[fizzbatter]

Hate? Everyone i know loves slack. I love slack. I've used it for my last two companies for (~many) years now. That doesn't make it innovative though, imo.

I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative. Attaching a file to a message?. Searching history? These aren't new or special in any way shape or form.

What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack.

There's no hate coming from me - i'm just a realist. Slack didn't do anything amazing. It just did things right. Which is unfortunate for all of us users, as it took so many years to do things right. Unfortunately for slack though, they showed what is a good UX.. how hard do you think it is to copy that UX? Not easy, sure, but the template is there. Spend some time copying Slack, and i think you can manage to make Slack.Clone.

[Latty]

It sounds a lot like all the people that bash StackOverflow - "It's just posts and a voting system, I could write that in a week!", ignoring all the complexity and design behind it, operating at scale and cultivating the environment.

If people need something to be 'amazing' not to put it down, and 'amazing' doesn't include doing the right things to be highly successful...

If no one else did it, was it really so obvious?

[SomeStupidPoint]

Microsoft has a well regarded developer network and Q&A system regarding Microsoft technologies, at least in my (limited to primarily Azure) experience.

Similarly, Microsoft has already operated a widely used integrated chat, profile, and community system at scale. Given their recent pushes, it wouldn't be entirely surprising for them to bring back similar platforms for business users integrated with LinkedIn.

That would eat a lot of Slack's potential big clients, because MS has a history of enterprise grade support on products like that, and Slack has scale issues for large orgs.

[blakeyrat]

Does Slack even allow on-premise installs yet? That instantly disqualified them from the last 3 jobs I've had. (All of which had data protection issues that prevented them from using off-premises IM systems, mostly HIPAA regulations.) Microsoft's got that market already sewn-up, right out of the gate.

[Pyxl101]

As far as I'm aware Slack does not offer on-premise installs. (On-premise in this case could mean running in my own account at a cloud service provider) It's unfortunate because I'd love to adopt them as well at my current company, but it will be very difficult to achieve if the only option is to become yet another tenant of some large multi-tenant infrastructure.

Microsoft will quickly take over this market if they offer an easy-to-manage on-prem solution that's integrated with the company directory, as it seems they've done. Plenty of firms already have Exchange and ActiveDirectory and Skype for Business.

[Daviey]

I think this is one reason teams use hipchat, because it does provide this.

[8_hours_ago]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft Team doesn't currently have a self-hosted option. I hope it's in the pipeline because my company can't use an offsite IM service. It would be nice if Microsoft added support and then Slack followed. Competition is good!

[it33]

Mattermost is an open source, self-hosted Slack-alternative: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...

[oddvar]

There is also Matrix (matrix.org), an open standard for decentralized communications. Our goal is to let all apps talk to each other - including Slack, Mattermost, and Microsoft Teams!

Check it out using any Matrix-enabled app: https://matrix.to/#/#matrix:matrix.org

[cmdrfred]

Skype can be self hosted.

[irodoramatic]

For enterprise companies that already use a lot of MS services, and which have tight security policies on what software can be used/licensed/installed, an MS Slack clone could be a wonderful thing for employees.

[ganset]

Having worked for a company with security concerns and tightly coupled to Microsoft, Lynx fucking sucks and a MS Slack alternative would have made my short time there much more bearable.

[geofft]

I think you are interpreting the rhetoric as "Slack is not innovative, therefore it is not praiseworthy."

The claim is something else entirely: "Slack is not innovative, therefore it is not immune to competition."

There isn't any value judgment with the second claim. "didn't do anything amazing" is a statement of fact, not a put down. It's not somehow morally bad to do nothing amazing! If anything, it's morally good. There's no sense wasting time building amazing technological breakthroughs when the problem space doesn't need it, and just needs someone to execute well on boring problems. (Slack is particularly good at recognizing this and just getting the job done; see also their tech stack running on PHP.)

[JamesBarney]

Stack overflow benefits from tremendous network effects while Slack does not.

[mdonahoe]

Slack has some limited network effects with guest access, but they should really make inter-company collaboration easier.

The lock-in due to loss of history is a bigger reason to stick with slack though once you have it.

[acedinlowball]

Sorry, but you're wrong about this. This is my opinion on the matter and I understand that not everyone will agree with me.

[exstudent2]

People bash StackOverflow for their draconian moderation, not because it would be technically trivial to implement (it wouldn't, nothing at scale is).

[JamesBarney]

Stack overflow was hugely popular before their draconian moderation. And I use it less because of it. The most valuable questions I have as a developer are things like "what are they trade offs between using system.js or webpack". "How should I use flux Or redux to get the most benefit?" Or "how does the js build ecosystem work". These are much more valuable in my opinion then "I got error 4602 how do I solve it?".

[Latty]

I've seen both. The "draconian moderation" is also the reason for their success.

[exstudent2]

That's highly debatable. I use it despite the moderation. Half the questions I get answers for are "closed, off topic".

