I'd think Excel-based games would be more common. It's dataflow programming after all, which is the only form of massively parallel programming that ever caught on in a big way.
I really liked Glitch. The aesthetic was really cool and it always felt cozy. Was sad to see it go, but I can kind of understand it since I don't know they ever had a real business model to it.
Not really; MMO is just a massively multiplayer online game, it doesn't have to be an RPG. It could just as well be an FPS, RTS or any other genre...
</nitpicking>
Making an MMO is an incredibly hard but rewarding endeavor. There are so many subsystems that you can design and program that you will never end the game; but you will end much wiser.
I'm somewhat surprised that Amazon didn't end up acquiring Slack, considering that the major thing they are missing compared to Microsoft is productivity tools. If they had purchased Dropbox and Slack they could've gotten a foothold rather quickly and slowed down one of Microsoft's major selling points (you already use Office, why not Azure?). Discord could be another interesting company in the chat space, as I'm sure they are considering an enterprise play (if they aren't they are insane, considering they have one of the more user friendly chat services and with SSO and a SLA they could probably charge $10 per user).
(Yes, I know Chime exists. But I don't think I've ever heard of anyone using it, and Slack is still rather popular.)
Amazon is a big place and I can't speak for all of it, but while IT announced that slack was "available" a few months ago, I don't personally know anyone that has actually switched to using it. Everyone still uses Chime.
That may just be a peculiarity of my department, but saying "Amazon as a company switched to slack" is definitely overstating what happened.
>I don't personally know anyone that has actually switched to using it. Everyone still uses Chime.
It must be just your org/team, because a few of my friends working there in entirely different orgs had their teams switched to Slack fully within the week of announcement. Not claiming you are wrong though, because my sample size of 3 people/teams is purely anecdata.
The video meetings are easily the worst part of Slack. Even though Slack meetings are free and integrated, everyone at my org still uses Zoom with Slack instead.
It may be Firefox. The video conferencing platform we use (Dekko Lynx) requires Chrome or Edge, because Firefox does not support the tech that Dekko needs for its end-to-end encryption calls (as we have been explained).
I work at a company that spends a lot of money at AWS, and one of the many support channels we have now is through shared Slack channels.
I can imagine that the main driver behind IT announcing Slack support was for their customer-facing staff to be able to provide support for their customers.
I would be interested to know more about these AWS Slack channels. Are the official? Do you get them with a particular support plan? Where can I find out more information on this?
They are officiall and we use our own slack instance. We have an internal dedicated slack channel with our aws team i(technical account manager, solutions architect etc) as well. It can be handy just for organising meetings etc but it is really hit and miss depending on your account team. We are on an enterprise plan.
It definitely helped to have a faster turn around time and provide more visibility for people.
This is super org-dependent -- my entire org has completely switched to Slack, I only use Chime for meetings now (except for the occasional recruiter or someone outside my org who will ping me on Chime).
Switching to slack was brought up in our org and most people were at best noncommittal, because the option wasn't really "chime vs. slack", it was "chime vs. chime AND slack".
We'd still all need chime for meetings and interacting with any groups that hadn't switched.
It's actually pretty smooth since you can do `/chime` in a Slack channel or DM and it automatically starts a Chime call. Otherwise I just keep Chime open for scheduled meetings.
Weird. From my little view of the Amazon world it seemed like everyone moved within a week of availability. I always thought Chime worked fine, but it seems the kids want to wear the cool sneakers.
Chime has the best noise canceling of any service I've used. On the other hand, I've only ever used it to talk to Amazon employees at their request. That says a lot about adoption.
One could copy-paste Discord, replace all occurrences of "gaming" for "enterprise" and it would be a much better business communication platform than Slack.
I don't think this is true. You can't really join/leave channels on Discord (yes I'm aware you can use roles to give permissions but it's not the same).
This is my biggest complaint about Discord, and the reason I rarely check the few servers I'm on. There are three channels out of 80 I'm interested in. Just let me leave them!
You can mute channels and hide them, or mute sections, or mute chanells and collapse the sections they are in. There are lots of ways to get channels you don't want out of your face.
You can opt-in with role-based permissions. Discord has been used by massive servers with hundreds of thousands of users, it's a bit involved to set up but it's not impossible. You can even automate a lot of it with bots.
You understand that an admin needing to set up a channel, a bot and a role is a bit more involved than any user just hitting create channel and inviting the relevant users/users searching and joining the public channel, right?
EDIT: Another example of discord's permission system being a poor match for the business use case is pinning messages to the channel is the same permission as deleting other user's messages. Additionally, the channel per server limit is 500.
It's like they took IRC, saw it worked for businesses, and were like "how can we fuck this up, slowly, to destroy the very essence of what made chat channels useful in the first place?".
The issue for my Slack workspaces is that they are not noisy. So what happens is, people (inadvertently?) make threads, which then turns off notifications about that conversation for everyone else, therefore taking them out of the loop. And because the room is not noisy, they may not notice that they've missed the conversation until hours or even days have passed.
Twitch already purchased Curse Voice about four years ago and renamed it to the Twitch Desktop application. It was what Discord is now before Discord existed. That was already a losing battle when Twitch made the purchase though so they ended up stripping out all of those features. It would have made more sense for them to buy Discord back then.
> Twitch already purchased Curse Voice about four years ago and renamed it to the Twitch Desktop application. It was what Discord is now before Discord existed.
Curse Voice released in June 2015. Discord released in May 2015.
At best you could fudge the numbers and claim that Discord and Curse came out at the same time. A claim that Curse Voice was anything before Discord existed is flat out false.
Curse Voice actually released in early 2014[1][2]. I remember mainly because that year is burned into my memory from the CTO at the time snapping his fingers non-stop into microphones testing noise/echo cancellation and latency.
I'm imagining a meeting a few years back, at Google:
"Ok, you know our motto, 'Don't be Evil.'?"
Heads nod.
"What if ... what if ... what if we simplify that?"
"How so?"
"Just cut off the first word, 'Be Evil.' Simple, elegant."
"I like it!"
----
Jokes aside, I think Google does a pretty good job of keeping the major products steady. Our little cohort on HN isn't a great sample for determining what "major" is.
Seems to me that either "Hangouts" (or whatever it's been most recently renamed to) is "major," and so many might argue it proves you false regarding "steady," OR it's not major, and discord would thus not be major and likewise not be kept "steady".
Given some of their moves with Google Workspace tying together Gmail / Meet / Chat, I doubt they could get away with this without significant antitrust issues.
They still haven’t fully closed on their Fitbit acquisition, so I’d expect they’d have a tough hill to climb for a Discord or a Slack.
It would if they build a completely free product to price out competitors. Then there's an easy case to be made that they're leveraging market power / dominance in one market to undercut rivals in another (e.g. running this new service with negative profits to gain market share before eventually boosting prices later.)
My gut reasoning is that cloud infrastructure is not the same product as office productivity and the two use cases are not the same, the purchasing decisions aren't made by the same people (except at scale, I guess, I'll concede that), and the boots on the ground building shit in the cloud take the path of least resistance where that logic would never apply.
I don't really subscribe to the belief that a company should half ass a product or acquire something in a new market because they aren't already there, but I may be in the minority. Amazon has shown they can build a trillion dollar enterprise without caring about office productivity or chat, but they'll sell the shovels to anyone who wants to try and dig those holes.
First, you start with Office 365, then you put some stuff on One Drive, you add a little list in SharePoint online, then you use Teams to access all that. You move to Azure AD.
And then you want to automate or do some nice charts, and there is Power platform just around the corner...
and then you find yourself limited so you go Azure Functions...
and then start one VM on Azure...
The jump from Power Platform to Azure Functions and a VM is likely not to be the same people
Power Platform is for "power users" to be able to "no code" things, this is targeted (MS Claims) as non-IT Users, as is the Rest of the office/Microsoft 365 stack
Azure (including Azure AD) however is targeted at IT Staff, dev's,sysadmins, etc. There is a clear line in how the tools are marketed, deployed, licensed and utilized
Next after that is running VDIs on either a small Citrix farm on Azure or as Desktop as a Service, since AD, SSO, 2FA ,Productivity tools and user file storage is there.
After that, you already have some firewalling and VPNs in place so adding the odd server is just a step away.
Adding dedicated lines and firewalls and rules and all bella and whistles with all four big players (AMZ, IBM, MSFT, GOOG) plus 2 ISPs adds cost fast, so you typically pick 2. MSFTbis already there for O365 so yeah, they have a head start
I kind of agree here, is Office 365 stuff targeted at devs and software companies? I sure don't care about it when I'm shopping for managed cloud services and infra to run my software.
You nailed it, Google product managers, specially in Cloud lack the Enterprise expertise. They need to get that a company with IT staff already went through updating NT to Windows 2000 and then 2008 and deploying Linux and Active Directory and Exchange 5.5, 2k..etc...many MS products which were de facto for any large Company, if you can't integrate with it you will never have a solid footstep into the Enterprise world, yeah they may use BigQuery and that's it.
My large disappointment with Google's Cloud Platform offering was lack of commitment to parity features.
I am sorry but the concept of "Beta release level" is a complete misfire/mismatch for what an enterprise needs. For example, you cannot, on one hand, advertise that you have a competitive feature (Google Functions competing with AWS Lambda), but then, on the other hand, turn around and label it beta and basically use that an an excuse for inferior reliability and inferior documentation. How can you basically GA a major piece of platform functionality, call it beta, and then ask any enterprise (that has lower risk tolerance) to use it? Enterprises don't want to invest into beta-labelled features, because they know it's an excuse for bugs and half-baked support. No wonder GCP is struggling for adoption.
("beta release" level is a conversation you have with select trusted partners that are willing to tolerate your early stuff in exchange for early access to value... it is not something that is acceptable to advertise as open enrollment to all)
Agree I heard they are changing the release process, they call it private early access now and then they will make it GA directly, no more alpha, beta and GA. But I think your point still is valid. Watching Re-invent today, just helped me realize that many Google Products are playing catch up and once launched Product managers and Eng team move somewhere else as there is no incentive to get promoted, this means your GA product may be understaffed or supported by new staff and at the end dead. Look at Cloud Datalab and the mess they have in ML world (Kaggle, Colab, AI Platform Notebooks, plans for new editor...etc)
I am sorry but the concept of "Beta release level" is a complete misfire/mismatch for what an enterprise needs.
Anyone who uses GCP knows you type “gcloud beta ...” an awful lot. But enterprise sales are made on the golf course between people who have never and will never use the product themselves.
Thank god they've changed that. Preview or GA is much harder line, where you can't hide behind a beta label for cycles on end. You can see the language in that release "give your business the confidence."
My point was that features were being advertised as essentially GA that were not actually GA. When evaluating the Google Cloud Platform sans-beta features, I was suddenly looking at a much more barren offering, in comparison to AWS.
Yes, thank you for the clarification. We had some problems with VPC-SC in the past. (ML training) and since it was Beta, there was no accountability. Anyways we are a AWS shop :)
Hear hear, here's to products getting the job done well and reliably, untouchably. If you want to come anywhere near close, you have to put out something considerably better and I've yet to see that. Maybe Google Docs is starting to get there. Still I see expert users driving towards Microsoft Excel, for example. Because they are productive with it like you wouldn't believe.
If buying a business would put Amazon in the position of having to introduce a new end-user customer support burden, then they are unlikely to do so.
Eero devices require this customer support, but that can be merged with their IOT support team for all other in-home objects. I think Amazon made an exception to their “user support is never our priority” choice because they know it’s the only way to get a physical foothold in our homes, with Kindle and Echo, and I think the burden of Eero support was worth it to them for the mesh networking technology that has been harvested for Sidewalk.
