[fennecfoxen]

> I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be able to continue to use Screenhero.

You know what you need to do, to keep these teams happy? You need to continue have a minimal tool that does the thing that people need -- screen sharing -- and does it well, instead of bludgeoning them with a massive general-purpose communications suite that they don't want, which is essentially what you were just cheering about in your recent email.

I'm sure you'll make more money this way, but you needn't expect the people you're abandoning to be happy.

[jsherwani]

Around 90% of the response we've gotten has been positive — our users love the fact that we're merging with a product that they already use and love. The combined user experience is going to be far better than the experience we have today.

Maintaining a minimal tool for screen sharing is a nice idea in theory, but I know from experience that we do best when we're able to focus on one thing. And we really want to do a great job of making the integrated communication + collaboration experience as awesome as we can. Based on many conversations with our customers, I know that communication of the sort Slack provides was something that most of our users either needed or already used within Slack. Agreed, that it's most and not all of our users, but we can't really make everyone happy all of the time. I do believe we are making the most people the most happy through this, though.

[mathgeek]

> You know what you need to do, to keep these teams happy? You need to continue have a minimal tool that does the thing that people need -- screen sharing -- and does it well, instead of bludgeoning them a massive general-purpose communications suite that they don't want, which is essentially what you were just cheering about in your recent email.

This is absolutely, 100% the way I feel. I look back to AOL Instant Messenger as a classic example of a product that forgot to do one thing well... and that's why I bet you hadn't thought of AIM for quite some time before reading this.

That said, best of luck to Screenhero going forward. Video chat w/ screen sharing is a crowded space and I'm sure they needed to hedge their bets.

[FooBarWidget]

Strongly disagree.

As a software developer, I've put off adding more features into my products for several years now. All because I feared introducing features will make my users think it's "bloated", "violating the Unix philosophy", etc.

But over the years, I've found that most users actually want more features. Most of them want more business value. And that there is value in having features integrated/builtin instead of external.

When I tell people "no, we don't do that, but you can use that other tool in combination with mine" most of them are like "what? I have to use TWO tools"? The "simple tool that does one thing" philosophy mostly appeals to a small number of hardcore nerds, but the rest of the world wants more features, more integration. They don't want theoretic purity.

The fact that I didn't add features and only focused on bug fixes actually hurted the reputation of my software in the grand scheme of things. So yeah, I'll be adding more features from now on.

[woah]

Look to Adium for a counter-example

[FooBarWidget]

Counter example? I wish Adium would add more features. It's been stagnant for years and the only reason why I'm still using it is because there's nothing better.

For example, MSN file transfers have always been broken. They never managed to fix that before MSN's shutdown.

Google Talk file transfers are similarly broken.

No support for Skype.

No support for webcams.

All these issues have been open for years. They only introduce basic bug fixes but not much else.