Ask HN: How can Slack be disrupted?
I read many articles about "Company X taking on Slack", but they fail to point out exactly how the company plans to disrupt Slack.
http://fortune.com/2015/09/23/microsoft-slack-killer/
https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-slack-work-office-chat http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/22/domo-takes-on-slack-with-130m-at-2-billion-valuation/
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-to-take-on-slack-and-facebook-with-new-ai-powered-chat-says-report/
http://www.slashgear.com/quip-adds-chat-rooms-to-take-on-slack-21380086/
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/01/27/hipchat-looks-take-slack-new-app-private-networks/
We use Slack all day, it is deeply embedded in our productivity and workflows, it just works. What exactly would convince us to give up something that works?
Emulating Slack is not enough, how do you think Slack can truly be disrupted?
75 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadDon't ask 'How do I disrupt Slack?', or more generally 'How do I disrupt Y?'.
Also don't ask 'I want to build Slack for X, what X is good?', or more generally 'I want to build Y for X, what X is good for that Y?'.
Instead observe your environment. Get out and walk around. Talk to people you know in domains you have personal experience in, or are very familiar with. Lots of people - people that are like you, and people that aren't. Find out what their pain points are, and what they'd pay to get rid of those pain points. If you want to focus on chat, find out what their pain points are in communication (the broader area).
Then execute to solve those pain points and make the world a better place. Iterate your execution to solve one pain point (the one the most people say they have/would pay for) and get your first customers. Then solve additional related pain points in successive iterations.
Slack wasn't built by walking around talking to people outside, they built an internal chat tool to solve a problem they had at their company (where they were originally building a video game). They realized the chat tool was good, and turned it into a product. They solved their own pain point, not other people's. http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-slack-2015-...
I.e: https://rocket.chat/
1) Inside Firewall hosting – Slack can easily fix this by introducing a product that works inside your firewall, and I bet they're already working on it. Their "teams" model already works perfectly for it.
2) Customizability – Slack already has such a robust API for integrations, that most of your customizability and branding needs can be taken care of through the API and CSS rules.
The one thing I personally need for my product is the ability to bundle slack as an embedded chat directly on my site (mostly because I don't want users to have to install a separate app), and I really don't see Slack building that, to be honest.
Don't try to compete with a well run team at the peak of their abilities. Go find an underserved market that has tons of money and incompetent incumbents providing services. Slack is successful because this is what they did, but that has sucked a lot of the upside out of the market.
I disagree that you can't compete with a well run team at the peak of their abilities, this is a free market, you can compete with whoever you like. Slack is successful because they solved an internal pain point, read about their history http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-slack-2015-...
Yes, yes - Slack gets all the news and chicks and is probably bigger. But it's the entire mindset. You wouldn't start an HVAC repair company after hearing that an HVAC repair company is doing well, even if they're the biggest one in the region and even if they're making millions; similarly, you shouldn't start a chat app just because you hear Fortune magazine writing about a chat app.
There's another part to this too: With the word 'disrupt' I'm hearing "Slack is doing well; I'm jealous of Slack; how can I hurt Slack?" I used to have a neighbor that would get jealous of people and key their car if it was nicer than his. Nobody liked him and eventually they arrested him for unrelated reasons.
Don't phrase your business plan as being the equivalent of keying Slack's car.
There have been multi-million (and billion) dollar businesses started by disrupting major players in their space, by solving the problem they are trying to solve, with much better technology and approaching the problem from new angles. If you think tech companies aren't started with the intent of disrupting other companies, you are living in a bubble.
http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilem...
- Anyone can be interrupted at any time (to say nothing of @everyone), so it's essentially just an all-day meeting. At least emails could be responded to at relative leisure.
- There are only three notification states: "nothing" (normal icon) "something happened in a non-muted channel" (red dot), and "you were mentioned specifically". There's no way to gauge importance without disrupting your flow. Some pointless cat GIF (why are these being posted on work chat?) is ranked the same as "what should we do next?". Similarly, "@everyone there are donuts in the kitchen, OMG" is ranked the same as "@someone THE SERVER IS ON FIRE".
- Channels are never-ending, so it's relatively impossible to tell where one topic began and another ended. Additionally, multiple conversations can be held at the same time, and it's difficult to tell who's replying to who.
However, I quite like Slack's group private chats. I'd like to see a group-chat solution that promoted those and completely got rid of static channels. Everything's just a private group chat, with all of the people that are needed. When the discussion's done, archive it - it's searchable, of course, but if you need to continue the discussion, make a new one! Maybe everyone in the chat even gets a summary emailed to them that they can search in their email client as well (thus solving the "wait, where did we discuss that" problem).
There are a few other changes I would make - for example, the return key should be newline by default to prevent people from writing
like
this
and instead
putting their thoughts into well-composed
messages
> It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it’s the tool’s fault, not the user’s fault. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design.
https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-74...