Slack customer support cannot be easily integrated with any existing Amazon support team that I’m aware of, and does not offer a world-changing advantage to that degree.
Not in my experience, at least in the relatively-rare occasions where exceptions happen. I had an order which Amazon claimed to have been delivered but wasn't, and it took several days and multiple interactions to resolve. Just figuring out a way to talk to a human felt like an ARG.
The question was whether Amazon has "relatively good customer support for retail", which it doesn't in my experience.
If we move the goalpost to "have I been able to resolve problems", then yes — after 30 minutes of research into how to hack Amazon customer support in order to talk with a human, followed by multiple phone and chat interactions with generous on-hold time, I can share that Amazon support for retail technically exists and is excellent except when compared to 95% of other customer support experience I've ever had.
> If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void.
Ooof, I believe you. I'm Facebook-free, but maybe it's time to start looking for another email provider.
Amazon removed the ability to filter items only shipped and sold by Amazon.com. That is an anti customer move that squarely puts Amazon in the bad customer service category.
I've had good experiences. But when you have bad experiences, they can be really bad. I ordered a TV on Amazon (Prime) and it was scheduled for delivery in 3 days. Because it's a large shipment truck delivery, they give you a window. Like Spectrum/Comcast. So I sat home all day and... nothing. I checked my messages and almost the exact time the delivery window was closing they left a message saying "could not deliver will try some other time" basically.
It took a month and about 15 customer service reps before a single person could tell me where my TV was. I'm not exaggerating. They had no clue what happened to a $1,000 purchase. It fell into their bureaucratic black hole like some scene from a Monty Python skit.
Amazon pays under market for acquisitions while sf pays above market. Unclear if slack would ever grow revenue to the level sf is offering at, nor if shrinking set of alternative high-payers like cisco/google/other will, so cashing out while they can at such a high level makes sense.
Not sure why using Office would be a reason to prefer Azure over something else. Can you elaborate? Are there some useful integrations one can benefit from?
Regarding Amazon buying Slack. My guess would be it's too expensive. If you look at Amazon's acquisitions history, you would see they almost never spend more than $1B. The one exception I recall is Whole Foods which they paid ~$13B for.
I think the big seller/on-ramp is Azure Active Directory. Once you’re all set up to permission your shared documents in Office, and log into your corporate machines with the same accounts, those permissions are automatically available to cloud services. Authentication/authorization is built in automatically to any app you want to spin up, much more easily than syncing your ldap accounts to AWS or creating them manually, and/or manually building auth for your internal app. So internal apps and resources end up on azure, and other usages follow.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, but I'm not here to tell you to use Azure - just providing an example for the use of AAD.
Kubeflow is an OSS framework for doing distributed data science / machine learning (including Tensorflow hence the name) on Kubernetes.
With the AAD integration it's just much more convenient to give a team of data scientists access to a Kubeflow Kubernetes cluster - AAD with the Kubeflow OpenIDConnect component will handle AuthN & AuthZ. Kubeflow itself sets up different Kubernetes namespaces for each authorized user upon first login.
You definitely don't need to run Kubernetes on AKS or Azure in general to take advantage of the AAD features.
Fewer vendors, unified billing/support/contract negotiations. These non-technical things are still integrations in a sense, that enterprises can benefit from.
It's nice to be able to get your email (Exchange), identity (Active Directory), productivity/office apps (Office), and underlying infrastructure (Azure), and even business intelligence/analytics (Dynamics) all from one place.
I don’t think Amazon wants this. It seems like they are trying to have more completely automated, higher scalable services for companies to build stuff on top of.
While slack and Dropbox are customer facing and build on top of Amazon.
Theoretically that stuff is more value added, but I think their markets are smaller compared to what Amazon is going for.
If the goal is to be the buggy whip maker for the universe there’s a lot more there until they need to start vertically integrating and buying stuff that uses the buggy whips.
> as I'm sure they are considering an enterprise play (if they aren't they are insane, considering they have one of the more user friendly chat services and with SSO and a SLA they could probably charge $10 per user).
I truly hope not. I like discord for its informal, gaming, and specifically not enterprise or "professional" approach/atmosphere. I use it to chat with friends and talk in some communities (eg. programming ones).
Maybe the culture at Amazon isn't a fit for Slack. Depends on the users, I guess, but it may end up as a tool that hinders productivity.
I think Salesforce compares itself to Microsoft and sees its ambitions to enter ERP, CRM and BI markets and they already have a collaboration platform with Teams, for better or for worse.
> If they had purchased Dropbox and Slack they could've gotten a foothold rather quickly and slowed down one of Microsoft's major selling points (you already use Office, why not Azure?).
Are you suggesting an enterprise is going to leave Office for Dropbox and Slack? Cause that's not happening.
Small businesses aren't nearly as attached, and the Office experience sucks on mobile and web. There's definitely a market for someone who can get that right, and I don't think that someone is Microsoft. I say this as someone who is irrevocably attached to Excel (and to a lesser extent, Word and PowerPoint), I don't think Microsoft is currently willing to cut off the entire ecosystem of software based around Office on the desktop, but if you were to make a clean break, make it cheap and have it work great on web and mobile, a new player could have a shot. There's tons of people going to Google and their suite isn't great, what if it was?
I would say Amazon’s main business is commerce. They want to be involved everywhere people are buying/selling things. AWS & Amazon.com are coincidences of them starting up around the same time as the internet.
Before long, they’ll own the entire feature for “oh, I need to buy cereal. Alexa buy me cereal. Ok, done. <few mins later>. I’m passing by the Amazon Go store on way home, Alexa. Can I return these shoes I bought last week and pick up my cereal there. Sure.”
What's the difference here? How can GAAP profit and net income be nearly a billion dollars in difference? I thought GAAP was standard accounting? What kind of operational losses are not included in GAAP
You left out the word "gross" but that word is important here. GAAP gross profit doesn't include operational cost, only product production cost. That's why it's gross and not net.
Yes the redundant orgs will probably be mainly laid off eventually. You don’t need 2 HR’s, G/A, etc. Sales will probably be reduced quite a bit and the engineering team will stick around.
Every acquired company always says that, practically verbatim. It's meaningless, the CEO doesn't have a say anymore. Salesforce's designs are the relevant direction now, and they're not telling. Facebook (Telegram, Oculus, Instagram) and IBM (dozens of companies) come to mind as specific examples of acquisitions in which the former CEO insisted that business would continue as usual, only for the management teams to be gutted and the company culture eradicated.
We're still remarkably separate from IBM, just as was promised. I do find myself collaborating from time to time with IBMers but most of the time we're pretty separate.
Their culture is very different than ours so it can be interesting when we team up. I think Red Hat is having a big impact on IBM honestly. They seem to be really embracing Red Hat tech and culture. I was really worried when the acquisition happened, but I no longer am worried about it. In fact, for the first time in a long time I'm optimistic about IBM. I'm looking forward to see what they do.
The subscription model is a true modernized return to the good old ways of creating a product that sells because it’s good quality. How? If a user is not satisfied, they will stop paying. Slack has all the incentives to improve their product, especially in the face of competition.
Is that true? For a social app where every user pays, sure, but Slack is generally paid for by a central business/group/organization. If the users in the organization are sufficiently unhappy with Slack, a functional organization should be unhappy with Slack, and if the organization is unhappy it can migrate everybody elsewhere overnight, with minimal social impact.
I can't possibly see this going well for salesforce. Buying slack for 70x revenue is insane. Their entire market is going to be eaten by teams and google chat, if it hasn't already. Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software because everyone is already using office. And those that aren't are on g-suite. Slack's recent guidance was horrible too.
Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?
Damn! What kind of research did you have to do to write all those names or did you remember them all? :) They're so many now, I can only remember a few
They'll kill hangouts? I´d say there´s a big danger that instead of switching to yet another Google chat service, ppl will just switch to telegram/whatsap/facebook messenger.
They've already announced its demise. It's just confusing because it'll be migrating into some other service that nobody who doesn't work at Google can distinguish from Hangouts.
Does it? It's not a good comparison. All of those are brand names for a product still offered with continuity of teams between them and while some of the brand names signaled breaks in compatibility for developers using the services, it was still ostensibly the same product. Whereas most of these Google projects were ostensibly entirely different teams with different project goals building externally similar projects because of internal politics.
It's also interesting to note that most of those backwards compatibility breaks in developer APIs in the Microsoft product mentioned have occurred as Microsoft has adapted to changes in (security) standards over the years, from entirely proprietary system, through custom extensions of WS-* and SAML standards, to today's OpenID Connect-based system. It's a very stark contrast to Google's messaging apps which started with the (XMPP) standards-based Google Chat and each subsequent product has been more proprietary, more of a walled garden, and less interoperable with other products.
So for a 1:1 comparison, let's consider the apps that MS has made in this space over the years. Ignoring the semi-annual rebrands and the MS chat products that were killed from before Google even existed (there's surprisingly many!), there's at least:
1. MSN Messenger (+ rebrands)
2. Skype
3. NetMeeting
4. Lync (+ rebrands)
5. Yammer
6. Kaizala
7. Teams
8. SharedView
9. Windows Meeting Space
10. Groove
11. Qik
I tried to err on the side of assuming that any time they killed one product and immediately replaced it with another, it was a rebrand. (E.g. were Office Communicator / Office Live Meeting / Lync / Skype for Business actually compatible? If not, they clearly weren't just rebrands.)
Overall this seems like a very similar amount of churn, product overlap, and politics-driven product management.
Skype, Qik, Yammer, and Groove were all acquisitions. (None of Google's messenger churn has the excuse of being an acquisition.)
Yammer is a social network and if Yammer counts for Microsoft as a "chat app" then Google gets to add Buzz, Reader, Orkut, G+, Wave, etc to the list.
Groove wasn't exactly a chat app either. It was more the P2P bastard child of Lotus Notes (or a P2P relative of SharePoint, sort of, in Microsoft terms). Chat was a feature, but it wasn't the emphasis of the app, the emphasis was more on shared workspaces (folders, documents). Some ideas that have resurfaced elsewhere in O365 and even Teams, though not in the P2P way without big cloud internet services that Groove attempted.
Windows Meeting Space was the last rebrand of NetMeeting, apparently. There's also evidence according to Wikipedia that SharedView piggy backed on the Windows Meeting Space codebase and in some ways was a "trial version" of Windows Meeting Space with different internet services backing it and paid for by ads.
Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated. (Except for support of on premises installs which still has a few more years on the clock. Another contrast to Google who has never supported on premises installs, much less for years after the projects died/moved on.)
> Yammer is a social network and if Yammer counts for Microsoft as a "chat app" then Google gets to add Buzz, Reader, Orkut, G+, Wave, etc to the list.
The list of supposed Google chat apps up the thread did in fact include both Buzz and Wave, so I'm just applying the same criteria. Hangouts was the chat part of G+, so I think it'd be double counting to include G+.
> Groove wasn't exactly a chat app either
Neither are Duo and Meet, which were in the list of supposed Google chat apps.
> Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated
I don't understand. The entire thing we're supposed to be mocking Google for here is that they launch chat apps, and then force users to migrate away. Now you're saying that all these Microsoft ones don't count, because they've either already killed them and forced a migration, or are already in the process of doing so.
> Skype, Qik, Yammer, and Groove were all acquisitions. (None of Google's messenger churn has the excuse of being an acquisition.)
Fair enough that this is different. But first, note that when Google discontinues a product they got from an acquisition, HN does not consider that to be an exenuating circumstance. I think it's fair to apply the same policy here. And second, nobody forced Microsoft to buy Skype when they already had a popular app doing just the same thing, which they then killed to make room for Skype.
> Neither are Duo and Meet, which were in the list of supposed Google chat apps.
