want? I guess I have to look up Slack and see what it is.
EDIT: So I looked it up and it looks like something useful for a lot of remote workers that need constant, instant contact with people working on the same stuff at the same time. To me that's a pretty niche market. If I thought the phone or email wasn't good enough, I might pay $5/month for such a service. But irc works pretty good still today.
There's a venn diagram with an intersection of people who use Hacker News and people who don't know what Slack is, and it's literally just you. It's bizarre to me that you feel the need to share your opinion on the valuation of something you knew nothing about a half an hour ago.
That said, $16B seems to be about 4x more than I would have expected.
That I've been deeply involved in the design and implementation of both hardware and software for 40 years and know nothing about it, and don't know anyone in the industry who does either, is a comment on the $16B evaluation. Companies thrive on the needs and wants of people which is why Coke and Google and Microsoft stock prices are so high and maintain those levels. I don't find want and need for Slack among anyone I know. A small space but the same people have heard of and use Coke, Microsoft and Google.
On the contrary, I literally don't know anyone who doesn't know what Slack is. I'm not sure if it's a generational gap, corporate gap, or what, but I've used it at multiple organizations both in and out of tech.
The alternative interpretation of what you have said is that $16B is actually too low and that Slack is undervalued or at the very least it has a lot of room to grow.
Is 16B really too high of a valuation when Atlassian is double the market cap at 32B? Both have similar products (collaboration/productivity) and are extremely sticky.
Atlassian has a wider suite of products. I would say HipChat is the Slack alternative. Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello. And Atlassian is more developer centric whereas Slack is monetizing enterprise users.
Actually hipchat was quite nice to use, fast and responsive for awhile, and I loved some of their built in emoticons. I think they didn't really maintain it and keep it up to date with the competition.
Atlassian products are more mission-critical. Most companies actually need some tool that does what Jira or Bitbucket does. They don't really need Slack.
I've worked at companies both with and without Slack. Something like Slack might be mission critical for a remote-first company, but comparing the two situations, I've actually noticed better communication without Slack than with it.
We use slack at the three companies I currently work on and it's mostly a distraction and a place to quickly share files. It's good for some shared notifications. My most active slack is one I have with friends.
It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B for that is a complete insanity.
This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era
At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales
Very zen, worth rethinking the value of this statement too.
Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you better get to the real quality differences.
Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you start conversations about the depth of a thing instead of emotional discussions defending your positions.
Anyone could build Facebook, the value is the existing userbase. I would think that slack would be one of the easiest tools to replace because its only used within organisations so you can get everyone to switch at once.
The entire slack userbase could vaporise within weeks if slack made a wrong move. Slack doesn't really bring anything special to the table.
Slack made 140m in the first quarter of this year, their valuation is based on how fast they've grown their business and how fast it continues to grow. They don't sell ads, they sell seats, they're a SAAS company. 16B is not insane for a company that has grown revenue at their pace and continues to grow revenue.
I agree, but in a less disparaging manner. I'd say rather, the barrier to entry is super low, many competitors exist, and some arguably better. I don't feel they have runaway velocity like say, FB achieved early on when in a similar boat.
Dropbox took on a problem users have (how can I sync my files between multiple computers?) and provided a great solution to it.
Slack takes a problem users have ("my coworkers keep bugging me with stupid questions") and makes the problem worse, because now your coworkers can see that you're online and demand instant answer :)
Slack is also very popular with open source and hobbyist communities. People often seem to assume that it's used only at work, which I guess makes some amount of sense given that the vast majority of paying customers are probably workplaces. Slack would already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed.
It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.