[antoniuschan99]

I felt that Slacks innovation never went beyond stage 1-2. The app was thrusted onto stage by upending chat and the momentum was sustained against teams by its 3rd part integrations implementation.

Innovations that could have carried the company further could be digital whiteboarding, google docs like editing, dropbox style storage, squiggle like remote teams collaboration.

Also the atlassian merger via hip-chat sunset could have resulted a stronger integration between the two organizations.

Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned

[NickM]

Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned

I'm still mad about this. It was such a great piece of software, and then Slack bought it and literally killed it without offering anything to replace the lost functionality.

[noneeeed]

This is one of the small number of takeovers (along with Sparrow and Dark Sky) that actually make me angry, because they deprived everyone of something really great, for little apparent benefit.

The fact that so many people use Slack, but then do all their voice, video and screensharing in Zoom or some other tool says a lot about Slack as a tool and company.

My wife uses Teams for work. It's rubbish in many ways, but when she's using it they do everything in it. Somehow slack has failed at this despite having many of the same features built in.

[irrational]

Why do you say Teams is rubbish? We used it for the better part of a year before moving to Slack (corporation wide mandate). So far my opinion of Slack is that it is rubbish. I never had any issues with Teams, but Slack has been a nightmare for me. I don’t get updates and notifications about channels I’m following like I should. It doesn’t work anywhere near as well on my phone as Teams did. I’m not a MS lover (I was a web developer during the first two browser wars and the standards war and still have bad feelings towards MS), but Teams seems to be really well put together. I’m interested to hear why you disagree.

[wokwokwok]

Do you use teams a lot?

I’m literally astonished to read this.

Teams is the king of “press a key and wait for the screen to unfreeze”, or the “launched but all you get is a white box until you restart”.

It also features what I politely refer to as “no search”, which is where you search your chat history, and conversations just aren’t there... until you go back through your history and find them, and then wow! Suddenly you can search for it.

Screen sharing can cause a meeting to drop out for no reason.

Want to upload a video? Or an image? Well, you can get an empty white box and when you click on it, you’ll get an empty white pop up. Great job.

Now, all of that said... that’s on windows.

Now try using it on a Mac. Ha! Haaaaaa!

Usable? Yes.

Good?? Not in my books.

It’s one of the poorest chat applications I’ve used, personally. /shrug

To be fair, I haven’t had much trouble with the mobile app on iOS, but I don’t use it much, and it’s seems on-par to the slack one to me.

...but I certainly wouldn’t call it a marvel of engineering; it’s just deeply integrated with outlook and it’s mandatory; so people who don’t do “chat” also use it.

[irrational]

Yes, I used it constantly day in and day out on a mac for years. I honestly never experienced the things you mention. But I do have a high end mac, so maybe that has something to do with it?

[wokwokwok]

Everyone who uses it in our office on all platforms experiences these issues to a greater or lesser extent, depending how much they use it.

I guess you’re just lucky? Or we’re unlucky?

...but we have about 900 staff using it, so it seems like a strange outlier to me.

I’m absolutely astonished to hear that you don’t get the “missing image” bug; that one happens all the time with larger images you share. It literally happened to me yesterday morning.

Maybe it a regional thing, and the Australian infrastructure is just rubbish behind the scenes and we’re seeing latency issues?

No idea; also don’t really care that much; teams gets my thumbs down. It’s rubbish as far as I’m concerned; hopefully others have better experiences with it.

[achow]

Use Teams for Video conference. It is a life saver.

Never faced issues on the things that you mention - screen sharing, uploading of a video or image etc.

Perf no issues, conduct internal as well as external conferences with college hires and interns (session attendance can go up to 70-80 people).

Yes there are some usability issues - the most notorious among my colleagues being the very clumsy meeting link share.

[magicalhippo]

Used it for a few years, and heavily this year with several daily screen sharing sessions, calls, meetings, ad-hoc group calls, both internally and with external contacts since Covid-19 hit the streets in March, and I've never experienced any of what you mention.

