Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DanHulton 3032 days ago
There's also a fair amount of hubris in assuming that assuming that you know the market better than the market leader.

They're killing it for a reason, and it just may be that the market they're targeting cares more about the app Just Working than about the RAM consumption.

3 comments

Slack is merely the latest contender in a very long succession of group chat technologies. They will be usurped one day, but they are substantially accelerating their demise by making their product so infuriatingly slow.
Microsoft is gunning for them hard with Teams. It's not really a very good product, but it might win traction just by being bundled into their Office 365 subscriptions.

Microsoft does have people on staff that know how to make an Electron app not suck really horribly, though whether any of that expertise from the DevTools branch makes its way to Office and the red-haired stepchild UC teams...

> assuming that you know the market better than the market leader.

I never made that claim.

> They're killing it for a reason

Sure, but who knows what that reason really is. I've gone through numerous cycles of "best chat app ever", and they're pretty much all in the dustbin now. I just don't see anything about Slack that makes it any better than several alternatives other than the number of users. In fact it's objectively worse than alternatives in several ways. The video and regular calling for example is pretty terrible on anything less than a high speed internet connection. In general the app often fails to load on weak WIFI. I can still use Skype, Discord, Gittr, Facebook Messenger, Signal, et.al. on coffeeshop wifi, but not Slack. You don't need to be a genius to see that this is a problem.

The status quo justifies the status quo, said every market leader ever.