Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company.
That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueless about the situation they are now in.
UPDATE:
Some saying it's not super easy to copy Slack. I see what you are saying but the truth is that it's easily to copy Slack to a "good enough" state. If you think the "best" and "most brilliant" software wins the enterprise market then you don't understand the enterprise market. Wish it wasn't like that, but it is and that's Slack's challenge (and what the article is saying).
If that's all Slack does, then it is incredibly simple (I realize this is only one part). It has saved me the time of figuring out what pieces make the whole and how they interact with each other (i.e the skeleton). Now, I just I need to slap the nervous system (code) onto it and call it alive.
Do it in a weekend? A codemonkey could do it in a day.
This argument would be different if it were for something like Dropbox, where the internals are really "something else."
But, I agree, with what I believe you're implying, that HN users throw around "I could code it in a weekend," even if it doesn't apply here.
I used to have same attitude but what I have learned over the years is that sometimes the big Co just does not get it. Just look at Google with its 100 chat applications, it's like watching Titanic hitting an iceberg in slow motion.
I really hate the way tech is trending. Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings. They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first.
With tech more than any other industry the rich get richer. Combined with how tight the big tech companies have gotten with Washington DC and they've basically become too big to fail.
I like(d) slack as much as the next person when my last workplace used it, but we used it over gchat for some reason, right around when Hangouts had just been early released for Google Business/Apps for Education Users. Slack was slick, nice, and definitely fun, but we already had a chat system that more-or-less did the same thing.
I don't think that Slack's issue is so much that other companies are just copying it, it's that they were a nuisance in an already existing space (collaborative chat) and they hit on a few key features that devs liked. While the Slack features are great, and the slack-team is great [1], [edited content: it's yet another item to keep track of], and that's a hard sell when you're an org of 100+ employees and you already have stuff like Lync or Hangouts or Skype around as part of the standard employee loadout.
I hope the best for Slack and sincerely think they'll be able to dazzle people with their support and with good responses to user feedback.
[1] http://imgur.com/a/6vPcn It's small, but this sense of humor and fast response time from the support team is just hard to hate.
Edit: Removed comment on extra account as below comments pointed out Slack has SAML SSO, which I was not aware of as it was not in use at my last place of employment. Changed it to current text, as I still feel that the idea that it's Yet Another Chat that users have to decide on, but definitely a plus that it's not another account.
I don't think it is fair to classify them as just a "fancy IRC". I see technical people myself included think of them that way, but why isn't a slightly fancier IRC dominant?
Seamless mobile clients, integrations, animated gifs, etc. Slack has a lot of small but very sticky features.
Exactly. My workplace is currently evaluating Slack and Microsoft Teams vs. "bolt on chat to the existing internal social network". I'm presently trying to figure out how to explain to the engineers running the evaluation that the value of Slack cannot must be understood by the quality of execution, not just as the sum of its features.
"How will we get people to use Slack if it does not have $feature [1]?" - "But hundreds of people are already using it, so your point is moot."
> [...] a fancy IRC with a new account that has to be set up - that's a hard sell when you're an org of 100+ employees [...]
Slack appears to support SAML SSO, with a list of supported providers and ability to roll a custom one (https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/205168057). Haven't tried/needed it, but wouldn't that care of this particular problem?
Can confirm - at my ultra-massive employer where we have a considerable number of very large Slack teams, we use SAML to authenticate Slack against our intranet ID and everything more or less works.
I had this thought the other day, even though I doubt it's original, and it seems like income inequality is growing to be so massive that its impossible, or at least much harder, to build a business anymore. If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants. Even bigger, more established companies like slack or NYT find themselves between a rock and hard place. Look at whats happening with journalism, it's geting wrecked by social, how can they possibly compete?
All of the services used by the majority of people have been consolidated by just a few companies. This is terrible for both quality and personal provacy, not to mention pricing.
> income inequality is growing to be so massive that its impossible, or at least much harder, to build a business anymore.
> If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants.
These two ideas are diametrically opposed. If it's impossible to build a business then you'd expect that their you'd get no offers to buy your company (indicating that it is valued highly) or that entry into new markets would be near-impossible in the first place (like starting a new bank). What you're actually complaining about here is that big companies won't give startups space to build their own little monopolies. That shouldn't be surprising, in fact part of the reason startups are meant to be lean in the first place is to out-manoeuvre and out-compete large bureaucratic organisations.