[Latty]

If it wasn't for the moderation, it'd be a swamp of terrible just like the forums of old.

[exstudent2]

Many people feel otherwise. Anyway it's way off topic to the op.

[intoverflow2]

>What slack did far more than UI, was UX. Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack.

I don't think they even do that well, it's a complete nightmare finding anything on slack beyond the last 24 hours.

What Slack did well was branding and marketing.

[kzisme]

I haven't met a single person (unless they were ~really~ non technical) that enjoyed using slack.

It never works the way I expect it to work, and very simple things that you can do within IRC takes multiple steps in Slack.

[hosh]

I enjoy using Slack. There were a lot of nuances that together adds up into substantial improvements over Hipchat or IRC.

I am also a remote software engineer who have been working on distributed teams for the past 8 years. I've tried a bunch of different things to collaborate remotely, including IRC. Your mileage may vary.

[kzisme]

What downsides did you find to using IRC?

Either way each choice is just a tool and if it works for you - thanks great!

[hosh]

Wasn't a downside to IRC so much as there are UI/UX stuff in Slack that helps a lot. These are small things that seems obvious now, but they help with communication.

I've been working on applying the theory of Kanban starting from first principle: "Make work visible." Visibility helps develop trust. Slacks helps with signaling a lot, and there are obviously a lot of thought put into the design.

Some examples:

1. URL for every message. I can paste that URL into Github PRs or Jira to reference a conversation where people talk through something.

2. Cross-device notifications and fallbacks, and other controls such as Do Not Disturb, etc. This allows me to control heads-down coding vs. when people needs help.

3. Notification integration helps. I know there are IRC bots that can do that, but how well you can just click through things depends upon the IRC client you choose. Being able to see a log of say, Github and Jira (usually in a separate channel) helps stay in the loop. The same with when adding CI/CD notifications.

4. Starring messages helps me manage time. I don't read everything people send over the chat. I certainly do NOT try replacing person-to-person contact with Slack (or IRC or HipChat). Sometimes I'll star something I want to read later (which may or may not happen).

5. URLs posted often have previews, which also helps with managing whether I go read it or not.

I'm sure these things can be done with IRC, and Hipchat probably copied over some of these ideas. Mattermost has certainly cloned the important stuff. By no means am I saying any of this seem earth-shattering innovative, but it is clear to me that Slack was designed around remote working, and it works well.

To keep things in perspective too: before Gmail, I used to run my own web server and used terminal-based apps for that. I don't do that anymore because it was easier to just dump things in Gmail and then search for things I need. I'm still keeping my tmux+emacs setup though -- maybe I'm missing out with web-based development.

So yeah, Slack is a great tool, and it works well with what I do. If you don't use it with discipline, or you have not developed much of a philosophy on how this all works together, it's not going to work well. You won't have a philosophical framework in which to curate or vet what you want in your life or attention-space.

[thesimpsons1022]

i enjoy the built in gifs and emojis but thats about it

[kzisme]

When I used it at a previous job emojis/gifs were quite fun, but after awhile I stopped using them.

I feel like they get in the way more than anything - and other platforms can still implement those just as easily.

[beachstartup]

i agree, the search and history are its achilles' heel right now. i still cut and paste important stuff out of slack into a big notes text file because i know it will be a shitty experience finding it later.

[geoka9]

You know you can "star" stuff in slack, right?

[beachstartup]

so what? i want to search based on keyword, not know ahead-of-time what i'm going to find important in 6 months.

[domino]

Shameless plug here, but you could give us a try: https://pogo.ai , we aim to solve that problem (and more :) )

[vehementi]

Marketing yeah. They weren't the first to do the obvious "make IRC in the cloud with persistent storage and notifications/app/etc." I had been waiting for, just the first I heard of.

Do you have any other issues, just curious or is their search algorithm enough to make the Slack platform a net bad UX?

[drumdance]

I personally prefer Flowdock's UI, but they're slipping behind.

[reitanqild]

> I can't think of a single feature they've done that is innovative.

This reminds me a lot of HN dismissing Dropbox on the original show HN or something:

"We have git, rsync, FTP. We can hack something like this together in an afternoon."

Except that was before Dropbox went ahead to become a huge success.

This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]

[fizzbatter]

So what? you don't have to innovate to be a success, that's where a lot of HNers get stuck imo.

Sure, i'm not calling Slack amazing - but i very clearly said i use slack, love it, pay for it and recommend it. I used Dropbox too.

I don't think anyone here is claiming Slack isn't a massive success. Nor that the product is any less great because it's not innovative. A comment like:

> This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]

seems to suggest "we" are somehow wrong.. but i'm not sure where. Is my above statement somehow wrong? Or are you simply linking success and innovation where as i am not?

[reitanqild]

>> This time we are saying this after Slack has already established itself. :-]

> seems to suggest "we" are somehow wrong.. but i'm not sure where.