Duo and Meet were video chat apps, which seems to be a part of "chat apps". You did include video chat apps/meeting/conference apps in the Microsoft list.
Groove is more like P2P Google Docs is maybe the closest Google analog. You wouldn't include Google Docs as a chat app would you? (Although I do know some folks that use it as such.)
>> Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated
> I don't understand. The entire thing we're supposed to be mocking Google for here is that they launch chat apps, and then force users to migrate away. Now you're saying that all these Microsoft ones don't count, because they've either already killed them and forced a migration, or are already in the process of doing so.
I wasn't saying that they don't count, I was simply furthering the conversation on exactly that sort of semantic question, and relatedly also this one:
> Hangouts was the chat part of G+, so I think it'd be double counting to include G+.
While the clients are nothing alike and there's a backcompat break in the servers, Lync/S4B provided the foundations for the tech that became Teams' voice and video chat. Does that make Lync the "chat part" of Teams? (Hangouts was also a briefly separate "product" before G+ and then again briefly after.)
Kaizala I don't know anything about directly, but what I was reading suggested that it has a ton of features, especially for bandwidth limited networks, that have never been a part of Teams before whenever the merger is supposed to happen and those features are added to Teams. When those features merge, does that make Kaizala a part of Teams? Supposedly (according to sources cited by Wikipedia) Microsoft has even been considering a "powered by Kaizala" sub-branding on those features, for the target users. If there is a "Kaizala part" of Teams, is that double counting?
> And second, nobody forced Microsoft to buy Skype when they already had a popular app doing just the same thing, which they then killed to make room for Skype.
Windows Live Messenger and Skype lived side-by-side for several years and Microsoft at the time was criticized by confusingly marketing both and keeping both alive. From what I saw as an outside observer, WLM died by its own hand and a death of a thousand papercuts. Skype, too, seems to be on the long path of killing itself with self-inflicted papercuts. I do admit both of those sad tales seem politically similar to what we observe of Google's chat efforts. That's two products I definitely feel are comparable to all that.
There was also MSN, and then on the side there was your Xbox Live account and your Games for Windows Live account. I think mine have all been merged at this point, but people at my job still click on the "work" account when they really want their personal (we don't use 365) and are confused when their account is empty.
Tangential question, is the new Google Pay a completely separate product from the old Google wallet? Because a lot of the functionality seems to be the same but I get the impression it was probably re-implemented since a lot of that functionally was removed from Google wallet years ago.
I would love to that you are right - but it not so easy.
I have two G Suite domains and I'm utterly and absolutely confused.
- in one domain I have "Chat" just under "Important" messages. But somehow I cannot send any chats. I see only chats from 2018 or so (when they shutdown Gmail Chat). The cool thing is that they look like read email messages. But I cannot send any chat.
- in other domain I have "Hangouts" but no Chat.
I hope this real world example illustrates why parent comment is correct when asking "Which one?".
The "Chats" under "Important" is a gmail tag/label for the messages that are archived into your gmail account from the messaging app.
Messages sent in Google Hangouts on my own domain today show up in my email under the "Chats" label, so this functionality is still working -- if you use the right/latest app, I guess.
The mobile Google Chat still doesn't let you switch accounts, like Hangouts supports. Perplexing, given how much people in the Google-sphere context switch.
For me there's a profile picture in the top right that opens an account dialog, from where a single tap switches to any other account. Do you mean something beyond that?
I see Meet, but not Chat, and none of my Chats show up in the Gmail app (iOS), and there's a separate Chat app (which doesn't do the account switching I mentioned).
Makes it more difficult to switch between Gmail and Meet though (to look something up while in a meeting) since they are now conjoined into the same app.
I can understand Facebook or WeChat building everything into the same app, making the app into an inner platform within the platform, but when Google already control the outer platform it doesn't make much sense.
You click the video button, switch tabs, and click the screen share button. I agree that chat sucks compared to slack and teams, but it's got enough functionality to not be a deal breaker for companies that are already paying gSuite. Especially if they've never used the superior competitors.
I don't think that's right, it's called Workplace now and I don't think it's been that long since they changed up the name. https://workspace.google.com/
No I mean the product that constitutes gsuite hasn't existed for 20 years. Gmail is 2004. drive, which is really the start of gsuite, is only 8 years old.
As far I can tell Google currently has two products called "Google Chat". One of them is available at chat.google.com for G-Suite customers and competes with Slack. The other is available in Android Messages and is the user-facing name for RCS.
Right, but OP was listing chat apps to say how many Google killed. Allo was the analogous chat app that was released in tandem with duo. Duo is not a chat app.
Slack's main differentiator up until now was that it wasn't tied up in a tech giant. That meant it had great compatibility with everything, and that it was, as a product, the primary focus of its company (and not just an accessory). I think it could have survived on that alone, but this acquisition throws that entire story in the garbage. Now it'll just be "Teams but worse".
I wonder if and when the society will finally develop an immune response to this business pattern: a) get a large amount of people to tie their lives/businesses to a service you provide, b) sell out to a bigger fish, leaving these users high and dry.
Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. Services that came after MySpace aren't like MySpace.
Switching from one dominant service for posting your meal photos to another dominant service for posting your meal photos is relatively easy. But if a web tool you depend on decides to finish their "incredible journey", you're likely to remain without an equivalent replacement (VC subsidies making it easy for few players to suck out oxygen from a market segment), and you end up having to adapt your workflow to whatever remains or comes after.
> Apple and Sweden have about the same valuation right now
Sweden doesn't have valuation, so you can't compare them.
Apple has valuation which is measured in dollars. Sweden has GDP which is measured in dollars per year. The units are different, so the numbers aren't comparable.
I guess one can say "Sweden produces about one Apple's worth in a year", or "Saudi Arabia produces about one Apple's worth in a year and a bit". This however makes owning Sweden/Saudi Arabia look better than owning Apple by a shot.
> Apple has valuation which is measured in dollars. Sweden has GDP which is measured in dollars per year. The units are different, so the numbers aren't comparable.
Of course. I was referring to Sweden's national wealth[1], which is roughly equal to Apple's market cap of $2T. Sweden's GDP of $560B is only roughly twice Apple's FY2020 revenue of $275B.
Apple is worth roughly 2% of the national wealth of the United States, which is $106T.
> National net wealth, also known as national net worth, is the total sum of the value of a nation's assets minus its liabilities.
For the little sense that comparing a public company to a nation state makes, one still might be inclined to compare Apples to apples (and not to Oranges).
In this case, one should compare National Wealth (country's assets minus its liabilities) against Apple's assets minus its liabilities. That calculation gives us about 65B dollars, which puts Apple somewhere between Ghana (95th) and Turkmenistan (96th).
This is why I invest in index funds only and never look at individual stocks. It wasn't even 15 years ago in college that I was taught that fundamental analysis and buy-and-hold value-based investing was the way to go for individual investors. The 'discipline of the market' will force companies to improve their fundamentals and by extension, their profitability over time.
That advice seems laughable now, even if you hold for years. Companies are going public while nowhere near profitability. And others are experiencing surging prices on the basis of hype and rosy promises about the future. You can say "that's just tech companies", but it's not 1999 anymore. 'Tech' is not a new and mysterious industry with made-up metrics, they make up the largest companies in our economy.
So are you saying it is worth investing in unprofitable companies (at IPO time) because the market will force the company to improve it's profitability going forward?
The time to invest in an IPO stock is before it goes public, not after. IPOs are priced to extract the maximum possible capital, partly why the prices usually dive within the first trading day. Buying on the secondary market (NYSE/NASDAQ)is putting money in the pockets of the investment bank that underwrote the issue.
Of course once a company has been public for a while and there is sufficient public information about their performance, you can choose to go the value investing path.
Except Apple does about $300B in revenue at like 40% gross margins, which is absolutely insane and means they are valued much more reasonably than Slack.
Apple is also growing faster than Sweden’s economy.
Slack saw the risks of being a "simple, elegant collaboration darling, and tried to pivot into operations and workflows over the past 3 years. I haven't looked into the feature set much, but I think most customers rejected the idea because it seemed robust and "un-Slack-y".
I always thought the lack of adoption in this feature set was a marketing failure of Slack, but I'm now seeing it as bait for a Salesforce integration.
Slack's sales execution sucked. They had a great product but didn't know how to sell in the middle of a pandemic. Salesforce will treat Slack like Microsoft treats LinkedIn or Github. I wish I could invest in the 'acquired' company.
- Slack wasn't going to survive as an independent. Their anti-trust efforts against Microsoft + Teams seemed to go nowhere.
- Salesforce is one of the only companies that can go to-to-toe with Microsoft in the enterprise - 80%+ of the Fortune 500, 150k+ customers, 200k+ people at their conference each year
- Salesforce already know your org chart so can roll out slack to anyone already on force.com easily.
- Salesforce are building out from a data-up direction to take up what employees have open on their screens at work. Slack/collab was a big part they were missing (so is video/conf - zoom would be perfect but it's overvalued, Workday also fits)
- Integrations with CRM, customer support, social media management, etc. are a no-brainer into slack
- Microsoft are weak exactly where Salesforce are strong so a lot of customers are across both and would be tempted by free Slack over free Teams
- They're issuing stock for half the acquisition and have a cap of 250B+ which is a bit bubbly but they're doing well P&L wise recently
Some decent points. 80% is good to see. The problem is I don't see anyway companies drop Microsoft. Everyone already has teams or chat for free, are they going to pay for slack now? Assuming slack moves to the same model, buy the salesforce suite and get slack, how much added value is slack really providing? Will companies be willing to pay more now that slack is included even though they already have chat apps? I'm not super knowledgeable on salesforce, but afaik only sales people have the subscription, so will companies have different chat apps for sales and everyone else? Seems like it would be easier to just put the sales people on teams with everyone else. Is slack a big enough perk that it would stop companies that are considering dropping salesforce? Is that worth 28 billion? That's really the only use I see. I agree this is a great move for slack, questioning how salesforce is able to leverage slack here when everyone else gives their chats away for free.
Exactly. I work at a large financial company and we have: Teams, Slack, Skype and Zoom.
- Zoom for large team meeting
- Slack for collaboration between our teams
- Skype for upper management meetings who are still only know Skype
- Teams is free with office subscription and our company has been pushing everyone to use it instead of using slack but everyone hates Teams. Terrible UI and slow
I don't think that matters really. Maybe companies that are already using slack won't switch, but if you're using chat, which is free, are the executives really going to decide that it's worth paying to switch to slack? I think it's unlikely. Hard to see where the market is other than startups that are already using slack. Slacks revenue is currently nowhere near enough for this valuation and I can't see it getting where it needs to.
Honest question: what is Google chat? I only know Hangouts, I did not know they had a Slack/Teams app as well? Or is this the very old app that was integrated into Gmail back in the day?
Yea, google has a competitor called chat. As other comments have said it doesn't really stack up with teams/slack, but the video system is pretty good. It works well enough, an has seen consistent improvements over the year. Doubt any company would specifically choose google chat, but I know that many that already have deals for g-suite are using it. The thing is pretty much every company has a contract for office or google chat these days. Hard to imagine paying for slack when you've already got these free apps available.
I've been on google meets all day since march and have never froze. Plenty of huge conference calls, screen sharing. Works great for me. Missing some features of zoom, but the video/audio quality is just as good in my experience.
My experience having US<->Europe<->India comms and 10 guys everyday - video always starts to glitch and then goes to a complete freeze irrelevant whose country the video from.
1 times in 10 someone's audio gets lost completely.
It's a team chat, included into Google Workspace (G Suite). It's not terrible, and not great. It runs in the browser and integrates with Gmail; is really slow; has 1-to-1 messages, groups, and rooms; rooms have threads to organize conversations, but you can't see a list, you just end up scrolling a lot.
