[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.