> Even bigger, more established companies like slack or NYT find themselves between a rock and hard place. Look at whats happening with journalism, it's geting wrecked by social, how can they possibly compete?
NYT are in a pickle because advertising is a terrible business model in the 21st century and no-one buys newspaper subscriptions any more. They need to find a new way to reap a profit from journalism, preferably one that doesn't result in them turning into Buzzfeed for cheap clicks.
(to add a personal opinion here, I think that journalism is likely to be entirely be replaced by citizen journalism and sousveillance, and that this is a leap forward in freedom of information and openness of the truth).
> All of the services used by the majority of people have been consolidated by just a few companies. This is terrible for both quality and personal privacy, not to mention pricing.
The whole point of market competition is that if one company offering a fungible (and I'd argue software is mostly fungible when it can be easily replicated) product over-prices relative to the market, a competitor will undercut them. Also, the fact that companies like Slack exist is testament to the fact that Microsoft and friends _haven't_ managed to get a stranglehold on the software market.
I don't know what world you're living in but the reality is not as grim as you're making out.
Indeed, I think it is easier to build a business today - and income inequality is not the reason for most of the entrepreneurship issues people struggle with...
Automation and concentration of power are, however, problems for the modern entrepreneur. If they build a cool app or something and become part of the tech ecosystem that way, then they have decreasing power over their own piece of the pie. They can be banned from the app store, out-SEO'd in a week, locked out from previously accessible user data, banned from an API, etc... Some of this is due to today's fast pace, but another factor is the centralized architecture of modern internet ecosystems.
I agree, and I think we're on the brink of a real revolution in decentralising the internet once more. Many people are working on this problem, from masotodon to the bitcoin economy to ethereum, I2P/TOR and so on. I think what we really need is a "browser" equivalent that talks P2P - the internet would have never taken off if not for the web, and many of the companies working on decentralisation now are either talking "web" or providing infrastructure/protocols that no-one really talks yet.
Even the fact that journalism is getting dominated by citizen journalism speaks to this, imo. We just need to free citizen journalism from the shackles of twitter.
did you read the article? journalist aren't making money because they cant run ads.that means professional journalist won't be able to survive anymore.
It has always been like that. Thinking this is new or trending is a really naive point of view. The business world is unethical, immoral, frequently borders on the illegal, and hardly ever does the right thing. If you think any of the tech companies are any different then you drank the kool aid.
They are not too big to fail. The bubble we are in makes it seem that way. Cheap money makes valuations soar. Won't last much longer though. A good thing because thats when you can really make some money.
I don't think it has. Tech has allowed for massive consolidation not possible in the past, in almost every industry.
Media is now controlled by a handful of global corporations rather than independent outlets
Tech is the same, Amazon will soon control everything from ocean freight to last mile delivery. Google and Facebook have similar reach as well as the ability to influence billions.
If something isn't done I think we're going to see Weylan-Yutani level super-corporations that are effectively more powerful than governments.
> They can just wait to see what works, then copy it and kill the startup that did it first.
Well, if the only advantage is being first that's a big problem. The same goes for other startups: they can observe what works and deliver a better solution faster.
I see Slack innovating a little (custom menus etc.) but maybe it's just the market shifting - the chat alone is not interesting anymore as a standalone product but rather as part of a bigger solution.
I'm not sure that's true. Copying a product that is doing well isn't a new idea. How many auction sites have tried to copy eBay? As far as I can tell, it's still the king of that market. Once something is sufficiently useful, there's no compelling reason to switch from it to something else.
When did we start ignoring the reality that startup's need something unique about them to survive?
When did startups become entitled to not having competition?
When did BigCo decide to bow down to startups and stop focusing on survival?
One lesser discussed reason for this is the amount of power centralized control of big data & the cloud allows to the massive companies that leverage it. Companies are leveraging it before they really even have it. Control of the data is a big part of controlling the ecosystem. Everyone likes to make fun of how technologically illiterate legislators are - but it seems we simultaneously expect legislation to make a safe space for us. It seems more reasonable that developers & users together figure out how to take back control of our data!
Nothing new here. Look at Netscape, eventually being surpassed by Internet Explorer. (Which in turn was surpassed by Safari and Chrome)
It's very hard for large companies to do large scale decentralized R&D, so they copy and buy companies that are doing it. This isn't an awful thing. In many cases the original technologists get acquired. If the market is big enough, big players will want in too.