A company that uses G Suite certainly isn't going to use MS, and usually won't choose to pay separately for Slack.
In what sense therefore could it possibly not be a real competitor? It's there, it works, it's fine. It's also relatively young and so we can expect it to improve significantly over the coming years, similar to how Meet has been improving over the past few years.
> Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software
Is that really true? I'm biased since I'm on the dev side, but everyone I know is using macbook pros, with very rare stragglers using windows or linux, and they use web clients for most stuff (e.g. gsuite, etc) rather than thick clients. I suspect with the push to working from home this will only accelerate.
This is a shame, since I like Microsoft Office products and am one of the few people I know who thinks VB is a great productivity tool, .Net is superior (in terms of language design) to Java, and Excel, Visio are better than anything else out there. But it's been almost a decade since anyone I know has needed to use that stuff in the office.
My impression is that many if not most mid size and up orgs pay for the MS Suite at the company level. With 365 you can get the whole suite from email to docs, one drive, and teams.
Teams comes free with the suite. My company moved from webex + adhoc solutions to teams and it has worked well, at least for video chat.
MS office apps have decent support for Apple these days
Have you used Gchat for bots/search/threading? It’s awful. It is not a good chat app and hasn’t changed much in 4 years. It plays catchup with competitors. Teams is so far away from having good features and app integration; Everyone I talk to that used Slack hates it. It’s just that it’s free with o365 that it’s even used. Honestly, I want to remind people everyone said the same thing about Google buying YouTube and FB buying insta. Two large purchases that were so worth it for the companies.
The point is there's nowhere for slack to grow. Just about every organization gets comparable but slightly worse chat apps for free with their google or Microsoft subscription. Convincing executives to buy slack when they've got a free app from a trusted company that they're already paying for support will be very tough.
Ive never used anything but slack at work and that's with 4 different organizations. Microsoft teams was tried and ppl just kept using slack regardless.
I'm not saying orgs will switch away from slack. It's a great app. I'm saying orgs that are not currently using slack will not want to pay to switch when they've got a free IM app that works fine. For slack to be worth this valuation they need about 10x as much revenue. I don't see how they could possibly accomplish that when everyone has already picked an app at this point.
It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.
The way rooms is organized is really annoying. It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet. The rooms also show what appears to be IMs for group chats (the style/UI) instead of a chatroom.
The calendar integration is nice and the video chats are good, but The Linux version of their client just stops pulling audio all the time unless I do a `killall -9 pulseaudio` and restart it (and it's the only app left where I still have to do that).
Teams gets a big "Meh" for me on calls and awful for text chat.
> It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet.
Yes, it's odd. For those who haven't used Teams, it defaults to showing you a team's channels you use most frequently (I guess? I never quite understood the logic) and then you have to click to see the full list. Maddening.
Clicking in every channel to see what’s new is insane. I’m in 15 “teams” and they each probably average 10 channels. I see the alerts that there are new messages but I would need to go into each one to check them out.
That's odd. I'm using Linux Teams client in a Docker container, and it gets many days of uptime (and many voice calls per day) between restarts (for unrelated reasons). No problems with integrating with host pulseaudio server.
I'm quite a happy user of Teams, the only thing I'm missing is ability to share my desktop with giving control to a remote caller - but I only needed that maybe once or twice over this entire year so far.
Thanks for the feedback. The Docker container is a good idea! Let's see if it fixes my audio issues.
Note that outside of audio being disabled on a regular basis (and there being no way of setting it back up properly), I am also happy with the product. It beats Skype Business, which I could never get to work on Linux.
We use Teams at work, and for that it works quite well. Calls and desktop sharing work well, the channels do what they do, integration with OneDrive and the wiki thing is nice etc.
But then I got a member of a different Team, for one of our customers, as part of some integration work. And boy is that a CF.
Unlike Discord you either have this team or that team active. Notifications from the other are horribly unreliable, and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client.
So as such, "Teams" really should have been named "Team".
Shameless plug. AirSend (https://www.airsend.io) offers the bare essentials one need to collaborate with both internal team members & external clients in one elegant package. Collaborating across organization boundaries is really hard with both ms teams and slack. Thats the problem we are trying to solve with airsend.
AirSend gives you a few simple (chat, voice/video, files, tasks and wiki) but powerful tools and then get out of the way.
>>and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client.
This was largely fixed, you may have to enable the "new meeting experience" though, which starts your meeting / call in a separate window from the main client
Guess I'm using the wrong words. To the left of my user name, next to the minimize/maximize buttons, I can switch (in my mind)... something. I guess tenant is the word, but in my mind that is the team.
I see now that what I've always thought of as "channels" is called Teams, no idea how I've overlooked that for over two years but there you go.
My point is in Discord I can be on a dozen different servers with different administrators and seamlessly go between them. Not so in Teams. I'm stuck to one tenant (team) at a time. Which sucks if you need to switch between them.
I see, I am not sure how common that is. Most places you only need 1 Tenant unless your are contracting with Multiple companies but even then you would be set up as a Guest on their tenant not have your own independent user name for each tenant you need access to.
You are correct that Teams today does not support Multi-Tenancy but that is really not an issue for 99.5% of organizations who would only ever have 1 tenant anyway
I definitely prefer Slack. Here are a few reasons off the top of my head.
1. Many users have issues where the unmute button is unresponsive. Typically the workaround is to turn off incoming video feeds which isn't exactly ideal. This is a major turnoff.
2. Difficult to stay involved in multiple channels as described by another comment. I find it tedious to find what's happened if I've been away for a while.
3. Slack has bots that do various helpful things including leaving channels you don't use, asking you for your daily standup feedback if you don't have an in person meeting, referencing external content, etc. I assume Teams must have something similar but I've never seen them used which likely indicates its a lot easier to do with Slack.
4. Nicer UI as you allude to yourself
5. Slack works with several video chat options including their own (based on AWS tools I believe?) and Zoom. I actually prefer Slack video chat over Zoom or Teams for pair programming as its so easy to annotate the screen without clicking into a bunch of menus or being the meeting owner or something. You literally just start drawing on the screen and your coworkers see it
6. Excellent mobile app which is quite important for a chat client
7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually)
> 7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually)
Looks like there's a free [0] version of teams that supports unlimited search, unlimited app integrations and meetings of up to 100 attendees. Compare to free [1] slack that has limitations of 10k searchable messages, 10 app integrations and only 1-1 meetings
Fair enough, not too surprising Microsoft can offer a limited version for free. The Microsoft free version is much more limited than you imply though. The "meetings of up to 100 attendees" are for 60 minutes maximum versus the Slack ones which have no cap. Not to mention many people use Slack + an external video chat app so they wouldn't care.
Teams just doesn’t seem very good for team collaboration outside of video/audio. Their client feels cramped and stifling and their web version is not feature complete. Basic stuff like just linking to a document or wiki page or tab in Teams doesn’t work well so you end up with stuff like “Open the Foo team, look in the Bar channel and click the second link in the header to see the dashboard.” instead of just adding a link to it.
The integration and embedding of office/powerbi/etc is neat, but it forces it into a Teams frame.
For some reason, some things launch SharePoint with its own bag of shit for trying to make its own version of web sites.
I’m in a big org with Teams for almost a year. We have thousands of employees who aren’t as active as hundred person free slack open source projects. People aren’t using it to communicate much with each other.
They keep emailing, or texting or IMing. I get more Skype IMs a day than Teams. And do you know how horrible Skype is?
Because of this, I think it sucks as a superset of Slack. Sure, it nominally has all those features, but in practice they aren’t usable.
I hope that MS just keeps iterating and it eventually gets better. I think it’s better now than a year ago.
The problem is that the people responsible for mandating its usage don't care how much it sucks, they care that it's working enterprise IM and they get it for free with the Office subs they're already paying for.
The thing I like about Teams is the way you can have collaboratively-editable documents localised to a particular channel by way of the Files tab, which is great for organisations that don't yet have an ingrained online Office 365 or Google Sheets culture.
Apart from that, I find it clunky, unwieldy, and it has that unfortunate soullessness that permeates many 'productivity' applications (exemplified by the sterile selection of reaction emoji).
I don’t like this because I would like to store my doc in OneDrive or some other team and link them into a teams channel to edit.
So while the collab works well, it’s a lot of work to then organize the files so anything beyond literal ephemeral scratch pads sucks for “power users” and completely confuses regular users.
I don't disagree, but unless you're at a startup you probably don't get to choose. It's some executive choosing, and saying we saved a boatload by moving to the app that's included with our productivity suite is enticing.
Exactly. At companies that are large customers, employees don't get to choose. You get Google Chat integrated into your email inbox, and connections to Slack are blocked.
Eh people will be salty about the Salesforce name but honestly their acquisition of Heroku hasn't caused me any pains regarding our experience with that platform. I'm as skeptical as anyone else, and I think there's more risk in a tighter "integration" making it a miserable experience. Might be a good time in the market for a new Slack competitor!
Judging from Salesforce's past acquisitions I'd bet (and hope) that we won't see a lot of changes being forced on Slack users in the future. Salesforce will probably use it internally and include Salesforce product integrations, and likely start to use it instead of Chatter.
I don't believe Salesforce got much value out of Heroku however. Their main app isn't built on top of it, and they were shopping around for cloud providers to expand to places like Australia.
"Congratulations to Slack on its exit" I say as I forgot they are post-IPO.
I always thought it strange how big Slack got to begin with. History will probably remember its ultimate accomplishment was getting lots of companies to switch from direct-message communication to chat rooms. However, that was probably inevitable as an internet savvy generation took over more companies, and Slack was simply well-timed. It's not like the product was light years ahead of its myriad of competitors. It had a little better design and had friendly corporate terms.
Which is good news. If Salesforce really does ruin Slack, I have no doubt someone will swoop into the space just as quickly as they did.
Remember that MS Teams forced themselves into the market by pushing it onto their existing customers, not because it's a worthy competitor. Now Slack can play that same game too.
What about Mac users though? I can’t imagine using a Microsoft product in any capacity that isn’t entirely separate from Microsoft - meaning GitHub and VSCode.
Teams feels entirely too tied to MSFT. The UI seems unbearable.
I use Teams on my Linux workstation every day, entirely through the web site running in Chrome (organization-specific IT peculiarities prevent the "native" app from working on our Linux). It works just as well as Slack ever has for me. There are plenty of Mac users in my org too, but I don't know if they use an app or the web site.
Teams videochat works flawlessly on my linux worklaptop as well (native though), I get disconnected from video calls a lot using Slack... If Teams fixes their chatroom issue I'd definitely be willing to make the switch entirely.
Discord is already better than Slack and Teams anyway, they've just made the (potentially smart, maybe not) decision to only compete for gamers/social applications rather than business/teams.
Whatever happened to matrix.org/vector/riot.im/element.io? (side note: most confusing branding ever :-/). Element seemed to be picking up some momentum a few months back. There was recent news that they acquired gitter too [1]. These days I only hear about slack exodus and discord this and discord that, though.
If I get it right, from all the group messengers that appeared around 6 years ago, the only one with an open protocol seems to be Matrix, but it hasn't proven to be to their advantage, apparently. Only Element, Zulip and Mattermost are open source?
Honorable mention: IRCCloud was a "hot thing" for a while, but it seems like it wasn't enough to revitalize IRC. [2]
--
Appendix, initial releases:
* Slack: August 2013; 7 years ago
* Discord: May 13, 2015; 5 years ago
* Mattermost: October 2, 2015; 5 years ago
* Zulip: ca 2014, at least 5/6 years ago?
