I think the downvotes are because ircd != Slack. Setting up your own ircd is a whole other thing vs going to Slack.com and creating a Team. UI features, administration, it's all different. So we could have a whole conversation about whether irc is worth the effort... but now we've drifted far from the comment above, which is about lack of security features in Slack.
Whenever I'd had to use irc I have a horrible flashback. I used to have to install really shitty software. Now I can use a browser. Not that this is perfect, but it's one less hassle. Then I have to find the server which is running the channel and remember/google how the fuck you're supposed to connect to it. Then you have to type #join, and then..no, do you pick a nickname first and then join? You have to hope no-ones impersonating you because it seems there's no security model for irc at all - you just have to trust people. You try and talk but no-one replies. Is that because there's no-one there? It looks like there's a lot of people there but they have odd characters in their names and some of the colours are different. Are those offline colours? Do the characters mean they're bots? No, someone tells you you're on silent and have to type something before you can speak. Ok, i'm logging in because i asked a question earlier and now i'm using a different pc. I'll just scroll up....what the fuck? I can't scroll up? I have to just stay logged in like...all the time? Ah, you say - yes, but you can install some software.
Yes, that's where slack comes in. Except, instead of "install some software" you just "create an account" and log in and. Oh, that's it. Create a room, invite friends, or whatever. Post, DM people, scroll back, add rss feeds etc. It all just works. Nice android app too.
Not that i'm trying to sell slack; i can take it or leave it. I'm sure there are alternatives to that. But I have literally no idea why in 2016 anyone would want to subject themselves to irc (plus whatever other crap you have to install/configure to make it bearable).
> But I have literally no idea why in 2016 anyone would want to subject themselves to irc (plus whatever other crap you have to install/configure to make it bearable).
Although I'm not trying to discount what you want for chat...
Everything you just desribed is super easy for me to do with IRC. I can customize it to look however I want, and just connect with the protocol. That's why I "subject myself to irc". All the commands you have trouble remembering, are customizeable, and muscle-memory for me.
> Now I can use a browser.
hmmm... that sounds like the opposite of what I want. To each their own I guess.
> Not that i'm trying to sell slack
Not at all. I asked for a comparison, and that's what you provided. I guess I just don't have any personal interest in it over IRC. Cheers!
Slack is to group chat like Dropbox is to file sharing.
There are plenty of old school ways to share/synchronise files among a group of people. You could run an FTP server and a bunch of automated scripts etc. Or you can just install Dropbox for your non-technically minded users and it just works. The interface is nice and mobile app support is great. Slack is similar in that regard.
I'll list some things I do in slack that I don't in IRC. Many of these are probably possible in IRC, but the fact that I don't do this in IRC suggests that there is more friction than slack.
1. Send messages to people that are offline.
2. Easily see unread messages in a channel.
3. Markdown formatting.
4. @everyone/@channel notifications (not to be abused).
5. Simple Github integration (and other apps).
6. Mobile notifications (in fact, just the overall state of "mobile")
I'm sure every single one of these could be added to irc via bot or something like that. The beauty of slack is that I can set up a slack team and do all of the above without having to really muck around with that. Much lower operational overhead.
Don't you get it? People are not willing to put up with older technology that works, because the UI design has fallen out of favor. People need something dumbed down, mobile friendly, with low barriers to entry, but most importantly of all: it has to be something everyone else is using. Because the most important proof is social proof. There is no place for your solution here /s
So none of the benefits that Slack brings over IRC exist? Easy file uploads aren't there? Built in persistence without having to fiddle with bouncers isn't there? Mobile apps that work well aren't there?
It is substantially different. Getting all the additional stuff that Slack offers bolted onto IRC would be a pain. Not to mention trying to support end users.
I think his point was that IRC, too, allows instant communication, and self-hosting would allow parent to enforce necessary security policies. Not that it is or isn't worth the effort.
Slack offers markdown, message editing, emoji reactions (which I use the hell out of, one of my favorite features), large snippet sharing, link previews, in-app gif/youtube previews, don't need a logger for scrollback...