So culturally most teams value communication, therefore you need notifications because communication is an inherently valuable good. But this is a tool for a business sector where the $$$ are generated by people in deep flow, and notifications disrupt flow. So there is a technological design failure of including a notification system but culturally not being allowed to say no to it.
For example, everyone hates the (non slack) IM system where I work because its a disruptive annoyance of little value, so we all complain much like op about the users using it wrong, when whats really wrong is the design and we don't have the strength to overrule the cultural value.
Yes, code reuse, can iterate faster, saves engineering time, etc., but does this all matter if the user experience is sacrificed?
(Spotify, I'm also looking at you.)
If I were to have a shot at disrupting Slack, I'd definitely contextually interleave IM and email into a variety of systems: tickets, bugs, processes, etc. Just today I spent an unacceptable amount of time hunting down an email related to a ticket. Communication should occur within the context of work, not alongside it.
> At least emails could be responded to at relative leisure.
We thought IM was the answer to the email problem. Instead, we've found out that we've replaced it with a far greater demon.
It's not really any different to email. I've worked in offices where people use group lists to inform everyone that there's donuts in the kitchen, and dozens of people reply-all to say thank you. That doesn't mean email is broken; it means people use email badly. In exactly the same way, Slack is a tool. How you use it determines how effective it is.
I think of group chat as more akin to a digital open-plan office, with both the good and the bad connotations of that.
For example, what if we could schedule group chats?
You can: https://meekan.com/slack/
Meekan looks interesting, and they have the idea right (since as a third-party they are limited), but it's a plugin, and it's a bot[1]. Scheduling would be a core concept of my theoretical group-chat app - something you were incredibly encouraged to do by the interface, instead of bothering an arbitrary number of people that are probably trying to focus.
[1] the problem with bots is that it pushes stuff that ought to be "interface" into public view, with all of the notification and visual noise baggage that is implied by that.
Date/time localization should just work, here Amy needs to manually ask for it, and everyone else is notified that she did! And that doesn't even cover language localization! If I'm having a meeting with a colleague whose English is weak and prefers Chinese, will it just drop even more noise into the chat when she requests a translation?
And then when you tell them off they reply (to all) saying sorry
We all know who does that
Eve Online player are incredibly well organised, they would probably have no issue on Slack either.
Don't use a team of volunteer who share the same goal, passion and vision to judge the quality of a communication tool intended to be used at work where people disagree, backstab each other and generally don't want to be there, those are two very different populations.
So, may be the problem doesn't lie with a tool anyway.
Imagine a future with guaranteed minimal income, where all the companies are staffed by people whose primary motivation is the same as Eve Online players...
...and they apply equally to all channels. I'm in the company "what to get for lunch" channel, but I do not ever want notifications from that channel unless someone specifically mentions me. I don't even want to see there are unread messages in it. Can I configure this? Of course not.
I also don't want to receive any notifications from some bot users. Can I ignore notifications specifically from particular users? Of course not.
And don't get me started on searching. I want a simple incremental search in the current buffer, ideally regex capable. Why does it have to open a god damned sidebar that doesn't even fit in the window to show the results?
Actually, the whole thing about how incredibly inefficiently it uses the screen space it's given is a real bother. I disliked Skype for taking up way too much space, but Slack is even worse!
I realise most of these complaints are about the official client but it's provided as a part of the service and there aren't many alternatives yet, which is a problem with the service.
I agree with you completely. The notification ecosystem is toxic to work and slack, by camouflaging itself as work, is the worst offender.
I've experimented with remote work and bad actors on chat can still ruin that. Unless it's your job to answer the phone, the expectation of being interruptible is killer no matter where you are.
In business (and outside of business), anyone can be interrupted at any time regardless of Slack. If people are expecting immediate replies 100% of the time, that's a cultural thing, not a Slack thing. It's very common to send a message to someone who's on vacation and get a response a week later, just like with email. Of course _more_ conversation happens in real time on Slack as compared to email, but that's kind of the point. They are fundamentally different types of conversations. The various notification options that slack provides (per-channel per-device type, global pattern notifications, etc) mean you can pretty much avoid being interrupted except when you really want to be. People who get mad that you don't respond to Slacks right away are the same people who get mad that you don't respond to emails right away.
Three notifications states is pretty much the same or better than any other sort of emergency communication. Pagers, text alerts, emails, etc have essentially the same degree of distinction between messages, with the reader having to determine severity from context. A text message from GrubHub is less important to me than one from PagerDuty, but my text messaging system doesn't know that. So it's true that if you had a single channel in slack where people were talking about donuts and server fires you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But you shouldn't have a channel where people are talking about donuts and server fires.
