[cj]

Your comment is unnecessarily dismissive.

Disrupting the space now doesn't seem any less hard now than it was 10 years ago when slack and zoom did it.

But yes, if your point is that it's hard, then indeed. It is hard. Should that stop someone? No!

[dghlsakjg]

Slack and Zoom both predate Teams. Teams only gained penetration through bundling with the rest of MS products on large enterprise contracts.

There are already open source alternatives built for both Teams and Zoom. The issue is that open source projects don’t have salespeople that will promise compliance and integration (whether or not they can actually deliver).

[mynameisash]

> Teams only gained penetration through bundling with the rest of MS products on large enterprise contracts.

Hard disagree on the "only" modifier. Surely integration helped, but I've used Zoom, and I hate it every time I have to use it. Teams is comparatively a godsend.

[burnte]

He wasn't dismissive, he was countering dismissiveness. It was dismissive to throw out "just build your own". 99% of companies don't have that option, most companies are customers, not builders. This commenter was pointing out the obvious lack of perspective on the majority of businesses. That is a huge problem in SV and software development these days, the lack of awareness and context about real problems out in the market. "Just build a replacement" is a non-viable route for most people and most companies.

[jf22]

I think it's dismissive to say that explaining something is harder isn't important.

And something being harder stopping your from doing it is ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much effort something will take and weighing the risks and rewards.

[cj]

Let’s try to turn this into a productive thread that adds some value here.

What is it about enterprise IT that is preventing us from building a better alternative?

How can we get around those hurdles?

[9x39]

Chat is a commodity. Right out of the gate, that's not great for margins.

Enterprise chat might not be a commodity quite yet - SSO, DLP/data classification, auditing, retention, compliance checkboxes - but these seem insurmountable at first glance to get a FOSS solution to reach a viable enterprise feature matrix.

Killer features as a moat might help, but while almost everyone uses chat, everyone probably uses chat differently, so that means discovering killer features for a niche and trying to own that segment before expanding. Unfortunately this is the "Draw the rest of the owl" part, because while I have quibbles with chat apps, I struggle to envision a chat app that does something radically different than any other chat app.

[nemomarx]

If you built that alternative, would companies choose to use it? they get teams built into their outlook and office 365 contracts and all the other integration. Slack didn't lose because it was worse, so just being better isn't enough.

The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical without their funding to start with.

[supportengineer]

Cronyism and nepotism is how you get "Enterprise IT"

[isaacremuant]

Slack is not open source. Neither is Zoom.

Your comment is just fake empathy noise.