I love IRC, but the features don't compare. You might be able to implement some/most/all of the missing features, but they're not available out of the box.
Slack's one of the many things we use and don't pay for because the free version does exactly everything we need. Asana, NewRelic... a bunch of things are the same way. I worry some day they'll all dump the free plans and we won't be able to afford whatever pricing they come up with. It's not like we can't pay anything, but have so far found no need for the paid plans. I kinda sorta feel like a free loader. So I guess they have a good number of paying customers? At least with that valuation, I'd hope so.
I don't see this happening. Free plans like this will typically help build better products to sell to the actual paying customers, or even help with bug fixes. I don't see them removing their free model.
Slack has a pretty nice integration with appear.in. It's a free in-browser video conferencing service. We've used it with Slack very effectively in the past!
That looks nice, but we need more than 8 participants.
We are an entirely remote company, and we found that videochat during our standups really helps. Currently we are paying $5 a month per user for Google apps and only using a very small portion of it (basically just the video chatting), and they allow up to 25 people which is perfect for us.
we routinely have meetings with 15-30 people and we use Sococo[1] for all our audio and video. The office layout is also really nice. Everything else we've tried for video hasn't cut it, in comparison.
Note that Sococo will try to push you to their new browser based product. Last time we tried it, it was far worse than the 'classic' version we still use. But they don't really show 'classic' on their website anymore.
(I'm not the guy you replied to but...) It's not bad when everyone knows what they are doing.
You get the occasional feedback screech or something, but for the most part we aren't animals and we all know how to mute our mic's. And the added benefit of a face means you can get more body-language which helps prevent the "talking over" that happens on conference calls.
Plus the way we have it setup now we can all "mute" one another, so if someone is causing an issue and doesn't know it (or stepped away for a second) we can instantly mute them and move on.
No we are all participating, but we only talk one at a time mostly. It works surprisingly similar to a real meeting. Someone runs it, and everyone else participates when they need to.
Though Discord is targeted towards gaming. I use both and found there are differences that are important, especially in the realm of notifications, themeing, and integration with other services.
Yeah discord really isn't even suitable for gaming community staff, it's really best as a gathering place for your team/clan/community rather than a place to get real work done. We still use slack for admins/devs/other staff.
One of my biggest complaints is the lack of easy to manage private channels. There's a super complex and powerful permissions system quite obviously based on mumble, but if I want to make a quick private channel to talk to two people, it's easier to make a whole new server than just another channel.
> Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan...
In comparison to a free plan sure but in what real business is $7/user/mo too expensive for anything? That's less than an hour's minimum wage[1].
[1]: Technically it's quite a bit less as min wage in the U.S. is $7.25 and that doesn't include corporate payroll tax or medicare/social-security matching
> The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers?
None of those are businesses. Maybe I should have clarified but I meant a business as one where employees work for an organization that derives value from their work (say $A), the organization pays the employees some form of compensation ($B), and the expectation is that the value derived by each employee is more than the compensation (i.e $A > $B).
In that model I don't see many places where ($A - $B) < $7.
Slack offers its standard plan for free if you are a non-profit org. But you need to be an org; you can’t just walk in and claim your free plan if all you have is a GitHub repo and a (even large) community.
But when a lot of tools and integrations only work with Slack, then open source projects often don’t have the time to reimplement them just for their own projects.
The network effect leads to lots of open source projects having to choose slack – which, in turn, means they end up having to pay, without having revenue.
The problem is that Slack is not the only tool jockeying for a few dollars per employee per month. Hipchat, while not the cool thing anymore, is also much cheaper.
I never see the slack app in my top battery users; I saw the hipchat app in the top battery users all the time before I uninstalled the app. I don't leaving it running for work, but not at the expense of 10-15% of my battery.
Weird, maybe their infrastructure doesn't scale well and only goes down when the US is at work? Sadly there's no time stamps on their status page, so I can't tell.
