[cmahler7]

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.

[csydas]

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.

[bitexploder]

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.

[majewsky]

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."

[1] e.g. SSO integration

[senko]

> [...] 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?

[ajdlinux]

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.

[csydas]

I see, that was not set up at my last work place, so I was not aware it was an option.

I have edited my original post to correct this with an updated content piece. Thank you both for letting me know.

[wheelerwj]

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.

The world is in a weird place these days.

[beaconstudios]

> 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.

[pokemongoaway]

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.

[beaconstudios]

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.

[chrischen]

How is journalism wrecked by social? By social you mean social (aka fake) news?

[wheelerwj]

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.

[pryelluw]

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.

[cmahler7]

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.

[hdhzy]

> 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.

[amorphid]

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.

[jonwachob91]

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?

[pokemongoaway]

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!

[mathattack]

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.

[seppin]

so who buys slack ?

[mercer]

Atlassian or Microsoft. Although I hope not.

[jfoster]

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.

[sjg007]

"Startups have basically become free market validation for the tech kings."

This is not a new thing..

[rb808]

We need a better patent system basically.