Never heard any issues from my colleagues either, including the less technically minded at sales which usually come running if something doesn't work.

While I think it has room for improvement, for basic stuff it just works for us.

[BlargMcLarg]

Just like parent stating "usable? yes", I too find it usable at best. Coming from a history of using Discord and Slack, where Discord was mostly "less formal Slack without all the utilities, but with voice chat", I find Teams to fall into an uncanny valley.

The focus on video conferences might be the most annoying part. Most of the time, I just want to see the shared screen at best. There's an option to stop incoming video, though this one isn't on by default. There also flat-out isn't a way to stop looking at your own face when sharing video.

Meetings with Teams links tend to inflate the history, dozens of chats that could've been one thing now cause dumb questions like "should we stay here or go into the other call?". This was already solved by apps like Teamspeak more than a decade ago. It feels immensely clunky, but the culture also doesn't provide an intuitive way to avoid this problem.

The last bit highlights my biggest problem. It's mostly culture. It feels as restrictive as your average enterprise program, yet it also feels chaotic in all the wrong ways. Many problems have already been solved and plenty of cultures, like global social gaming, have already experienced ways to handle this. Had I not had any experience with other apps, I likely wouldn't feel this way.

I also realize part of the problem is how Teams is configured, which I have no experience with. But then it once again boils down to "here you have this tool that can do a lot, but it's not intuitive and we don't give you a lot of guidelines" despite the fact most companies have zero experience with remote.

[lenkite]

This is strange. Our company uses Teams and I have never experienced any of those problems in 2 years.

The only problems I have had with Teams is the robotic-voice quality and the strange fascination that Microsoft has in changing their UI's from update to update leading me to keep hunting for that button which was there previously but can't be found now since its moved to some other place.

[Jochim]

Not the parent, but it's far too easy for your IT department to totally fuck teams up.

Our Teams instance has the calendar disables making it a pain to join meetings if you don't have easy access to your outlook calendar. They've also disabled any sort of api access which really limits what can be done in terms of integrating it into our other workflows.

In terms of general usability the app is lacking in information density. I routinely miss messages in team channels I've collapsed.

[irrational]

Huh, I have the opposite problem with Slack. I’m constantly missing messages on Slack, but I never did on Teams.

[IamZeroBalance]

Same thing happened to me. Missing a LOT of messages. No notifications at all and it's really frustrating.

[audiometry]

Teams doesn’t even have the ability to reply-quote to a message in chat. Moreover it’s very wasteful with screen real estate.

I’d also add that since my company moved to 365, about once every two weeks I get some email from it dept talking about service level disruptions.

And in the meantime it emails it’s creepy “we were watching your productivity” messages weekly.

Not a fan.

[vehementi]

> I don’t get updates and notifications about channels I’m following like I should

This sounds weird, like a configuration or permissions issue. Those basic features work flawlessly.

[ptrklly]

What happened with Dark Sky? I have used it for years and it seems just as good as ever. And it’s one of the few iPhone apps I give full location information to so I like that it’s owned by Apple since they have that info anyway.

[pcr0]

The fact that they shut down the API and Android app.

[ptrklly]

Ah, of course.

[nateabele]

Then maybe knowing that Screenhero's founders went on to create Screen[0] will assuage some of the anger.

Also, maybe it doesn't make it better, but it sounds like Slack didn't intend[1] to do this.

[0] https://screen.so/

[1] https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-Work-57df16351a884bc...

[tyre]

Tangential anecdote, the ScreenHero founders were in the same 4 unit apartment building as our first office at ZenPayroll/Gusto. They're amazing humans. We were all happy for them when they got acquired, and I'm glad that they get to do their thing now that the promise of Slack didn't work out.

[CMCDragonkai]

Can it record?

[pmart123]

Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack.

[chimeracoder]

> Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack.

They claim they did, but Slack screensharing is nowhere near what Screenhero's was.

A more Screenhero-like replacement is Tuple: https://tuple.app/

[llaolleh]

I'm not really a fan of Tuple. It seems like a poor man's version of Screenhero.

