[jsherwani]

It wasn’t ever intended to be a buy-and-kill, it’s just unfortunately what ended up happening. When Slack acquired Screenhero, it was with the full intent to bring voice/video/screen sharing to Slack. The problem was that, post-acquisition, leadership lost interest in what could’ve been a promising feature set and growth vector for Slack (see: Zoom in 2020). Partially because integrating disparate pieces of software is a hard problem and partially because management's appetite for investment in the team waned after the first year, building Slack Calls was slow and it was unclear how valuable the feature was to Slack's success. Add in the cost of maintaining what is a very complicated and far-reaching implementation for interactive screen sharing, (not just for engineering, but also for policy/legal and customer support), it made sense for Slack to kill it.

While I was still at Slack, there were retrospective conversations around how Screenhero maybe should have been built on the Slack platform, instead of as a first-party app. However, the acquisition happened so early in the life of Slack that the platform didn't really exist yet, so it's unclear how we'd do better if we had to do it all over.

With Pop, we're doing things the right way. Pop is a standalone app, with a solid Slack integration. It makes it really fast to jump between the two (in fact, it's faster to jump into a Pop meeting via Slack, than it is to join a Slack Call!).

[mchusma]

Slack's poor calling is baffling to us, and the fact that they are uninterested in making it better is obvious. The quality is so bad, we use google meet for almost everything at the company, even though we would prefer to use the native slack calling.

Its actually easier to use other apps than Slack's own apps. For example, you can't schedule a recurring slack call that calls all the participants. I would LOVE this feature, if there is a way to add it into slack.

[jsherwani]

We could actually build this — drop us a line at [e-mail] and let's talk through exactly how this could work with Slack + Pop!

[j1elo]

The way you explain it, looks like if Slack acquired Screenhero in a whim, "just in case we need it", and afterwards they realized that integrating and maintaining foreign code is a hard to do. Like, I could have told them that piece of wisdom for free.

I know, things are always more complex and your comment is no doubt a summarized version of what happened. It just read funny to me.

[jsherwani]

Yes, that was ~3 years of learning (and pain) condensed into a short paragraph :D

I think one key piece worth emphasizing was: Screenhero's core strength was in its interactive screen sharing. Slack's main desire was in voice, then video, then screen sharing, then interactive screen sharing — and this "impedance mismatch" is somewhat responsible for where things ended up. By the time we got to the end of that roadmap, the appetite for the final feature was low, while the cost was very high.