[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.