It could be similar to people complaining that Reddit or Imgur is down or unstable, but that mostly happens to Americans. So Europeans get the benefit of an overbuilt infrastructure, because the companies try to scale to the load generated by Americans.
Hipchat is made by the aussie company (Atlassian) that made Jira. Nice flexibility but disastrous performance, and they haven't really managed to fix that in A DECADE.
Trying out their hosted Jira solution recently felt quite a bit like a throwback to the 90s.
I'm not going to trust them again, sorry.
(We ended up using Youtrack instead. A lot faster, a lot cheaper, but less flexible.)
In addition to the rest of the comments, HipChat doesn't handle file uploads nearly as well, the message formatting is a joke, message history randomly gets erased, simple things like posting a YouTube link in Slack will embed the actual video, you can edit message in Slack (HipChat has that silly "s/word/replace" feature). I use both on a daily basis and Slack is just better in every way.
Recently hipchat released a major UI rewrite, and now there's no way to turn off autocorrect. It's almost useless for developers discussing code, if every technical term you type gets replaced with the first non-technical word that is "close enough."
I am assuming you're on OS X? You can right-click on the input field, and under "Spelling & Grammar" you can turn off auto-correct. This is an OS feature, not something HipChat specific.
I work at Asana. There's no way we'll drop our free plan. It's too fundamental to our sales model. We are, however, thinking a lot more actively about what features to make premium. Largely new features we haven't released yet.
Yeah, jerk! Answer for your unknowable future! "No way", indeed... the temerity, to suggest their product will be free after the heat death of the universe.
Jokes and other forms of amusement are banned on HN. It's been found that people here take things way too seriously, so the mods decided to ban jokes and humor outright.
You know, I've had my share of rants, etc. on HN but revisiting Reddit has made me appreciate the HN policies more.
I generally avoid Reddit these days, except occasionally dipping into the VR sub-reddits. The level of stupidity, entitlement, and general melodrama is ludicrous.
It's like when you're subjected to the nonsense of a person who's become accustomed to being the smartest person in a dumb room.
HN is just a smarter room. Like Reddit 10 years ago. We should defend that.
While that's true, the implication of the OPs statement is that the free plan does a great job converting users to the paid plan. While that's true, they'd be crazy to ditch it.
I'd pay for Asana if I ever needed to manage a small team on a personal project or if I start my own company. There's just too much intertia for me to change the project management software at the clients I work with now as a consultant.
Well, almost every server requires maintenance. My previous companies had dedicated sysadmins even for jira. Those servers were not even internet facing. Have a look at cloudron.io (cloud servers) or protonet (on premise servers).
They are not trying to be nice by offering free plan. That is their growth strategy. By using Slack you are helping their marketing efforts. IF they even end the free plan there will be competitors and open source tools which will help you migrate seamlessly.
You are a freeloader, but as long as they let you, you shouldn't feel bad about that.
However, great products are worth paying for. If/when they start to charge or you exceed the free tiers' limits, you'll have to make difficult choices based on what they're worth to your business.
I was sceptical, but Quip's combination of chat and group-editable documents feels actually much better for dev teams than Slack, which ends up very unstructured.
(I have no association with Quip at all, but recently had the chance to use it in a Slack-like context.)
Maybe... Sometimes the initially strong ecosystem doesn't end up being the winning one. Apple had a huge headstart in GUI desktops but Microsoft nearly trounced them.
(I don't see Quip having such an advantage -- although Quip seems like a perfect fit for Microsoft's product portfolio... Hmm...)
I've been using Quip for a few months now, it's awesome. Can't really describe it as a Slack competitor because it really has all the core features of Dropbox, Dropbox Paper, Google drive-like documents and slack combined. The text editor is extremately pleasant(even when sometimes gets a little crazy, hopefully they fix it soob) which is such a huge accomplishment since, at least on OSX, the app is super smooth, doesn't consume lots of resources and really feels OSX native.
