The authors company isn't a Slack competitor, it's a real-time data platform. Otherwise I imagine they wouldn't be using Slack for their internal messaging.
> Matthew O' Riordan is CEO and Co-founder of Ably. Ably is a platform that makes it easy for developers to add realtime messaging... to their applications.
Slack is realtime messaging. Ably is realtime messaging. They are competitors - the only question is how direct.
Slack is chat, its messages are sent and read by humans. Ably is a developer API, its messages are sent and read by machines.
Slack has a shiny user interface and a bunch of nice enterprise features. It's something you'd have everyone in your company sitting on their machine all day.
Ably is something nobody will ever see. It's an API that underlies other people's applications. Hell, Slack could run on top of Ably.
They're absolutely not competing. You're either misreading or deliberately misleading.
> Matthew O' Riordan is CEO and Co-founder of Ably. Ably is a platform that makes it easy for developers to add realtime messaging... to their applications.
Slack is realtime messaging. Ably is realtime messaging. They are competitors - the only question is how direct.