The effect you're describing might be a temporary anomaly. If startups are consistently damaged by tech giants copying them, startups will get lower valuations. If startups get lower valuations, tech giants might as well just acquire them rather than bothering to copy. It may reach an equilibrium.
It is interesting. It might go some way to explain the culture that the app embodies. Lots of 'cutesy' things like MOTD on the loading screen, emoticons everywhere, application messages that include the word "yay", integration with Giphy which seems to be a random Gif roulette. It all feels rather unprofessional sometimes. And like they're trying to crowbar the Slack culture into my own office culture.
When tools are straightforward in their utility they can empower, but when they have so much baggage, they can also influence culture. Of course being able to communicate more fluidly can change the culture of a workplace to be more open. But it sometimes feels like an extension of flippant social media, except you can't escape because there's critical stuff on it.
I used to work in a place that used XMPP, and before that Microsoft Communicator. They didn't bring as much benefit as Slack does, but sometimes I wish for something a bit more unobtrusive. I don't want a tool to try and make friends with me.
I've been trying to figure out what it would take to make SMTP the last business IM protocol. Today's fancy email applications are basically laid out like IMs anyway. It just seems like a matter of getting delivery latency down, and demanding some level of compliance with modern email standards (STARTTLS only, must have spf and dkim, must have FCrDNS). If we're playing by IM rules, we can even have people establish contacts, which should make spam filtering a lot lower latency.
The other sundry things would be video transcoding, and reference-type attachments (for stupid nonsense like attaching a giphy to your message, or possibly-useful things like embedding google docs info).
I'm a member of a team that pays for Slack. Don't forget, if you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I am sick, sick, sick, of being somebody's product.
And with Slack, I don't have to be somebody's product. I don't have to already use Lookout xxx Outlook. I don't have to cope with messages from recruiters sending spam. Any fake nuz that shows up was faked by somebody I know.
Go Slack. Please figure out how to make your business sustainable: you're helping make our business sustainable.
> This is the best time to raise money ever. It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history,
He basically knows he didn't need to raise 200M, but if you can take that, put it in the bank and don't have burn rates the likes of Uber - you've got a while to figure out the exact route to profitability.
So the problem slack has is that chat is so foundational to the web that it's one of those things that doesn't really make sense to farm it out to third parties.
It's not hard or expensive to run yourself, and it's not difficult to securely expose on the web. That's why Lync has such a head start and why Atlassian's on premises option is gaining traction. Ultimately I suspect Mattermost is going to end up the main winner here. Slack, Teams and Hipchat will all have their userbases, but they'll have been in a three-way bar fight to get them, which is expensive.
Meanwhile, all those 12 person offices that farm their IT out to third party support companies? They're gonna start getting given Mattermost servers, because that's easy for the IT shops to license and install, yet also still under their direct control, which is important because IT support companies don't have a tonne of bandwidth to educate all 100 client companies if slack suddenly changes something.
I'm going to tell you how hard it is to get chat right. I work at the company that more or less popularized internet chat. We use slack internally pretty much exclusively, and have for years.
Eh, I think they'll be fine. A solid product and existing userbase. They'll either get auctioned off for a few billion or showered with enough money that they can't possibly fail for at least five years.
My exact thought. Good thing I Control + F'd "800" before duplicating your comment.
800 employees is especially insane for a serial entrepreneur like Stuart Butterfield who should know better. Then again, the Twitter guys including Ev Williams were serial entrepreneurs and yet the overhired too. It seems an interesting coincidence in the technology sector that viral user growth often can lead to viral hiring.
> “We’re trying to build empathy at scale,” Mr. Butterfield said.
> “There are people who will die, get divorced, have children with cancer,” Mr. Butterfield said. “You really have to put yourself in their frames of mind. If we preoccupy these people for a minute longer than we have to, we’ll lose them.”
Slack is great, but it's also incredibly easy to copy. To the big tech guys this is just a feature, not a product, and that's Slack's challenge. It's totally fine if they don't take the enterprise by storm and remain a niche product, but then they can't be a 750 person company.
That stupid full page add thing they did when Teams came out also makes the leadership team look a bit clueless about the situation they are now in.
UPDATE: Some saying it's not super easy to copy Slack. I see what you are saying but the truth is that it's easily to copy Slack to a "good enough" state. If you think the "best" and "most brilliant" software wins the enterprise market then you don't understand the enterprise market. Wish it wasn't like that, but it is and that's Slack's challenge (and what the article is saying).