Quip does slash commands, but I don't know if they support custom integrations. (Shows how little I know about the platform really... I just like the concept of structured docs + unstructured chat being hyperlinked together.)
The only thing I liked about Quip was the conversation about the doc alongside the doc. Otherwise it was kind of a not-great Google docs, a not-great Dropbox and a not-great Slack wrapped into one.
That said, this was a year ago, maybe it's better now?
I hadn't seen Quip before now, but from their marketing site, it looks almost exactly like Basecamp. The screenshots shown have been Basecamp's core feature set for 5+ years.
Just more evidence the media, that for months has been sounding the alarm that Web 2.0 had burst, is almost always useless and wrong. Tech media no exception. I guess it's not burst. The Nasdaq stock index is up 15% from the lows in Fed. We're seeing a flight to quality, not a bubble burst, which is a subtly that is lost on most journalists.
didn't they raise like a billion dollars a few years ago? did they burn through it already? seems like money is created out of thin air with these valuation announcements.
I was a big Slack skeptic when my employer decided to roll it out. But just a few weeks in, it has cut my skype usage by 90% and has resulted in a lot more communication with colleagues than skype.
I think Slack is on its way to really challenging apps like skype and gotomeeting for the enterprise use-cases.
One area they could improve (besides the obvious one being video chat) is integration with other bug trackers. The Jira plugin is quite pathetic. Granted, Atlassian owns hipchat AND jira, but hipchat's jira integration is excellent. The slack plugin for jira is pretty terrible and is why $employer went with hipchat sadly.
Yup. I've been doing custom integrations because of this. We have several alerting systems, and catching items getting added to (and leaving) a queue is an important one that I've added, along with other integrations with internal systems that exist where I work.
One nice thing about slack is that writing these integrations are very, very simple.
I'm honestly astounded that so many high profile corporations are willing to use slack without an on-premise version.
Slack is the only SaaS that has access to, and STORES PERMANENTLY, every important private message, group message, document, commit, internal URLs, .... of your company.
At some point in the future, slack will get hacked. Every sufficiently popular product does. It's only a matter of time. And when it does, the data hosted by slack will be an absolute treasure trove for competitive intelligence, "insider" trading, hacking, and a variety of other bad, bad things.
Not to mention, an arbitrary number of employees at slack can read the internal communications of any company using their product. I'm sure slack has some "security" measures in place to prevent this, but it would only take one rogue employee with the keys to the kingdom to snoop on any data imaginable.
This seems incredibly dangerous to me...
I'm not a Slack shill, have never used the product, don't know anyone who works for the company.
But.
Has Facebook ever been hacked to this degree? Has Google ever been hacked to this degree? Has any sufficiently popular social-media/enterprise-knowledge-sharing app been hacked to this degree?
What makes you so completely certain that they will be hacked and that a 'treasure trove' will be available to the supposed hackers?
Take for instance Intel's addons to IPMI "Automatic Management Technology".
Let's say you have a server, reachable on a certain network address on a LAN.
I can turn on AMT, I can set up server management answerable at the SAME address. network traffic to and from the machine and network is undisturbed.
I can install bios updates, configure aspects of the machine, all kinds of things, just with AMT. I have read in some cases you can configure the machine this way even if its powered off.
IPMI cards are always-on, and run outside the rest of the server. They receive power even if the server is shut down. These are used for out-of-band management, power on/off, etc. Imagine if someone were to have control of the firmware running on your IPMI cards... they would have physical access to your server (essentially) from a remote location. You often don't control what's running on the IPMI cards or if they call home, etc. What if HP or Dell had sleeper software in your IPMI cards, and when it wakes up, opens a direct connection to your server?
The issue with centralization is that you don't have to name one company where Slack is the weak point in the chain: a good exploit might get you access to data from 1000 companies. Then Slack could be a better target even if it's 999 times more secure than the weakest link at each individual company (assuming the attacker doesn't have a very specific, one-track target).
The majority of the corporate world is either already on Office 365 or moving to Office 365 for their email, which could be subject to the same argument.