* Matrix protocol: ca September 2014; 6 years ago
* vector/riot/element: ca September 2016, 4 years ago
I joined Element about a month ago (we're hiring! https://element.io/careers) and now that I'm on the inside, I'm genuinely optimistic about our trajectory. We're not taking over the world overnight, but we are steadily growing.
From a business perspective, data sovereignty and end-to-end encryption seem to be really potent differentiators for certain market segments, especially government. To wit, the French government has a massive Matrix deployment under the name "Tchap", and the German military began rolling out a similar initiative called "BwMessenger" last month: https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger-...
On the opposite end of the spectrum you've got Mozilla, who replaced their IRC network with open, federated Matrix and saw greater far greater community engagement as a result.
October also saw a commercial entity (Famedly.com) begin sponsoring the development of a third-party homeserver implemented in Rust (Conduit). So we're starting to see glimmers of a potential ecosystem around the Matrix protocol independent of Element.
We don't have the same pop culture buzz as Slack or Discord, but I absolutely think there is something of substance here.
As an aside: Having come to Element from Mozilla, it's really weird to work somewhere with multiple large, paying customers. It gives me hope that we'll be able to maintain the runway we need to reach critical mass, one use case at a time.
The latest open source project that caught my eye in terms of the chosen chat technology was Servo, which has chosen Zulip [0]. Hopefully, in a not too distant future, we'll start seeing more communities opting for Matrix?
> the only one with an open protocol seems to be Matrix, but it hasn't proven to be to their advantage
I guess it depends on what you mean by "their advantage". Designing and promulgating an actual open federated protocol is way harder/time-consuming than doing the same for a closed proprietary one. So taking this approach has only hurt their flexibility and speed-to-market for features.
However, if done right, an open protocol can be way more advantageous to the global community as a whole! IMHO Matrix started out as just another crazy moonshot. "Let's make something like email and xmpp only better." But, fast-forward to now and they have built a very usable chat ecosystem with multiple server implementations and many clients.
My hope is that things like this Slack acquisition (and the inevitable cooperate shenanigan that will follow) will continue to push individuals and companies to invest in open federate-able alternatives.
Enterprises don't want federation. They want an easily searchable information repository much more than they want strong E2EE. They also don't see open source as an advantage.
Matrix was focused on things that deter enterprise customers while Slack built a machine for locking them in.
100% of companies require a way of communicating with other companies/people, and federated email and phone calls are extremely common ways (granted that non-federated means are becoming more popular, and I can believe there are a few companies whose only communication with the outside world is via non-federated means).
Companies have lists requirements for their tools and "not federated" isn't one of them, it's just that so far non-federated tools already fullfil the other requirements. Once Element is mature enough (and I'm sorry, but looking at the incoming issues on https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues?q=sort%3Aupd..., it doesn't look like it yet), then hopefully more companies will start considering it.
Also, some companies (at least some people in the one I work for, so I'm extrapolating) want to be able to text chat with other companies/people, and they currently do this with Teams (which requires both parties to have a Teams account). Slack allows this too if I understand. Federated chat would also give them this, so it is something they need, even if they don't realise that.
Enterprises may not want federation until they encounter a practical problem that just happens to be solved by federation. E.g. company/team acquisition, need to merge the chat ecosystems; don't want to disrupt the acquired team but you also need to have people in the rest of the company interact with existing channels etc. If both companies uses slack, the integration between such multiple accounts is possible.
Federation is also super useful if you're a multinational, since each geographic location could still operate autonomously in the face of an inability to route to the broader Internet. And with a protocol like Matrix, you're able to recover gracefully when federation is restored.
Do you think that's what's led to Slack's success though, that enterprises don't want federation?
I don't really think so. If Slack had exactly the same UX as it has but federated, I don't think that would have deterred very many customers. Maybe a few that have come on only after Slack already got so big.
It's not that federation per se is a downside for any particular customer. It's more that federation makes it a lot harder to make changes to your product, and it doesn't usually come with enough business upside to justify that cost.
Federation is actually pretty hard. It's real that federation makes it harder/slower to make changes or add new features -- but on top of that spending time on federation (even on open source projects) necessarily takes time you could be spending on the non-federation UX.
And it's not just enterprise customers for whom in the end federation isn't nearly as prioritized as a good UX in other places.
I don't think anything's happened to Matrix, it continues to develop and grow at what, at least as it feels to me, a slow and steady pace. I tried it towards the beginning, after a few years, and am currently on it again, running my own homeserver, and it's been getting better and better each time. It's definitely still got a few rough edges, but it's both much more reliable and much more fully featured than in the past. E2EE is finally very easy on the flagship clients, which is a pretty great achivement on an open federated system.
Anyway, I think it's still here and growing, but it pops into the HN consciousness every now and again. That doesn't mean it's popularity is similarly varied :)
After making an account a couple years ago I came back to Element a few days ago. Mostly, it's fine/good. It works as I expect text chat too, including the niceties we've come to expect by now.
One thing that really stood out to me is that you can cross-sign your device certificates! That means your chat partners don't need to verify the signatures of all your device keys, but only one. Even though this is the only good option (in my opinion), the only other messenger that does this that I'm aware of is iMessage.
I wish more people used it. Not just individually, but for their communities. There's a couple of good bridges which I intend to try, to bring my Signal/Telegram/... contacts all into one place, but you need not only the bridge, you also need to host your own homeserver and I haven't made the dive into all of that yet.
The Lounge[1] is an open source IRCCloud alternative for users who are comfortable with self-hosting and want an always on, web GUI, access from anywhere, works on mobile, IRC client.
I run Matrix/Element on my self-hosted server (address in my profile) and it's great for chatting with people on the Fediverse (Mastodon/Pleroma/Peertube/etc.) as a lot of people in that world also use Matrix and have their addresses posted in their profile.
Corporations don't want to spend the manpower to run something like this, considering Slack is relatively cheap and Teams just comes with their Azure/Office365 license.
It's more for hobbyists and hacker types. If you want a nice mobile client for Matrix, try out FluffyChat. It supports room emojis!
That's been the most disorienting part of joining Element. We have kind of a bimodal distribution of constituencies with peaks both on the enthusiast side and the boring bureaucratic government side. The mass market in the middle won't know what hit 'em! ;)
I would love to see IRC make a comeback but the fact is IRC on mobile is a pain in the ass. Users want persistence and IRC is designed for the opposite.
I agree. We should evolve the IRC spec to support the modern requirements of common users. Then web clients are just an addition. Call it IRC2 or anything if it offends the original IRC nerds (which I'm part of)
Well, there's IRCv3... Problem with multi-device is you need some way of authenticating multiple TCP connections as the same logical user, at which point a lot of IRC's simplicity of implementation has been lost. Whether that's a worthwhile sacrifice is a different question though; I think it might be (as a young IRC nerd).
That’s somewhat the solution irccloud provides, however they need a mobile app. I think the biggest issue with irc is the backlog. It’s somewhat nice to be able to easily search a companies chat history and find some context. The solution to that is correct documentation, however that problem is much harder.
Self-hosted an instance two or so years ago and have never run into issues, besides the occasional kick to my reverse proxy. You can create accounts for your friends/family/coworkers, the web app is fast/clean on mobile, and chat logs are persistent.
IRC is pretty much perfect. No "X user is typing" messages. No ads, no tracking, no javascript. No hidden instance of chrome running. The community even self selects in to my own interests.
Element / Matrix are great in principle, but it's probably not helping that there are fatal bugs in the iOS app that break core functionality (see [1]). Outside of that, it has major issues with accessibility in general -- user facing documentation is non-existent, for example. Users on my server complain sometimes that they feel they need to have a degree in computer science to do simple things. I feel like Element's complications around branding are a great metaphor for the Matrix ecosystem in general
It's a shame -- I'm hopeful that the situation will be better in the next year or so, but if these issues aren't corrected I can't see how they won't forever be in the shadow of mainstream apps like Slack, who have much stronger sensibilities around UX and accessibility (dark patterns and lack of E2EE notwithstanding).
I self-host a Matrix instance and it's great. It's just the network thing where you need your friends to hop on it before it gains much value.
In the meantime, Matrix makes it possible (not trivial, in my experience) to bridge to other chat services. Bridging requires a fair bit of technical know-how.
I started using it when it was riot.im but it didn't work any better when they renamed it element and it made it just a bit harder to find while it was not really that popular already... I think they just tried to cash in a bit instead of a lot (or shot themselves in the foot)
To add to the honorable mention: I've been very happy with irccloud, though yeah I agree - IRC is still waning. I don't do anything crazy with it, but it has been fast, simple, and reliable - no complaints at all, which is quite rare.
Seems like it's been around at least since 2015, it is open source, and it supports audio and video chat. Pretty impressive... and yet, I truly forgot about it!
Matrix is doing pretty well (although I might be biased, being project lead). For instance, the entirety of the German military announced moving over to Matrix using a fork of Element a few days ago: https://sifted.eu/articles/european-armies-matrix/, and there are several other (very) major governments beyond France & Germany who are switching to Matrix in order to get end-to-end-encrypted interoperable comms that they can run themselves. Hopefully we should be able to announce them in the coming months :)
Meanwhile, we're about to finish the main milestones of making Gitter natively speak Matrix (planning to announce on Thursday), and on the FOSS side in general, Mozilla has successfully moved over entirely to Matrix for community facing work (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/03/03/moznet-irc-is-dead-long-l...), and a few other similar sized open source projects are in the process of finalising doing the same manoeuvre; watch which this space for updates. https://element.debian.social/ looks to be a thing, for instance :)
In terms of naming, it's really not hard: Matrix is the protocol; the core team set up a company called New Vector who made a flagship Matrix client called Riot, but we then renamed both the company and the app to be Element in order to simplify things. Hopefully most people have forgotten the renaming and moved on by now.
In terms of what's next for Matrix:
* Loads of effort making Element more mainstream-friendly; going through improving the UX and making it consistent cross-platform and predictable for new users. The approach we're taking is to film new users using the service, and literally tight-loop fixing the thinkos that they trip over until they stop tripping over. It sounds obvious, and we should have done it years ago, but it's starting to make a big difference. The first wave of changes ship in the next 2 weeks.
* Social login - implementing OIDC Connect to simplify onboarding if you're willing to hand over your identity to an existing identity provider (Github/Gitlab/Apple/Twitter/Google/FB)
* We're in the middle of implementing Spaces - super fun feature to define arbitrary hierarchies of rooms; a bit like discord servers, or slack workspaces, or possibly a usenet hierarchy or IMAP folder tree depending on how you squint. We're hoping to get the first cut out by the end of the year, which is super fun.
* We're also working hard on freeform threading (you too could implement HN/Reddit/Email/NNTP/Twitter on Matrix if you want!). https://github.com/matrix-org/cerulean has some details for the intrepid.
* Peer-to-Peer Matrix is going great guns; we've just finished the first cut of a new P2P overlay network called Pinecone (based on Yggdrasil, but using source routing).
* We've almost finished a wave of work to make 1:1 VoIP not suck; fixes are already shipping in Element on all platforms, but we're almost at the point where VoIP is robust and reliable rather than a quick proof-of-concept which we'd not had a chance to ever really polish.
* Finally, lots of work queued up to make end-to-end encryption more usable. Particularly, chasing bugs where encryption fails (we just fixed a major one in iOS for instance, which shipped a few days ago, thanks to the Push service extension sometimes racing with the main Element process desyncing). We're also looking at simplifying the E2EE key recovery process and just switching to using the same password to both login and decrypt your messages, rather than separate login password & security passphrases as we have today.
I could go on, but TL;DR: I think "the only one with an open protocol seems to be Matrix, but it hasn't proven to be to their advantage, apparently." is bogus. We'd just be another random open source chat webapp if it wasn't for Matrix; instead it's a global open network with 25+ million users and about 60,000 servers. So not yet as big as Email or the Web, but bigger than (say) bitcoin, and continuing to grow exponentially.
