[pmmucsd]

Slack is a good example. When the cost of Slack is an unreasonable amount of your operating costs then it makes sense to clone and maintain. The product is simple, you can basically recreate the main functionality in a sitting. Why would you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for it?

[aobdev]

That’s a fine example, but my question then is why does Slack exist? Surely Fortune 500 companies are smart enough to realize that building a slack clone is cheaper, yet they don’t do that.

So now consider AI, perhaps the cost of building has decreased from 100k to 10k. What stops a Slack competitor from also building the product for 10k and reselling it at 10% of the cost of Slack? My point is that I don’t see how AI has changed the value prop.

[krisoft]

> my question then is why does Slack exist?

I do not actually believe that you can trivially vibe code a viable slack replacement. But even if one day we could it wouldn’t mean that Slack as a company would just disappear overnight.

They would hang around serving companies who haven’t got the memo yet, or who are locked in a contract, or where the internal political situation is against such a move. The innertia of a bunch of humans behaving like a bunch of humans would provide a sort of “coyote time” effect where the fundamentals could fall out from under Slack yet the company would keep “floating” for a while.

It is funny how much of your question sounds like the old joke where an economist can’t believe their eyes that a $20 bill is laying on the pavement, because surely if it were so someone would have already picked it up. In a steady state the logic might hold up, but we are not in a steady state.

And that is separate from why do I think it is not realistic to just replace slack with vibe coded alternative: just in my company some people use the web interface, some the ios app and some the android app. To be a viable replacement you would need all 3 platforms supported with all features. That sounds in itself a nightmare. Then figuring out what features my company members really use is an other nightmare. There are some who craft custom emojis all the time, some who integrate all kind of weird apps. We various CI and data pipeline processes integrated with slack reporting. And then comes huddle. Video and voice chat and screen sharing. You can even draw on someone else’s screen with it! IT has their needs to archive things (maybe?) or snoop on certain things. Then comes of course interfacing with single-sign-on. I wouldn’t even volunteer to enumerate all the different features people just at my company depend on, let alone offer to replace it.

[pylua]

Is it the sla and maintenance cost ? As silly as it seems it is important for slack to work reliably, especially in case of court orders and legal retention.

Also Is there not a self hosted open source solution that companies can host ? That’s easier than ai?

[svnt]

There is value in taking a product to market and hardening it, and no one wants to invest in something that requires headcount for cost-savings. They want upside. But if it doesn't require headcount and/or unlocks functions they have to negotiate for, and the AI can keep it online and troubleshoot, that is a different story.

Slack exists in part because ten years ago it was a lot harder for big orgs to make good/modern software.

[dehrmann]

Mattermost is FOSS. Why aren't companies running their own servers to avoid Slack? Prior to OneDrive and web integration, LibreOffice was 95% as good as MS Office, better than VibeOffice will likely be, and it still failed to gain much traction.

[rpdillon]

This is the key point. We've already run the experiment where the code is free and all you need to do is host it yourself and people still didn't opt to do that work. I don't see how AI changes the situation.

[b00ty4breakfast]

I have to imagine that companies pay so much money for Slack because it's actually not that simple.

At the very least, the return is not worth the time and effort.

[nkrisc]

If Slack is so simple why haven’t companies created their own internal versions 10 years ago?

[klodolph]

Every company I worked at in the past 10 years has created an internal version of Slack. Four companies.

[aobdev]

I don’t doubt it but that doesn’t negate the fact that Slack as a company exists and makes money by selling software. My question is this: AI makes it cheaper to build software, but ADP, SAP, and Salesforce also have access to AI and could make cheaper versions of their products. How does AI change the build vs buy trade off in a way that eliminates economies of scale? My opinion and that of the article is that it doesn’t.

[klodolph]

> How does AI change the build vs buy trade off in a way that eliminates economies of scale?

I think a more likely scenario here is that something good and free escapes containment at some point and Slack’s core product just kind of deflates. Not something better than Slack, but something good enough that people don’t care about Slack any more.

I don’t see it as a question of whether you build it or buy it, but a question of the time horizon for selling messaging software as a business strategy. Most business strategies have a finite time horizon. How long can you continue to sell messaging software before there are too many competing solutions available and you stop making money from it?

[rpdillon]

We've already ran this experiment with Zulip and Mattermost. Slack still won.

[klodolph]

N=2, no thank you.

Web browsers used to be exclusively paid software, if you were serious. So did operating systems, SQL databases, C++ compilers, and video codecs.

[nkrisc]

I guess to provide a counterpoint to my own comment, even I worked for a company that created their own internal social network similar to Facebook (this was 15 years ago).

Of course it sucked and no one used it except executives and VPs. Everyone else did just enough to meet the minimum quarterly engagement metrics right before performance reviews.

[jayd16]

Why don't they sell them?

[klodolph]

A list of outcomes:

1. They did, and still sell it. You can buy it.

2. They did, and then exited the market. Employees gradually migrated off the internal platform.

3. They weren’t in the business of selling software, and didn’t sell their internal messaging platform (which is idiosyncratic and closely integrated with other internal system).

[jayd16]

Slack is an hilarious example.

I can't wait for orgs to try to vibe roll their own dozen clients, security models, and then try to talk to handle external integrations of some kind.

[andersmurphy]

I mean once campfire is full featured free and easy to self host. Completely open source slack replacement.

I imagine it's also infinitely better than anything an in house team could vibe code.

You don't need AI for a cheap slack alternative.

That's why I don't buy any of this.

Companies are not bothering with the free/open alternatives.

Unless the real power of LLMs is making it easy for greg in HR to self host these existing alternatives. But, that a trillion dollar market does not make.