[chucknelson]

I'm surprised investors aren't more scared of the competition, particularly Microsoft and its Teams product that is part of Office 365.

Maybe it's not a huge deal because the overlap of Slack customers and Office 365 customers isn't that big?

[DylanDmitri]

Teams isn't going to directly take market share from Slack, but it forms a hard barrier limiting Slack's future growth. Large established organizations are switching to Teams, and finding it good enough that they'll never want to pay for Slack.

[Slimbo]

Teams is absolutely taking share from Slack. As chat permeates organisations, it needs policies, single sign on, oversight and standards that are harder to implement in slack than Teams/Office 365. I know of many organisations who've been forced off slack because 'company policy'.

[calvinmorrison]

Never underestimate the power of workplace bureaucracy. At organizational size X, integrating with new Microsoft product Y, single sign on working and easy deploys to all office machines, support from Microsoft and Microsoft lackeys pitching new ideas to IT people, of course they're gonna pick teams.

[rchaud]

One man's "workplace bureaucracy" is another man's "it just works".

To everybody who isn't a software developer and will likely never need Jira integrations and Slackbots, Slack is just another chat app.

For a paid software, Slack needs to win those people over too.

[bradstewart]

> integrating with new Microsoft product Y, single sign on working and easy deploys to all office machines, support from Microsoft

Those sound more like great features than "workplace bureaucracy".

[thejosh]

If they can fix teams so everybody who uses it doesn't hate it, I'm sure they'll absolutely dominate.

[ttul]

There is also the possibility of Microsoft buying Slack to fix Teams.

[jupblb]

It's very unlikely considering they thought about doing that a few years ago.[0] I don't think they'll rapidly push forward with adding features characteristic for Slack as well. Teams is just yet another corporate tool that is easy to sell to existing customers of Office 365.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-canceled-8-billion...

[scarface74]

It’s basically the definition of enterprise software that the people who buy it aren’t the people who use it. The bean counters don’t care whether the users hate the software.

[gonzo41]

I'm still stuck with Skype. Go Delphi!

[lvh]

Have you used Teams? I've had to once, to talk to people and Microsoft, and it was _hilariously_ bad. I don't know anyone who uses it in earnest, and I know people who have used Google Chat.

(I do most of the sales calls for Latacora, which feels like a decent representative sample of startups, and I think all but one, maybe two, of the companies we have ever spoken with used Slack. Order of magnitude a percent.)

[gamblor956]

My company tried slack, Hangouts, and teams. We're standardizing on teams because it's the easiest for non-technical users to understand and use.

[techslave]

que? how can one not understand slack? it couldn’t be simpler.

[Spivak]

Never used Teams. This is not a comparison just some things in Slack that are weird.

* Formatting is done with Markdown syntax instead of "word processor" style formatting.

In a word processor if you type Hello, Ctrl+b World Ctrl+b!

it would produce Hello, <b>World</b>!

In Slack it produces Hello <b>World </b>!* * .

* /commands are not discoverable or intuitive to anyone who never used IRC or CLI programs. Non-programmers have no idea what arguments are or that [brackets] means optional.

* Bots and their syntax have the same problem except that their DSLs are far more varied and arcane.

* Very few people know or understand the difference between a channel and a group.

* Threads are super weird compared to email. It's like an inbox but not really. Threads interleaved into actual message timelines are not very discoverable and difficult to follow.

* Attachments and files don't really work like most people expect.

* There are at least 5 different settings panels all with different things and scopes.

* Reminders and a bunch of stuff being implemented as a magic "account" in Slack is super confusing to people.

* Very few people really "get" apps as well in this respect. They're in your message timeline, they look like accounts, and are in some ways but aren't in others.

* The difference between a "bot" and "app" isn't super well defined. Some respond to messages in a channel, some need commands.

[ghc]

Excellent enumeration of the things Slack gets wrong. I’m not sure all of them can be fixed, either. I have more faith in Microsoft getting it right.

[Ididntdothis]

I agree that Teams is pretty bad but a lot of companies use it because they have office 365. Your view is probably skewed by looking at Silicon Valley it startups. A lot of big companies use Teams.

In my company Teams was actually a big improvement because we had nothing before.

[lvh]

Oh sure: I didn’t mean to imply nobody does, I’m definitely just talking to startups.

[Blackstone4]

Work is a non-software company and we asked if we could use Slack and IT responded by saying that we already had Teams installed and included with O365.... therefore we should use that. That's what we've being doing except that no one chats on there....

[_jal]

> That's what we've being doing except that no one chats on there

...Which serves as a demonstration that nobody needs chat.

Isn't it great how that works?

[jodrellblank]

You might say nobody needs it, but they might benefit from it.

As many times as I’ve hated on Slack on HN, my anger is at their bloat and sluggishness and low density UI to do basic text chat. At least I can do basic text chat in an IRC style channel in it.

Desktop Teams is a nightmare of mystery magic UI, I never have any clue where I am in it, where anything else is, how to get to or from stuff or what the chat is doing, it’s super unpleasant.

It’s basically a web browser to SharePoint but with no browser chrome or address bar or navigation hints or breadcrumbs, then the same into a Skype replacement, then a pile of chat channels which aren’t channels and have rolled up chat threads in a list in them, but all of this in one window so you can only do one thing in the UI at any time (I.e. NOT chat to someone and look up some documentation in another window because it only has one window) and Teams honking at you wherever you are with red blobs of attention grabbers and “people are trying to contact you in Teams” dark pattern Facebook bullshit where the mobile teams and desktop teams notify and then emails you.

It’s both completely overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.

[ArtWomb]

The divide between customer bases actually resonates throughout the industry. It's Conoco Philips and the Department of Justice vs Gitlab and Sysdig. Old econ vs new roughly. And is sort of playing out across AWS vs Azure, etc. I wonder how Slack addresses this divide. Perhaps in keeping more of a startup ethos and attracting international players such as Grab.

[ElonMuskrat]

No chance to survive

The explanation is here

For Slack has no moat

[judge2020]

Hangouts chat as well, GSuite integration: https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

It's one of the few products that's forced Google to create a desktop app (even if it still is CEF based).

[sys_64738]

I wouldn't be surprised if Slack got bought up by the likes of Facebook or some other big tech.

[Kiro]

It would literally be impossible for my company to switch from Slack. It's so tightly integrated.

[flixic]

Consider replacing "literally" with "practically" or something similar in phrases like these.

I have seen first-hand how much of the business can run on Slack. Yet, if it's gone one day, companies would survive.