[anoncake]

So the official solution was proprietary garbage. Shadow IT replaces it by an equally proprietary workaround. That workaround is the underdog so the companies that owns it actually has to allow its workers to make it good if it wants so succeed.

It's officially adopted making it the incumbent. Now the company can stop to pretend caring about quality and start digging moats. Predictably, the proprietary workaround becomes proprietary garbage. And no problem was solved after all.

Will we ever learn?

[dvtrn]

Will we ever learn?

Asking myself this question everyday in an org that uses Skype for Business, Teams, Slack and...yes, there’s an island of engineers and ops people using IRC sneering at all of us from the horizon. Hell we still have people struggling to set up conference bridges and video calls and have resorted to buying their own solutions and expensing them back to payroll. I’ve been given expense reports for paid accounts for Zoom, LogMeIn and someone even tried expensing $3 after buying their own phone number and writing a single serving conferencing app on top of Twilio.

I found that last one especially creative and especially worrisome if these are the lengths people are going through.

I’ve sat through four all hands calls now where “unified communication” was brought up and “infra-departmental communication” was mentioned as the leading gripe on preceding employee satisfaction surveys.

Yet here we are.

Hilarious, when you consider we sell wholesale communications platforms and services.

(When is the next “who’s hiring”? Mid-level Product Manager shackled by golden handcuffs seeks short walks to happy hour and a 4 day work week, heh)

[myself248]

You're not kidding! I once worked with teams of field techs for a large american cellular operator who shall not be named. I'd have 3 or 4 teams in the field, and I was at a desk pulling marionette strings in the network for them.

To communicate with them, I was issued a cellphone (natch), and when I asked if there was a preferred way to juggle the multiple teams, my predecessor said "Just keep the calls short so you minimize the chances of having to put one on hold when another calls you."

"Can I set up a conference bridge and then have them all call into it?"

"Those are expensive. No."

So apparently everyone at this enormous phone company was still living in the 80s when teleconferencing was something you paid for. I called up a buddy who set up a private bridge on his asterisk box, and I gave that number to all my field techs. It was great, I could step away for a moment and come back to find one tech giving advice to another, and in the end my buddy made a few bucks on recip comp over the thousands of minutes we logged.

Did anyone else in the whole company know this was possible?

[dvtrn]

who shall not be named

Okay. I’ll do it: it was Sprint wasn’t it? ;)

[becauseiam]

I think you're overlooking the quality measure of the proprietary garbage as it evolves over time. Slack, in comparison to say Lync, or Skype has made huge moves towards better usability. But for a company like Slack determined to maintain market share, to control the user experience for all its users (whether they want to be users or not) is repeating the same mistakes, not necessarily the corporations signing contracts and writing cheques.

Slack is not the end solution. It's a step in the direction to being less terrible in the realm of corporate communication, and will be replaced by something else that does better in the future. For now it'll hold on whilst it still can.

[TeMPOraL]

I think Singularity will come before proprietary corporate communication software evolves to not be shit.

The sad part is, Slack was better in the past. It's the "digging moats" part GP mentioned that makes software shit. Corporate or otherwise. Consider: once upon a time, they supported an IRC gateway. But that was just a lure to get techies on-board, and predictably (like e.g. Google before with XMPP), once they've reached critical mass, they've shut it off.

(And I'm part of the problem too. I don't complain much, because as long as Ripcord - the not shit third-party desktop client - works, I don't have to deal with Slack's web and Electron crap.)

[thawaway1837]

Email mailing lists were awesome. I could filter them by keyword and search easily, and finding one result would show me the entire chain of the conversation.

And if your corporate IT wasn’t completely nightmarish about locking it down you had multiple client options on almost every platform.

Besides, there were tons of integrations, scripts already available, and it is super easy to write your own irrespective of what scripting language you know.

Technically it sucked in that it could, when used terribly, clog up an entire network (such as the infamous NHS mail chain reply fiasco from a few years ago), but I have no clue who decided Slack was better than emails for what emails did.

Slack is better than Lync and similar corporate messaging platform. But that’s not what people tried to sell it as, or for that matter, Slack advertising sells it as. They sell it as an alternative to email.

[nolaspring]

Microsoft set Skype on fire in a parking lot a few years ago in favor of Teams. Now we're just watching it burn itself out.

[prepend]

Teams has been highly frustrating. For direct IM, it’s better than Skype/lync, but that’s not saying much.

It’s weird how difficult to use their slack competitor is. Hard to search within teams and across channels. There’s a weird interaction between itself and OneDrive/SharePoint that I don’t get the mental model.

I used to hate Slack’s UX a lot until I started to use Teams.

[hpcjoe]

> I used to hate Slack’s UX a lot until I started to use Teams.

This. I was told MSFT has switched to Teams. They don't use Skype. Both my current and soon to be new employer (company bought) use Skype for business.

Skype is terrible in many ways.

Teams has a slicker UI. But it brings the horror to a whole new level. Someone mentions you passing in a group. You get a notification in email. But hey, if you aren't signed into that group, you can't see it. And you can only see like 4-5 groups at a time. So you really can't track conversations in real time.

The whole multi-teams experience ... is not well thought out. I have to switch between at least two different company teams multiple times per day, to do my work over the last 4 months.

Slack, for all its annoying mis-features, handles this workflow quite well. The UI, while somewhat simplistic, just works. Search and threading are terrible, but at least search works. Still have not figured out how to download conversations for transfer into tickets/etc.

I just want something that is simple, works well, allows me to search, to reliably enter code/screen caps/etc. Right now, though I don't like it, Slack comes close to working with some annoying misfeatures. Teams ... does not. Skype is best forgotten about.