Just out of curiosity: the press releases I've seen about these big government players switching to Matrix generally mention that they're using a customized client of some sort. That's understandable, but what I want to know is: Have they also customized the underlying protocol by which their homeservers communicate?
The reason I ask is that it seems to me (as an entirely uneducated outsider) that if they're using the Matrix protocol as-is, then they have incentive to support and assist with the further development of the Matrix protocol, which is great. But if they've already started customizing it, then I would worry that they eventually will decide they don't need Element or the main Matrix protocol and will just go off and do their own thing.
Nope, none of them have customised the protocol (at least of the ones we’re aware of and work with). They realise the whole benefit of Matrix is to speak Matrix rather than some mutant thing.
> "In terms of naming, it's really not hard: Matrix is the protocol..."
First time I read that it was clarifying. Second time I read it it reminded me - naming is important. Always think about customers and don't dismiss things that confuse customers / end users. I 100% want to see y'all succeed. But this customer friction area and similar ones are not to be overlooked. If I were you, I'd focus 100% on the best way to surface Matrix's value to others. That's all we're looking for.
is awesome. A CLI client that is reliable and cutting edge would be awesome (looks like some contenders - I'd love to see one in Clojure or Rust but that's just me..). Bridges with other providers like Slack etc. would be a good way to make in-roads into the Slack user base - would get developers using it for work, and then able to switch over, etc.
Most users of Slack, etc., are getting a little tired of it. We'd love something new - and something we could customize more! Awesome. But you have to position yourself as: (a) a strong, stable, growing alternative with a strong customer focus and appreciation (knowing that if you want to be Linux v. Microsoft and not GNOME/KDE v. macOS/Windows - i.e., succeed in the Enterprise outside of Europe, you have to be a new kind of customer obsessed than what has come before) (b) a low risk alternative to start experimenting with.
Biggest focus should be developers creating enterprise apps (like the German army). That's the sweet spot it seems like to get exponential traction. If you can tap into engineers who are using Slack/Teams/etc. and get them to build more clients, etc... it could be really good.
I.e., implement the difficult parts of Slack really, really well (again be Linux OS v. Microsoft OS - and let hypervisors and whatever else innovate on top of your platform -- and not try to boil the ocean with UI features, etc. - which I feel like is just difficult to compete with - there's a mountain of engineers in Cupertino who are going to out-innovate on a stronger platform with a lot more advantages.. but something like the Linux kernel.. is key).
> A CLI client that is reliable and cutting edge would be awesome (looks like some contenders - I'd love to see one in Clojure or Rust but that's just me..)
Weechat is really impressively good on Matrix, and the plugin is in the final stages of being rewritten in Rust. It has full E2EE support, and the developer is funded to work on it full time.
> I.e., implement the difficult parts of Slack really, really well
Yup. The balance between features and core stability is Hard, but hopefully we're getting the balance right (at last).
Hydrogen (hydrogen.element.io) is an example of a ludicrously lightweight, stable, but not-yet-featureful Matrix client fwiw, as an example of what the balance looks like for "implementing the difficult bits really really well".
Anyone read the press release? Salesforce wants to use Slack as an input device driver. Imagine
slacking with your customers, colleagues etc... need to create a DB entry? Slack command. Need to schedule some follow up, slack command. Need to track a bunch of tasks? Slack-Force integrations. I see an AI bot here to help get that data into Salesforce.
To quote: "Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world"
I work day to day in Slack. It's better than email and the need for workflow and knowledge integrations is clear. Asana needs to get a chat layer going ASAP.
The knowledge workflow integration sector is the next big thing.
Last year I somehow ended up using the iOS imessage thing where I chat directly with a company and it was excellent. Never saw or heard of it again, but I would love to have a similar ability on slack.
I have to chat with like ~10 vendors on a weekly basis for short-burst communication and end up having a bunch of weird shared slack-room things. Salesforce could clean that up and it'd be a great b2b messaging system.
Ah yes, people already waste fucking hours putting in the most ridiculous menial data into the CRM because management forces them to because Salesforce convinced them it would somehow help their business to know what color the customer's underwear was.
Now instead they can get more efficient at wasting time by using both slack and crm at the same time!
Kinda bummed by this news. I know a bunch of people over at Slack and I'm sure none of them are excited about being acquired. I still don't understand how salesforce has gotten so big where they can acquire $25B healthy companies which really don't fit into their eco-system.
Their sales teams have been locking in all major corporations. I have no idea how they cornered a market so fast. They are living like kings right now.
Chat is mostly ephemeral, so there isn't much lost in switching providers even at large corporations. If a better chat app takes off in the next year there isn't much stickiness in the current app, especially when individual teams start using the new product. This is how I've seen both AWS and Slack become standards and large corps–the innovating teams start using it regardless of the corp standard.
You talking about Salesforce? They've been around since 1999 and have been dominant in SaaS ever since the phrase was first coined. There's nothing fast about it.
It's a compelling pitch, but when it comes to actually using low code/no code solutions... well, it's a conversation that we re-visit every few years for a reason. Everyone needs last-mile customization that requires coding and therefore some technical ability.
Once a company realizes that it's not magical unicorns, they're too deeply embedded.
Is it better to spend X every year to just make the Salesforce solution work (thereby not having to admit to a mistake, and mitigating personal risk), or spend 3X in one year to write something in house (that requires maybe 1/10th X to maintain/extend from then on, but which is riskier, and unlikely to show up on future evals such that they can claim credit and get a raise)?
Corporations seem especially vulnerable to sunk cost fallacies.
Nobody wants to be the manager responsible for a large expense that might pay off in years when when the manager is in a different position and therefore the advantages will be reaped by someone else.
You’d be surprised by how much can be achieved with no code tools on SFDC. The biggest problem Salesforce has is that most customers are barely scratching the surface — or worse, still using the classic version that’s 10 years outdated.
I’ve fixed 2 year headaches of billion dollar enterprises in a few hours.
Why couldn’t they do that themselves?
1. Because Salesforce is so effortless to keep running, that billion dollar companies can get by with a couple of admins, and never put any investment into building on its functionality.
2. The people who know Salesforce well enough to do that are gobbled up and paid boatloads of money by Salesforce and Consultancies.
OP was asking how Salesforce got so huge when it has a medium-negative reputation among tech folks, and that was my answer: Management loves to hear "this will save $$$ on software"
Well, Slack, it was nice knowing you. I wonder who Discord will get bought up by when it replaces Slack after a year or two of Salesforce mismanagement?
It's so sad that this is the cycle for software now. Start small, get big fast, get sold, get ruined.
I realize I am presupposing Salesforce will ruin Slack - but it's hard to see how they won't, unless they take the approach Microsoft took with Github and keep it as a totally separate business unit. Even then, there's often meddling (see e. g. Facebook with Instagram and Oculus).
I don't know if I'd agree that it never fulfilled its promise. It's got a lot of market share and its core product - text chat and messaging - remains pretty solid, despite some missteps.
I haven't had that level of unreliability issue with text, though I _definitely_ have with calls.
I would agree that Slack had an opportunity to compete with Zoom and others because of COVID that it seems to have relatively squandered. Slack calls are still less reliable and usable than Zoom calls for many purposes. You can't dial in with a phone, you can't mute other people's video or even audio (though I'm not sure Zoom offers client-side video muting either), Slack's screenshare is less reliable and doesn't have as many options for limiting what you share, and so on.
So I guess I'd say it fulfilled its core promise: "decent enterprise real-time communications", but it's the failure to innovate or even keep up with competing services in some important areas that's the issue. Maybe that's splitting hairs?
Not sure how they got that quite so wrong from an engineering POV. We try and use Slack video calling probably every day and have to revert to Meet/Zoom/Discord/WhatsApp, due to terrible latency, random crashes (like not being able to hang up!), UI freezes, etc.
Just curious, what Salesforce aquisitions ruined a product? The only ones I know of are Heroku, Quip, and Tableau. I don't see any mention of Salesforce other than optional integrations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions lists a ton of companies I'm not familiar with that look like they were mostly absorbed. Beyond that, I'm not sure, but it's more of a reputational judgment I'm making.
I'm not sure I can think of a time when an acquisition or merger ever made a product better for the users.
Quip has gotten better, but unlike Slack it didn't start out already good, so the gains have been minimal. Part of it was lack of interest from the inside, where it competes with people just wanting to use or keep using google docs / github / confluence / a few holdouts on google sites and who will always complain about Quip. I suspect core Slack will remain about the same and the focus will turn towards Salesforce integrations that most Slack users won't know or care about.
I had forgotten that they bought Heroku. As far as I know, Heroku is still as cool as when I used to frequently use it. Time will tell how it goes with the Slack acquisition.
Yeah, but that was true even before the acquisition. It was so easily self-service that that didn't matter very much, but it was definitely always true.
Heroku kept getting more and more complicated. I remember when you could just push a Rails app to Heroku and everything would just work. That kept getting more and more challenging.
Why does every business have to be a $100G business? Can we support a model in which we have a lot of $100M businesses that are doing great things and delivering quality instead of quantity?
Investors seem to not like that idea, but customers would love that idea. It's unfortunate that our markets are not optimized for customers.
Because too many businesses fail for the model to work without multi-billion-dollar home runs, I think?
> but customers would love that idea
Sounds like an opportunity. :) There are many domains where small-ish scale SaaS is extremely profitable. The typical HN reader is usually not the target market, so we don't hear about them.
The real problem is when VCs think there's a billion-dollar business in your market, but there's not. And you have to spend millions in VC money just to compete with "we'll-make-it-up-on-volume" free services, and poof goes your nice margin. There were app-based delivery services long before DoorDash, GrubHub, etc. -- where are they now?
I'd just like to point out quip used to have a free tier now that's gone. They now push Salesforce anywhere. Also, marketing cloud is a mess from its former exact target. They will for sure ruin slack.
Earlier you could just stick with the version you had on your CD or floppy and not care what the C-suits was up to on the company that made the software you used. So I guess it wasn't as obvious back then?
That and software wasn't a service, so you weren't chained to the price points and plan levels that executives decided. If Salesforce decides to force everybody using Slack to get Salesforce instead (which seems not unlikely), there's no recourse. We can't just say "well, we have a perpetual license, so we'll do what we want."
I still know quite a few people who still use their old version of WordPerfect. At some point it became feature complete for them and they've stuck with it ever since.
The entire concept of a single chat service with a single UI is bogus. Some sort of mass delusion going on such that everyone nods their head every time one of these mono-services becomes popular. Protocols. Interoperability. Federation.
It's pretty obvious that Salesforce is going after the same model as Microsoft - bundling enterprise software to create a stronger moat against competitors offering unbundled, standalone versions, and to strengthen the value prop when selling to customers.
Will be fascinating to see this rivalry pick up steam as time goes on.
I guess I could be wrong but I feel like the chances of Slack surviving with its genuine "compatibility with everything" story and overall usability intact 3 years from now is small.
I'm a bit confused by what this means for WORK shareholders.
"Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020."
Lets say you own 100 shares of WORK. Does that mean you get both
1. $4,434 in cash (100 * 43.84 current value of WORK)
100 shares of WORK will be converted to $2679 and 7.76 shares of CRM. Where did you get 43.84 from?
The current value of WORK doesn't matter, it's the closing price on 11/30. The stock price will effectively be pinned at that now since nobody will want to trade at another price.
I hope this acquisition does not pass regulatory oversight. This is how it starts. Very soon, we will have another competition-killing, anti-competitive behemoth on our hands like we did with FANGM and then we will suddenly ask ourselves how it all happened. THIS. Right here. Is how it happens.
