I don't think it's sad; I've worked for a lot of small companies. Spending a few days learning and setting up tools is a lot of investment, never mind maintenance. I want to focus on creating business value, not "plumbing" like setting up chat tools.
Small companies sometimes turn in to large ones, but migrating from the tools everyone is used to is often not received well. There is a lot of inertia here.
> it's kinda sad that it has come to be that tech companies will consider installing matrix "complex".
I go to the Matrix website and there's a lot of "blah blah blah" about how it's an open network, a decentralized messaging protocol yada yada yada" Nothing about "how to actually start using the thing"
> More importantly, you don't need to get IT or Procurement involved to try slack.
Are you implying you do have to do so to try out Matrix? You can simply use the web version of Riot hosted here (https://riot.im/app) and sign up for a free account on matrix.org.
There's a link to this accessible from the "Try Matrix Now" page you referenced above. Admittedly, it seems the words inviting you to try Riot "on the web" were linked to https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot instead of to https://riot.im/app/. That's probably a mistake and should be fixed.
You can create your own rooms (which are like IRC channels) which can be invite-only.
The counterpart to Slack workspaces/"servers" would be Matrix communities. They allow you to group a bunch of rooms and users together for discoverability. The feature exists today and is usable but still not as polished as one would hope for, but I think work on this is coming up soon.
In particular, I think better community front pages (describing the community, supplying related URLs and such) and access control (such the ability to restrict joins to community rooms to community members without having to invite each user to the room separately) are things that will be worked on.
sorry, i think if a tech company can't maintain an install for something that is crucial , then it shouldnt be a tech company.perhaps it s a marketing shop or sth.
it's as if tech is delegating so much away that in the end there will be nobody left willing to actually do the tech
Maybe consider that we have literally hundreds of priority tasks, all of which are legitimately very important, and that while we can spend the time necessary to install and maintain non-turnkey solutions, we’d really prefer to work on one of the other priorities with that time.
There’s no such thing as general tech priorities, it’s just an amalgam of a bunch of individual priorities. In most of the cases I’ve seen those priorities are very reasonable. If you start a tech company and prioritize fiddling with internal messaging software over building your product, you’re going to fail. Prioritizing tech doesn’t mean yak shaving every random task, it means outsourcing as many non-essential tasks as you possibly can so that you have as much time and attention as possible for the one specific technical task that matters: building your product.
I don't think priorities shifted away from tech, they just moved up the value chain. Tech companies should focus their limited resources on building their core product, not managing "plumbing" like email servers or chat.
I can definitely maintain an install of whatever is needed. Why would I use time doing something that doesn't create value over and above just using a paid for solution?
Small companies sometimes turn in to large ones, but migrating from the tools everyone is used to is often not received well. There is a lot of inertia here.