Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fizzbatter 3518 days ago
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?

3 comments

>> 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.

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.

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.
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.

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...

This was my feeling as well.