Considering that Slack itself complained to the competition authorities that there is fierce competition from Microsoft and others, eating Slack's lunch, it seems hard. Salesforce can easily claim that the acquisition doesn't reduce competition, because Slack has a very small market share, or even that Slack would soon be bankrupt and needs to be saved.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/22/slack-accuses-microsoft-of-a...
If anything this deal helps increase competition in the collaboration/productivity space, since it was clear that Slack couldn't compete with Microsoft on its own.
The general trend seems to be winner takes all single suppliers in each market segment. They have no direct competition so eventually become a tax on us all.
I don't understand this sentiment at all. Slack is a nicely-done, enterprise-y chat app with a lot of users, most of who liked the idea of not paying for anything. There are many competitors, including several open source options.
Right now but how many competitors does Facebook have or Google. Each operates in its own narrow niche and dominates it. Chat apps will go the same way thanks to the network effects.
I think you're right, but I don't think of that as the result of a lack of competitors. In the enterprise space, it's going to be Salesforce/Slack vs. Microsoft/Teams.
Yes there are lots of competitors, including ones specialized for various industries. In finance there is Symphony, which along with being less infantile and more straight-laced than Slack also offers integrations with financial information products like factset.
Salesforce is already a monopoly if you go by volume of revenue earned from CRM. No one other than small/niche SaaS businesses competes directly for CRM business, and any new CRM startups can't get venture funding because it's considered an untouchable space by VCs. Every other large player they compete with in the CRM space (Hubspot, Zendesk, Oracle) offers a CRM as a side product to their main line of business.
This transaction shouldn't be the catalyst for regulatory action; regulators should have already taken action.
Why is it considered an untouchable space? Because CRM is so dominant? I don't understand what about the space would make it so capital intensive to compete against CRM in. They're internal tech is known to be very legacy and not cutting edge. A tech-competent startup could outmaneuver them. They're an Oracle 2.0, who at the time was also deemed unassailable, until Cloud and OSS databases ate their lunch.
I'm not a slack power user, but I feel that it's a bit like IRC but with a fancy (and slow) GUI wrapped around it. Certainly I am wrong, but how wrong?
At its core, that's a fully accurate description albeit a misleading one (along the lines of claiming that central AC is just window AC but without something sticking out of your window).
As it turns out, UX matters and Slack delivers far better UX than IRC since one single entity can control the entirety of the communication pipeline (from protocol to how messages are displayed).
Slack, maybe unfortunately, always invites the comparison to IRC because they borrowed a lot of their early UX from IRC with mentions, bots, channels, and /commands but that's pretty much where the comparison ends.
You can have IRC-style chatbots that parse messages and do things but Slack "integrations" are a lot more powerful and "magic" if your mental model of Slack is just fancy shmancy IRC.
Slack bundles basically all the features you'd have to implement out of band with IRC like chat history, search, user statuses, notifications for mentions, formatted content, media content like gifs and videos, reminders, attachments, pastebins.
Then there are things that you can't really do with the IRC protocol like reactions, threads, editing messages, messages with dynamically updating content (our Github bot for example changes the color of PR messages as the status changes), and embedded content like Polls that only take up one message and don't spam the chat with votes, shared history across devices.
It’s the same distance as between Dropbox and a Git + Rsync setup.
The later will work the same for half a percent of the users, but the 99.5% left would be crying tears of blood. I remember Mozilla employees’ blogs about the contraptions they had at individual levels to make IRC fully work for them, and you just can’t ask that to the HR recruiting intern.
I remember having an IRC client that supported adding your own client-side perl scripts to do all sorts of nifty automations in the 90s. I wonder what kind of magic IRC bots could do today with the natural language processing we have available now. But you make a fair point. I guess even if you are working at a small start-up with 100% hardcore computer-science types, as soon as you expand to include your own employees for HR, payroll, sales, marketing etc. you'll realize most people started using computers after UX was a thing.
You're about right, but I think not recognizing the value of having a UX that the average person feels comfortable with Both for daily usage and initial setup. IRC, for all its strengths, does not achieve that.
As far as messengers go, IRC is about as far from Slack as you can get. Two main differences:
1. You can't send IRC messages to people who are offline (yes you can work around this with bouncers etc. but that's beside the point). You can send Slack messages to people who are offline.
2. Slack is a proprietary, centralized system. Slack, the company, decides who is allowed to participate, and at what cost. IRC is a federated protocol, where different servers can be part of the same network, or part of a different network. You can set up a server or client by yourself if you want.
It's a major opportunity for them, for sure. They are still missing some features I find critical, but they really have things figured out with integrated voice/video communications in the app.
The one feature I wish they'd clone from Slack are threaded replies. I know they're rolling out a new way to reply, but it still makes the chat flow messy. I really enjoyed the way Slack allows for breakout threads/replies to a particular message. It was a great way to display enough context, but not make the flow confusing.
Oh my god the absolute worst thing about slack are threads. Can we please not bring them to anything else? how do they provide any value whatsoever other than making it hard to realize someone responded to you?
Personally, big fan of Slack threads. I use them daily in our team chat -- we can talk in the main chat about anything relevant to the whole team, and if someone has a specific comment on someone's message, they reply and create a thread while the rest of the conversation continues on.
The nesting-within-a-larger-conversation aspect felt very intuitive to me. I've been in other Slack workspaces that didn't use threads nearly as well, though -- I do think they take some "correct usage" to perform well.
Personally, I do like the concealed nature of threads within the main conversation, but I do not like how they are presented when opened. The whole "displayed on a narrow pane on the side" seems too cluttered to me. I'd much rather have it expand in the main conversation pane, maybe even create nested threads inside (kind of like reddit/HN).
Thread notifications are another pain point, as others have also noted. For some reason, all thread updates/notifications are clustered together in a separate tab called "Threads", regardless of what channels these threads belong to. If a thread (that I am following) belonging to a channel has an update, shouldn't that channel be highlighted? Now that I think about it, if that channel is highlighted and the user clicks on it, how is the user going to know which thread to check... all I can say is, threading in chat rooms is a non-trivial problem and while Slack gets some part of it right, there's still a ways to go.
I used to think the same thing regarding threads and I think slack's UI for them is bad (pushing them to a side window and squishing the main chat) but I have found them useful a few times recently. Often times a channel will have several different topics going on and the ability to push a conversation into a thread has been useful to avoid cross talk.
As much as I hate to say it, after using all three, I definitely like the Teams threads the best. That model offers the best balance of visibility and organization that I have seen.
I mean, you can't really disable notifications that exist for a feature and then complain that you're not notified when somebody messages you using that feature...
If it's truly async then just close slack until you're ready to talk, then open it back up and go through all of the red badges / white channels.
If you absolutely need to keep all notifications off and still want to read any thread replies, the very top channel in the slack app is called "Threads" and will show threads you've participated in or subscribed to, listed in chronological order based on most recent replies.
I have a lot of problems with slack (namely, performance and lack of solid video/audio calling), but threads are fine.
> If you absolutely need to keep all notifications off and still want to read any thread replies, the very top channel in the slack app is called "Threads" and will show threads you've participated in or subscribed to, listed in chronological order based on most recent replies.
How does that help with noticing threads that someone created while I wasn't looking?
Threads are by far the worst part of using Slack. A few coworkers use them, but most do not use them. It causes lots of unnecessary clicking and keeping track of an additional place where conversation is happening.
If it's off-topic, IRC's ancient solution has always been "Take it to #channel-cafe" or whatever, perhaps a topic-specific channel. Just /join it, if it doesn't exist it gets created. Or perhaps have a 1-1. But because this affects everyone, it's easy to make it the culture to not spam irrelevant stuff in the main channel, making it a non-problem that threads could alleviate.
In practice you're going to get violators, but that happens with Slack as well. In part because Slack's thread UI sucks so occasionally you'll wake up and see a couple people in after-hours last night who just didn't care and filled up 50-100 messages on the unthreaded channel, forcing people to skim through it or if they were foolish enough to leave notifications on after-hours to get all these pings.
One nice thing basically all modern chat systems have is easy group chat, so you don't have to create a new room, but rooms are nice too. e.g. any time we had a customer case requiring a few people to look into it, we'd just create a slack channel for it instead of using threads on the team channel. After a while someone would archive the channel.
Then there are people who use threads and occasionally click the "send to whole room" option which really screws up notifications. You're looking at it right there in the main team chat, but you have to open the thread or your notifications to dismiss the notification.
Next time I'm forced to use Slack I'll use Ripcord. You know what UI I miss most and would help Slack/Discord/Element tremendously? Tabs.
Our smallish company has used Discord all year long for our company communication and I could hardly be happier. They have an excellent bot API, a super clean yet playful interface, instant search and just don't feel/smell as "enterprisey" as Slack already felt (and that was well before now being acquired by Salesforce).
If Discord can maintain all those things and add a bit more Microsoft integration, they have a huge opportunity here.
(Either that or Microsoft can preempt the whole thing and acquire Discord).
My company has a similar size, and we have a self-hosted Mattermost instance. We're switching away because the executives bought into another product but that's a different story, Mattermost works well at that size.
Discord's entire business model seemed to be geared toward toppling Steam by perfecting community features and then expanding into digital sales. Right when they launched their game store, Epic Games started one too and was throwing around Fortnite money to lock in exclusives. Discord quickly retreated and has seemed rudderless for the past year.
They already started shifting away from their gamer branding. Earlier this year they generalized to online communities. And they have a formidable architecture. Some game servers have 6 digit user counts. Their permission model is also way more robust than Slack's, and that's not an easy gap to close given how tightly woven into the architecture a permission model needs to be.
In comparison to Slack, this all could have been had for pennies on the dollar. They must really want the brand, or the customer base, or to already have the enterprise feature gap closed.
And integrate business twitch streams please, with company email footers always reading ‘don’t forget to sub to my stream’. Let the twisted fantasy play out where the business world lives like esports streamers and wow raiding guilds.
Maybe, though this reminds me of the story where Borland's management decided to move away from the "hacker" style ethos and mainstream audience so that they chase after the "enterprise" businesses and ended up alienating their own engineers, their existing customers and screwing up themselves over the years to the point where they went from being one of the biggest software houses in the computer industry to a little ball that is painted and thrown around owners that operate akin to digital graveyards.
Discord's problem isn't it's name. Discord's entire interface is based around gaming. It shows your running game in the UI, it integrates with Steam, etc. It's loading messages are all based on gaming culture.
It just doesn't present itself as something you'd consider for your business.
The problem with Discord isn't the branding, it's the license. Anything you send in Discord can be used for branding material by Discord. Not good for a business.
Good to know. I have some Discord groups and contacts, but I don't spend a lot of time in it. I actually find the playful messages somewhat endearing, but I feel like they'd be better off launching an entirely separate client if they want to appeal to businesses.
Slack has actual administrator tools unlike Discord. Discord very clearly has no interest in the capturing any significant market share in the business space.
There's a bunch of open source projects using it now as well. I have two separate family Discord servers. Quite a few social ones that aren't specifically gaming focused too.
Discord also caters to small-med non-gaming online communities almost by accident because the kinds of moderation features you'd need are the same as if you were a streamer with an audience.
It's not really about the name or the branding but that fact that Discord's primary market and the driving force behind all their features is gaming communities.
Business, for worse, will demand features catered to their workflow.
Certainly an opportunity for Discord, but I wonder how big of an opportunity. Their target audience is more casual whereas Slack's has shifted to more work/Enterprise-focused. So their audiences don't overlap as much as they used to.
It will be interesting how this impacts Mattermost [1] though - an open source developer collaboration tool for Enterprises, a closer competitor to Slack.