That said, I think any hacker would die of boredom reading my company's Slack channels before they hit any nugget of interesting information!
Any hacker capable of hacking slack would likely automate searching of interesting information too :) It is not like they are going to sit and read tons of boring chats!
This is changing - rapidly. Even some of the biggest companies in the uber-conservative oil and energy industries are moving to O365 and similar.
There are very few holdouts that have no privileged corporate information in one SaaS or another - SFDC, github for enterprise, Workday, netsuite, etc...
Agreed and particularly unsettling given the NSA's precedents; how do we know Slack isn't simply siphoning data to them via secret frontdoor collaboration or unknown backdoor (or combination thereof [1]).
Yeah, but I think there's a difference between email and chat in terms of how much discretion you habitually exercise when writing, so it's likely that it's more dangerous to you in court.
That didn't leak any actual communications, though, just user database information. Still, point taken, let's hope they have implemented structural improvements to their security / qa processes.
I'm sure Apple is not keeping the schematics for the A8 on Slack. There is so much corporate communication info which would be of no value whatsoever to a competitor, and it would take a lot of work to troll through a data dump looking for a few nuggets, which might not even represent the company's actual plans (just some maverick's ramblings).
A lot can be gleaned and infered from seemingly ordinary internal communication. Why do you think people used to go dumpster diving at their competitor's offices?
If it was worth digging through actual trash, I'm sure an electronic dump would be more highly valued.
I know people say things through work IM that they wouldn't message via email. Not a good practice at all, but there is the illusion of something being less permanent via IM.
Slack does a pretty okay job messaging that everything you say is available to your companies administrators. At the minimum, assume that everything said on your corporate IM system (even private to two users) is discoverable in a lawsuit.
We use http://rocket.chat . Its open source, offers a slack compatible api, multi-user video chatting, screen sharing and has mobile/desktop applications.
I'm sort of astounded at the demand for these products. Instant messaging/chat/constant interruptions is an antipattern in my book. I don't use Slack or have any other instant messaging running on my desktop. I used to, but found it highly annoying. I just use email, and check it a few times a day. What is the need to suck on this firehose of instant information about all kinds of mundane events?
I think this is highly dependent on culture and the type of work you're doing. Is the software you're doing organized such that you can effectively lock yourself away for an entire day and just solve problems? If so, you're probably not going to see much value from Slack, if any.
But what if you do need to collaborate on pieces constantly? Bouncing emails back and forth isn't the best. If you don't have an office environment that's conducive to collaborating like that, slack is also a boon here. Doubly so if members of the team are distributed. What if you've got issues with your email where there's a ton of it, and 90% of it is only mildly important? If lots of the people sending out that email instead just sent chats to a channel that you turn off notifications for, you won't see notifications for it and your inbox is cleaner.
Of course it can be disastrous, with channels turning into nothing but a bunch of GIF sharing and other stupid shit. The onus is on the team to keep work channels clean and focused, and have appropriate channels for goofy stuff that people will naturally tend to participate in.
Note that I'm not saying whether or not this ultimately allows work to happen more efficiently. I honestly can't tell if using Slack makes things easier in the long run, but I certainly prefer using it over email if I can.
On the contrary, I think using a single tool (i.e. email) for every type of communication is the anti-pattern. The fact of the matter is that real-time chat is much better suited for most types of conversations that happen in a typical workplace.
My policy is that if the email is going to be less than two paragraphs, it's better to send it as a Slack message (or IRC or whatever your team uses). But if you need to elaborate on an idea, or bring someone up to speed on something, then write an email, and make sure it's exhaustive.
If everybody I knew were emailing instead of texting, chatting, calling, video calling, I would have much better relationships, professional and personal.
Just to clarify, are you asking about the use of instant messaging in a work environment, or at all? I can see an argument that it's counterproductive at work, but the purely social utility has been obvious for decades; it basically evolved out of IRC.