Slack makes it very clear that channels should be treated as disposable. I agree that they shouldn't be spun up and down as quickly as email subjects/threads, but again we're talking about different forms of communication. Slack is, by definition, _chat_, which means there's a lot more of if than email. For the most part chat is meant to reach some end point, whereas email _is_ the end point. It's rarely valuable to go back and read through a chat transcript on some topic, even if it's nicely delineated. Are there extremely verbose email threads? Yes, but they are equally as useless after the fact.
I think part of the Slack backlash confuses me, because it really just moved where this type of conversation was happening. Across every Slack team I see stats for, the ratio of private to public chats is huge, and private chat was happening before Slack (in IM, Gooogle Chat, etc). And I don't think the way those messages are being treat, or the expectation for replies, is really any different. The new chat that's happening tends to be very low volume.
Each time, I'm inclined to dismiss these messages. They make me think "well, I don't want to work with you because you sound like an uptight asshole who insists on everyone wearing a suit to maintain decorum, and no hats indoors". I end up feeling that we would not get along at all in real life, and I (usually) ignore the message and (sometimes) scoff.
But every time, there is a minor host of "thank you for expressing exactly how I feel about this" messages beneath, and frequently the comment is highly upvoted, so, I am now forced to confront the facts: that you are not a bad person, that you probably aren't as rare as I imagine, and that you (and authors of similar posts) are probably a perfect pleasure to know and to work with. We just hold different preferences -- both of which are equally valid.
To express my own: I like most of the structural elements of slack. I am not bothered by the interruptions it can cause. I send short streams of messages sometimes because I feel it can convey useful information about how the thoughts were chunked.
I am also (hopefully) not a bad person or a pain to work with, but might come off as such to you, were I to merely state my opposing preferences as fact or to note that slack's support for them makes it great.
Perhaps slack should change, or another product should fill that gap. Perhaps there are other groups with preferences that don't align with you or me at all! Either way, I find these thoughts much more interesting and healthy than imagining that I might dislike you, which was my former attitude. So, thanks. :)
I like strict workplace policies iff they actually improve my productivity. Otherwise, they are harmful.
I wonder if there's an overlap with people that like strict static compilers that scream if anything is even remotely incorrect.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%20alternative&...
When I say UI and UX, I mean an interface that both looks good and is easy to use as well (they are not mutually exclusive).
Of course, the app has has to be fast and reliable too. Even better if it's lightweight in size and in it's use of system resources - things that many cross-platform apps rarely achieve (including Slack).
I don't think Slack has the best UX in some aspects. For example, the way you need to sign-in multiple times to separate groups feels clumsy and cumbersome.
Does Slack now have too many features and functions? Does the interface feel too busy or cluttered? Do people want even more features? (Probably, although they probably want different features for their own unique needs). Can a simpler, open-source version offer an alternative?
One thing that's obvious from interviews with their staff is that they take UX very seriously - it's a key component in the development of their product. If you're developing an alternative open source version, don't discount the importance of UX to your own product.
Whether you agree or not that Slack is a well-designed app, there's no doubt its succeeded because it can easily be used by both developers and non-developers. Not something you can really say abour IRC, often put forward as a Slack alternative.
Incredibly difficult problem to solve -- any solution would probably add considerable friction to the interface, but it would rock if somebody could nail it.
Another possibility is them getting acquired, as they have already raised 7 rounds of funding (investor pressure), and their founder has had a large exit already (Flickr to Yahoo).
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack
To collect some examples from this thread:
* Some engineering teams need default UI that encourages larger message sizes so people aren't writing strings of tiny messages all the time. This _clearly_ isn't something that everybody wants or needs - a lot of brainstorming goes on in my Slack chats, for example, and that means tiny ideas have to go out quickly and easily - but it's a reasonable submarket to target. This would also lead to a larger emphasis on text formatting and composition, better controls on notification and addressing, better searching and filtering and quoting/reply/threading, and other tools that improve the power of an individual message at the expense of usability and speed - move it more toward the email/forum topic side of things.
* Some teams feel that the existing UI already gets in their way too much. Improve the ease of use and speed of message composition and flow of discussion. Not sure how you'd do this exactly; Slack is already pretty well optimized in this direction. Step one here would probably be to hire a whole building full of UX engineers and optimize the crap out of every single interaction anybody ever does with the UI. Microoptimization on top of microoptimization on top of microoptimization, like Apple did with the groundbreaking early IOSs.
* Specifically cater to enterprise clients with security requirements. Better technical details for security and access control, make it compliant with regulations with particular security and auditing and access control requirements. Provide a powerful system for per-channel access controls that interoperates with something like LDAP, maybe provide a system where you can only talk to people in different groups if you've managed to inherit some permissions that let you talk to them otherwise everything they say never appears on your screen, tag everything with a secrecy level and control access intelligence-agency style, etcetera.
And so on and so forth.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y