I'm so tired of hearing this argument. The amount of revenue generated by customers who use only Microsoft Teams without an Office365 subscription is exactly $0 [1]. MS gives you exactly 2 options to get teams:
1. Free
2. Included as part of Office365.
Teams is currently eatings Slacks lunch, but the lunch was paid for by a corporate IT guy who switched to Office365 so he could lay off some IT admins and save some money compared to managing an on-premise Exchange server.
They totally do, especially at big companies. You need to show that you made a difference, and rolled out new communication platform for the whole company, not just for 5%.
We don't have _less_ staff due to migrating from Exchange Server to EXO -- quite the opposite (and the remainder of the M365 stack has significantly grown IT, as well).
Given that
- Microsoft considered an $8B acquisition early 2016
- Salesforce does a $28B acquisition late 2020
That's only about 3x growth in almost 5 years. Don't get me wrong, this is a massive acquisition, but I still say "only" given the hypergrowth experienced by many adjacent tech companies.
So I think Microsoft may be quite happy they decided not to acquire Slack at such a high tag price nearly 5 years ago.
The number may be crazy, but Slack does benefit from network effects. For example, my company has many bots/integrations with other systems, years of institutional knowledge, and connections with multiple external vendors.
Switching would be painful so there'd have to be some pretty compelling reasons. (And who's got time to recreate all our custom emojis? :-))
That's a moat, not network effects. A network effect would be if your friends at other companies get value from joining Slack while you're on it. But there's not (except maybe sharing integrations/bots).
I'm assuming that third parties are a lot more likely to join an external channel on a platform they're already using (and are more likely to be responsive as well).
I think all the existing integration are examples of an indirect network effect -- companies wouldn't invest in providing them if there weren't already users on the platform.
Damn. I can't see how this ends well for Slack users in the long term.
> Combining Slack with Salesforce Customer 360 will be transformative for customers and the industry. The combination will create the operating system for the new way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world.
Is this specifically a problem with Salesforce? I think people would have this reaction with almost any company that purchases Slack. It represents a shift in focus from being a messaging company to being a piece of a bigger portfolio. That shift alone is much more important than whatever the other pieces in the portfolio happen to be.
If it had been Microsoft buying them I would have been like, well, they've done ok with GitHub so far. And I begrudgingly feel that way as someone who reviles their flagship OS and office products.
I doubt they care. What I suspect Salesforce realised long ago was that they don't need to appeal to their end-users, they just need to appeal to the managers in charge of signing contracts. In that regard, Slack is a fantastic fit.
Sadly I suspect the people saying "we need to find a Slack alternative" today are the same ones that have been saying "Slack sucks" this whole time, to little effect.
zulip is one of those rare pieces of software that really gives me joy to use.
feature-by-feature on paper, it doesn't necessarily stand out compared to the crowded landscape. It's not a new distributed protocol or anything unique.
but you really can tell it's well crafted, with love as slack used to say. And if you don't believe me, you can inspect the source code yourself!
It says much more about the people saying that than anything.
Salesforce is a reasonably good operating entity, I don't see any reason for Slackers to flinch.
But consider that 'Slack' was a movement - literally the name, the original premise, there was a corporate/hip aspect to it. Which now it's not, just the opposite, because it's 'Salesforce'.
Agreed, the reactions I'm seeing here feel more more emotional than rational. (Which is totally legitimate. Emotions are a dominant factor in product "love".) If the product were to get worse, there are any number of effectively-equivalent (if not as lovable) substitutes.
It's 'legit' to feel a certain way, the opposite to make decisions about business and productivity that way.
The real trick is, to figure out all those things we do that we think are based on utility, but are not.
The Saab ad comparing their car to the Jets the make appeals to our 'every little boy wants to be a pilot' fantasy.
But the Ford ads that tell us how 'strong' our vehicle is going to be ... even though many of us will never, ever use them for this purpose.
Like the guy with 1000 different tools in his shed - he buys them 'because they are useful'. But really, it's the 'emotion/novelty' of utility, not actual utility.
At least 1/2 of the tech industry is driven by this, it's hilarious. We HNers, so neurotically passionate about whatever it happens to be ... are the most guilty.
Of course a lot comes out of purely speculative and creative use of technology, it's just that we should be better at discerning.
Slack, if it's bad, is probably because it's a noisy channel, not because it's Salesforce.
> It's 'legit' to feel a certain way, the opposite to make decisions about business and productivity that way.
That seems very reasonable from a purely rational POV, and I know we all like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. (It reminds me of this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rational-2)
This seemed to be the response in every conversation I've had with people about Slack being acquired. No matter who acquired Slack, it just seemed like negative value to the existing customers who signed on for a ubiquitous messaging platform.
Heroku's consistent user experience post-Salesforce-aquisition gives me a little hope. It would be nice to hear Salesforce offer some assurances of product independence, though.
I agree Heroku has in this way been a model acquisition, but in this instance I can't see Salesforce being able to make those assurances – they likely see Slack as a key interface for their products and services, and integrating the two to support that vision will require oversight.
I can still see a world where Slack is a tool that continues to operate and serve its customers, similar to Heroku post-acquisition, but Salesforce augments their services with Slack tie-ins (and vice-versa).
Short: there's a middle ground I think they can strike.
> The combination will create the operating system for the new way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world.
I'm just complaining, but... Why do people write things like this? I see it in my own employer and our marketing material, too. It's confusing bullshit that is devoid of any meaning.
It's not really devoid of meaning if you understand the space. Roughly, Salesforce is about processes and Slack is about communication. Think about handling something like responding to a RFP. Salesforce is good at breaking that down into several pieces of work and assigning them to different people, but the communication and UI sucks. Slack makes communicating across a team easy but lacks the tools to build in formal processes. Combining those will, at least theoretically, end up as a better product.
The text targets key partners, investors and other financial people who needs to be convinced that this is indeed The Best Deal Possible for everyone involved.
Wow. I had to use a Salesforce tool once, and I can confidently say that the only worse things out there are various online tax return forms and Workday.
Great for Matrix though. I love Slack, and think this is one of the worst possible ends for it, from the users POV. I hope it was a profitable exit for the founders and employees though.
I am also surprised, as I'd think the COVID pandemic would have boosted its use. Though, after thinking about it I've seen MS Teams everywhere outside of Open Source and startups. A post-mortem of why they sold, and the events leading to it, would be an awesome thing for one of the founders to do.
They don't have to be exactly matching Microsoft 1:1 to be a competitor. But Office/O365 -> Quip, Azure -> Heroku, Windows -> Lightning Platform (a bit of a stretch)
> Combining Slack with Salesforce Customer 360 will be transformative for customers and the industry. The combination will create the operating system for the new way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world.
oh no. It sounds like they're not even going to try to maintain the whole "wholly independent subsidiary" act. Slack is being swallowed wholesale.
I can't imagine our company sticking with Slack if we are forced to start using Salesforce as well. Although I'm not really sure what we would use at that point. Teams needs the whole Office subscription and we're already on G Suite.
I'd say that I'm amazed Google hasn't come up with a competent Slack competitor yet, but then it's "Google" and "a messaging product", the two are like oil and water.
The problem is they can't settle down on something. I can't even tell you what their current messaging product is right now. Google Wave is dead. Google Facebook^HPlus is dead. I think Hangouts is dead? The thing in my GMail gives me notices that it's going away. Is it Google Voice? Why would I use a product with the name "Voice" to type "Text" to people, especially when it used to be a phone substitute. Certainly nothing is integrated, aside from whatever the thing in GMail is that's going away (and a 100 pixel wide chat isn't going to be useful for team discussions, anyway). Messaging for Google feels like "this ought to be something we can be good at, but can't actually figure out what to do".
Google makes "messaging products" but it's just something that floats on top on top of the sea of Google stuff. Like oil on top of water.
Having gone through many corporate chat transitions, I'm curious where we are headed next or when it will circle back. We already use Salesforce products so I don't see Slack going away unless something much better comes along.
I think these chat apps lack business context. Gitlab and GitHub don’t have real time chat, that would be a start. Then on top of that, to have context driven chat (a chat that is about a merge request, a branch). Or in Jira, to seamlessly chat on a ticket with those involved. That stuff doesn’t exist yet. We have the primitive version of context-less chat which is great for context-less conversation (normal social interaction). In business, we have something very specific to talk about so would like to see a new idea in this space.
The place where this does seem to be evolving is in customer support. When you chat with a representative, they have a lot of context. Your account, order, possible issue, etc.
I don't envy their authentication team. Must be a nightmare to consolidate old and new users under the same duct taped roof while dealing with acquired systems intricacies.
For people looking for an alternative to switch to, we’ve been using Quill [0], which is pretty much a more slick, clean Zulip.
It has a great approach to threads, where you can make them mandatory or optional on a per-channel basis (even when optional they have names and are more useful than Slack threads).
They also support adding external parties to channels/threads by email or SMS and even more interestingly, their model is such that you can direct message people in other Quill organizations if you know their details.
So question: which of all the alternatives to Slack has text as a first class citizen?
We don't use video or audio chat at all; just text chat, pinning important info to channels, swapping small files, searching chat history and a few plugins like reminders and github. May be important to mention that we have a lot of separate projects going on and we separate each in its own channel.
We absolutely want mobile and desktop clients, not a "web UI" that happens to sort of work on all platforms.
Could the hive mind give me some names of alternatives to consider?
It makes sense for them to buy Slack instead of Discord, since Discord has no ambitions to go into the enterprise business. This tweet is from 2017, but there hasn't been any announcements stating otherwise: https://twitter.com/discord/status/904787004357058561
What would’ve been the right trade here. I believe if you’d purchased Slack a few days ago on the original announcement of interest, and then sold them after this announcement, but before there’s time for antitrust to take a look at this, you’d have paid massive taxes on short term gains.
Kudos to whoever thought of this at sfdc. This is a visionary acquisition and it makes sense on so many levels. From the fabric of slack's unique sales model to what this means for enterprise communication.
Teams seems to be doing surprisingly well. Considering how many businesses have it "included" with their Office subscriptions, it just has to be good enough to avoid someone wanting to pay extra for an outside service. If Lync was half as good as Teams is now, companies like Slack never would've gotten off the ground.
I am absolutely not going back to using Teams: it was a slower, buggier, poorly-designed and consistently weird application.
Google isn't capable of putting together a useful chat and then keeping it alive for a meaningful amount of time to save their lives.
Discord seems to be on a streak trying to re-invent their image as a competitor in the space, and having used it for enough gaming related things, I'd definitely consider it for work.
Zulip seems to garner a lot of positive attention as well.
We still use Lync aka communicator aka skype. the killer feature is screenshare and exchange integration. its actually really hard to get some team members to join us on mattermost because they don’t see the point. :/ Looking forward to teams replacing mattermost and business skype going away.
I always found Skype for Business/Lync got confused if you had the software installed but weren't part of the business' domain. My experiences with SfB were: 1. I'm an outside contributor to a company using my personal machine. And 2. My organization but whilst using another organization's hardware. In both cases, joining Skype for Business meetings was downright nightmarish.
Yeah this is a fun little lesson for me. I’d been thinking through the summer that we need to expand what we do with our money and had been dithering, put together a short list of companies (like kid summer) and slack was one of them. I faffed about, put it off and then last night just decided “you know what, just place some trades and pull the plaster off” so I bought like 50 shares across a handful of companies - I own 3 slack shares so I’m not all that bothered.
I’ve risked very little money in my first share purchases - I couldn’t even buy a new low end mountain bike for what I’ve got at risk.
I don’t have first hand knowledge but I think a bunch of small things (not knowing who someone is by just a username, sending messages after hours when user is offline, etc)
Then they tried making another MMO, but ended up making Slack instead.
I really hope they get cracking on another MMO soon.