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by steeleduncan 118 days ago
Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives

Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
1 comments
glerk 118 days ago
Discord is a solid product. They just need to launch a simple business-friendly alternative UI without the teenager gamer aesthetics. I’m surprised they never tried going after the enterprise market.
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roncesvalles 118 days ago
Enterprise doesn't buy chat/meeting products without PSTN interop (dial-in dial-out to traditional phone line). Discord would probably need to double their dev team to add PSTN.

Building something like Slack or Teams to the level that a F500 company would make it their primary videoconferencing solution is a multi-thousand-employee project. It's not a little skunkworks project for 15-20 people in some corner of the office.

That's why TFA is hilariously flawed. When Altman says "tell us what we should build, we'll probably build it!", he's talking about driveways and backyard pools, not the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like asking mall Santa for a summer home in the Hamptons.

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glerk 118 days ago
> multi-thousand-employee project

I know absolutely nothing about PSTN interop and I'm sure it's very complex to implement. However, at the end of the day, this is just software we're talking about right? Software is cheap and easy to produce these days and I doubt you need thousands of people to implement something that syncs your meeting's audio stream to a phone line especially given that it's a problem that has been solved before.

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roncesvalles 118 days ago
Hardly. You're going from analog to digital and vice-versa. You probably need specialized appliances. For every country in the world. And it's "solved" but only in proprietary contexts; I don't think there's a standard. Then you need to operate it - you need SREs, bug fixes, keeping up with downstream changes etc.

Adding PSTN to Discord is absolutely a Discord-sized problem.

>Software is cheap and easy to produce these days

Yeah todo list apps

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redserk 118 days ago
There’s a size of enterprise where you can get away without PSTN integration but do need an answer for SSO and account provisioning/deprovisioning.
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operatingthetan 118 days ago
Discord seems to be heavily inspired by Slack in UX.
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