[celdon25]

Interesting, I found Tuple to have amazing quality and latency. Best I've seen with such a tool.

[babesh]

I think most of the value of Slack was cultural rather than technological. It was in getting people to discover/communicate via these abstractions of channels rather than point to point. This provides a lot of value in a company when you don’t know the specific person to talk to or want to talk to a group rather than one person.

EDIT: It also allows bystanders to learn from or keep abreast of the conversation.

However, this cultural practice can be easily transferred to another tool.

As an external observer, Slack seemed to have various issues that prevented it from innovating further.

One was lack of vision of how to innovate further. I think this often happens when someone stumbles onto an idea. They don’t have deep reasoning or conviction of where to go further.

Another issue is that they seemed to have other cultural preoccupations for a time. Look at the cultural discussions brewing when their growth was exploding. They have since stepped back from that but I think it slowed them down.

I don’t think these helped when you have a competitor that can integrate their entire suite of products into their chat system while effectively selling the chat for free. Slack didn’t even integrate as well or as quickly.

Slack wasn’t innovating enough to not be overtaken.

[tracer4201]

>It was in getting people to discover/communicate via these abstractions of channels rather than point to point.

Do you mean Slack is or was the first to get users to communicate over channels (vs point to point) in a business or enterprise setting?

I’m honestly not sure about what innovation came out of Slack. I worked for a startup in the early 2000s, and we ran our own IRC channels.

I’m only vaguely familiar with Slack, but what am I missing?

[babesh]

I have a limited perspective but my experience was in getting acquired by a larger company that used Slack. In the larger company, especially when you first join, you don’t know who to talk to to get information you need or to coordinate work. This was partly due to the by design self service/decentralized culture of the company.

The use of channels was eminently useful then. You discover the general channel to use and then people that you didn’t previously know can help you. Also it doesn’t have to be a specific person helping you. Different people can help you at different times and with different questions. Likewise, you return the favor.

Also, you can then snoop in on a channel to keep track of areas you are interested in. This was a way of extracting and sharing institutional knowledge.

Lastly, you can create temporary channels for coordinating projects.

Although channels existed before, this was the first setting that I found it used extensively and effectively in this way. Perhaps most importantly to getting the whole system to work, there were cultural expectations placed on groups responsible for particular channels of being timely and helpful in replies.

Therefore you would get replies to questions in seconds or minutes. That was very useful in getting unblocked and unblocking others. You would almost never encounter the flame wars that you would see on Hacker News (well besides the social channels).

The organizational environment and the culture of how to use channels is what I mean when I say the innovation was cultural. Divorce channels from the environment or culture and you will see very different outcomes.

[somehnguy]

I completely agree. I've been using Slack for a couple years with a couple of niche groups. Besides the occasional small UI changes it has felt dead for a long time. I suppose to make it not feel like that I could get more involved with adding integrations & whatnot. But on the surface it just feels like a dead chat product without any major improvements in a very long time.

[paxys]

On the contrary, I'm happy that Slack chose to do one thing extremely well rather than stretch itself thin releasing half-baked an unnecessary products. There are plenty of good services for docs, storage, whiteboarding etc., and I don't need any of them shoved in my Slack client.

[pas]

But they are not doing it "extremely" well. It's shoddy, spotty, resource-hog. It's (is/was) innovative, but it's no longer an amazing added value over running your own (RocketChet) or picking a cheaper option.

[antoniuschan99]

I agree with you, maybe Salesforce will let it continue focusing on its niche. It’s working for Heroku.

[mrkurt]

I think they did innovate, just not in ways that we-who-post-on Hacker News benefit from.

1. Shared channels are amazing

2. The "Enterprise Grid" was the first viable enterprise chat product. Slack made chat ubiquitous at places like IBM.

It's easy to blow off #2, but I think it's big. It was big enough to threaten MS Office.