Thanks, it was just an attempt to not talk down to anyone even if I disagree.

[reitanqild]

I agreed earlier today.

Rethinking it I think they might have been really innovative, but more in sales, marketing etc than in pure technical terms.

[Latty]

The general response in the thread was hoping that Slack would get gutted and dismissing it as trivial. Not being 'innovative' isn't a sin. Thinking there is nothing to learn from slack sounds like a mistaking to me.

[SomeStupidPoint]

But MS already operated a widely used webchat, profile, and community network, before social networks were a thing. As usual, MS did a meh implementation ahead of the market, got scooped by a bunch of slick implementations, and will come back a few years later with a relatively solid enterprise offering.

MS is going to bundle LinkedIn with a Slack-clone tied to their CMS and AI chat systems, and provide an easy-to-scale-in-private-cloud platform to enterprise. Part of their Azure smart services.

That's all people mean: Slack did a pretty good job, but it's very similar to stuff MS has done before, and there's not really a secret sauce trench. So MS will probably be able to win a lot of the enterprise market.

[GFischer]

Well, isn't what you're describing the Teams software that prompted Slack's letter?

Only tied to Office365, not Azure and LinkedIn.

https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat...

[reitanqild]

This was my feeling as well.

[mercer]

I have the feeling doing Dropbox right is a lot more difficult than doing Slack right. I still use Dropbox because somehow Drive and iCloud still don't work quite as nicely as Dropbox does. But I might be wrong; I've never built chat or file-sync apps.

[Ntrails]

It's not about what can be done, it's about prior art.

I've used xmpp chats with a couple of clients since well before slack and I'd struggle to think of a feature in slack that I hadn't used before.

[scaryclam]

We're actually investigating switching over to an XMPP server and completely ditching slack. No-one in the company uses it, no-one likes using it and XMPP just seems to work.

[croon]

I wasn't a pro about it, but I set up and ran our XMPP at a previous company. What I saw as a real problem was a split between clients, servers, modules over the protocol, so it definitely wasn't painless in what functionality worked between one server, modules, a client and inevitably someone choosing a different client. You might do it better than me and it ends up working great for you, or it's gotten better in the last few years since I tried it, but if my experiences are any indication I wouldn't recommend that route. YMMV.

But if you don't like Slack, I'm guessing Mattermost is out of the question as well. I'm still using IRC in a lot of places which "just works", but obviously that is missing a lot of features and fluff of newer technologies, even if some can be retrofitted in.

Please et me know what you decide and your success since it's still relevant for me in a couple of places.

[jpalomaki]

Both Slack and Dropbox are simple ideas, executed extremely well. I see that for both of them the challenge is there's quite many customers who don't demand the best execution, but can settle for not-so-good-but-a-bit-cheaper alternative.

Both companies can probably make well enough money to survive and achieve growth, but maybe not such an exponential growth the investors where expecting.

[yoz-y]

After having read http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding... I think that people often misuse the term innovation. From my understanding Slack is innovative, precisely because it is useful. Its novelty is not in features but in the delivery. Yes IRC had all the features but it is hardly something one can recommend. Slack made the long process of setting up a server, shell/bouncer, dcc a matter of a few clicks. On top of that they provide a unique client for everybody which means that everybody sees the same thing. Throw in the integrations and you have a very compelling package. The features one by one are not new or revolutionary, but they were the first to push the whole deal out.

[swasheck]

"Hate" no longer means "hate." It means "disagree with another at any level."

[Latty]

People were saying they hope Microsoft would put Slack out of business. That's not disagreeing, that's actively disliking them.

[swasheck]

But even dislike != hate.

[mercer]

Plus, Microsoft can throw engineering power at integrating their 'clone' with all their other tools. While I can't seem myself buying into their ecosystem anytime soon, that's a huge advantage that will be hard for Slack to compete with.

[Latty]

I'd imaginethe developers of the products integrating their own things into Slack would give more and better thingts than Microsoft integrating other products into their things. We'll have to see if people start shifting where they integrate.

[mercer]

Good point. I'm too far away from Moft's ecosystem to be able to tell how well they can execute such integrations...

[mamcx]

Is like to say cooking is just about mix ingredients.

[dingaling]

> Top to bottom, it's a very nice UX. It's why i love Slack.

I wouldn't even credit them with that. 20 minutes ago I yet again pressed up-arrow to scroll up one line to see a message off the top of the page and yet again it dropped me into an editing prompt for my last message. What?

And then there's the click-click-click of jumping between channels to see the latest messages, instead of having some form of summary.

In my experience people tolerate the UI of Slack, they don't praise it.

[leesalminen]

I've long thought that an aggregated screen holding all unread message (with a button to expand +/- 5 lines) was sorely missing from Slack.

[Fishkins]

This is a newish feature that's at least close to what you want https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/226410907-View-all-...