[realityking]

I don’t have experience with Enterprise Grid but shared channels are absolutely amazing. We have shared channels with vendors, partners and customers and across all functions I haven’t heard a bad word about them (except that only IT can set them up but that might be a permission thing on our side)

[lock-free]

Shared channels are a godsend for startups trying to figure out their support story. Forums have been long known to suck, shared channels are much more responsive.

There are obvious downsides but the benefits outweigh them. I really don't want to go back to forums and email for customers.

[thrower123]

Made chat ubiquitous at IBM?

Maybe I'm a greybeard, but IBM made their own chat product that was ubique-itous* enough that Sametime became a verb there...

* Ubique is the company Lotus bought before IBM bought Lotus, before IBM sold the scraps to HCL.

[jasonjayr]

Sametime seemed to have an AOLIM connection too; or was that imagined?

[llaolleh]

I completely agree with you on this. Companies have to innovate or they die. To me Slack had plenty of chances to go beyond their initial product. Imagine if they incorporated Screen Hero into Slack and poured resources to reduce latency and better real time collaboration as if you were a feet away from your coworker. Would Microsoft be able to replicate all of that from scratch?

You also have to consider that if you're a startup you can be a lot more agile because you deal with a lot less bullshit. Microsoft probably has tons of red tape and they are also spread thin. Their design space is also restricted in that they have to follow existing patterns. Slack should have been able to roam the earth however they wished. But they didn't. Slack had the lead and momentum but they blew it.

I don't see Teams as necessarily a bad thing as the article implies. Every product we have is a derivative of something else. It fosters innovation.

[amw-zero]

Why would a chat app do any things? Why does an application need to continuously grow to be useful?

[antoniuschan99]

Because it’s a public company now. Shareholders demand growth or they’ll just invest in other high growth companies.

Bootstrapped products/companies like Campfire by 37Signals didn’t need to grow, but they also stopped innovating and the chat frature became just a feature inside basecamp.

I think it’s really how companies are structured.

The way Slack was positioned, it also had to grow or it will get taken over by a competitor like teams, or risk getting bought out which is what happened. Maybe the stakes are different when you’re #1 vs #10 in tech!

[benhurmarcel]

I find it funny that HN can criticize Slack for sticking to their main product without adding new collaboration features, while criticizing Dropbox for doing exactly the opposite.

[foolmeonce]

I'm not very familiar with Dropbox, but I would not be surprised if both were in fact wrong.

In the closest strategy to what slack did, one would define a main product and then optimize away any prototype bloat. As far as I observed, Slack's clients stayed pretty awful and they were trying to do Dropbox's strategy without success.

[an_opabinia]

That's because the thing that killed Slack wasn't Microsoft - it wasn't a bunch of horseshit executives say just before their retirement into angel investing - but Discord.

[lock-free]

Discord isn't enterprise software and I feel really bad for anyone who wants to use it as such. Microsoft Teams is without a doubt the only thing threatening Slack, Discord is an entirely different beast.

[whateveracct]

Discord is why Slack doesn't have mass consumer appeal. They can't compete in that market.

[halfmatthalfcat]

They aren’t going after the same demo though. The market is big enough for both of them to exist. The path for Discord is a lot more hazy than Slack imo.

[whateveracct]

I think for Slack to be truly bigger than it got, it needed both demos. Being workplace only has a ceiling.

[corobo]

Slacks pricing is what they don't have mass consumer appeal. I'm not paying to make the logs you're obviously keeping anyway visible lmao

As a business with employees sure, but as a community? You couldn't have moved everyone to discord faster

[lock-free]

Who wants mass consumer appeal? Consumers don't pay for things.

Discord has like a $2billion valuation and no exit. Slack had a $24 billion IPO. Consumer software is not as valuable as enterprise.

[jachee]

$currentjob switched to Teams 7 months ago, and I still miss Slack every day.

The only ones who I haven't heard lament the switch are the ones whose budget Slack used to (and o365 does) cone from.

[Wowfunhappy]

Interesting! Do you know of any workplaces using Discord?