Yeah, I don't get it either. The majority of what I've seen at my company is giphy spam in every channel. The vast majority of people constantly check slack for any giphy updates or other BS. Direct messages are distracting because they are intrusive even if they're not that important right now. The whole thing is anti-productivity masquerading as collaboration.
I get its uses, but I rarely see those in practice.
I think most of the perceived hype is generated by Slack itself and its SV valleys. I doubt that more than a handful of Fortune 500 companies even allow its usage.
Back in October 2014 it included at least some teams at MS, Apple, and big news organizations like NY Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. While it may not be 100% deployed, I'd bet that a lot of F500 companies have at least a few divisions that are all over it.
> At some point in the future, slack will get hacked.
There are a number of high profile companies that have gotten hacked as well, some of which had REAL damage done as a result.
Running On-Prem is no safeguard for hacks, and you are trading one set of vulnerabilities for another set.
Following that same line of reasoning, services like AWS shouldn't be used either, as they also provide a new threat vector for attacks.
////
This is from Mattermost's web site:
> Mattermost is written in Golang and React and runs as a single Linux binary with either MySQL or Postgres.
For an on prem solution, you've now taken on the responsibility for maintaining at least a few linux machines. Including patching, hardware failure etc. Next comes the database, including performance tuning, security configuration and patching. Finally when updates to Mattermost software itself, ensuring you stay up to date with that.
If Messaging is somewhat critical, you'll need to ensure you have fail-over/fault tolerance in your architecture.
You'll also want to make sure when you patch, you do a rolling patch, so you don't accidently break messaging.
Plus you'll want to backup your message data and run through DR protocols.
This will be in addition to maintaining all the other corporate IT internal systems a company may use.
Running on-premises makes you a smaller target. If a hacker gets into slack, he can do "REAL damage" to every company using slack, not just one single on-premises target.
Real damage hacks like corporate espionage you don't hear about, because it is in no one's interest involved to reveal those to anyone other than the buyer of the information, which usually a premium if it's kept discrete. No way to say this has not already happened.
"High profile company" and "smaller target" are somewhat mutually exclusive.
Think about it this way: Slack's entire business revolves around secure company communication. That's just a blip on High Profile Co's list of priorities.
Slack maintains a bug bounty program. What's the likelihood that High Profile Co is doing the same for their messaging app?
That doesnt change the fact that it's (a) high value target and (b) highly likely to be compromised by the people they worry about most. Whereas on premise means hackers run into who knows what apps, network configs, routers, OS's, etc. Lots of extra work for them. Plus some company and its employees dont have access go your data without a risky subversion.
> Running On-Prem is no safeguard for hacks, and you are trading one set of vulnerabilities for another set.
I think the parent poster's point is, concentrating all of these user accounts into one location makes it a more enticing target. Robbing a bank is more enticing than robbing a liquor store. To strech the analogy a bit, and support your point, Banks are better at securing the money.
So, to be explicit, in house maybe not as secure as slack, but the possible rewards are just your company's value. If 1000 companies are all in the slack pool, slack ought to be 1000 times better than a single company alone. Because the reward for a hack is so outsized.
I've found message retention to be a "checkmark feature:" It's technically there, but it's not really achieving the goals you'd hope for message retention to help with. You'd want to be able to say "Don't retain messages more than 90 days old except for the rooms I, the admin, specify." But:
* There's no API to set retention settings or defaults
* There's no API to audit retention settings for private channels
* Non-admin users can change retention settings for DMs and private rooms
* There's no way to enforce that private rooms and DMs get a maximum retention setting
Security company SpiderOak (not affiliated) seems to be working on a "zero knowledge" end-to-end encrypted hosted Slack competitor. I'm no security expert and I don't know whether these claims actually hold up. You can read more here:
That the cloud service company had access to your communications was something that was brought up at Blekko which was using Google's hosted domain feature. On the down side, there was at least one documented case of an engineer pawing through other people's mail. On the other hand, a lot of the VCs and partners had Google hosted email as well so "copies" of our communication would be there anyway.
At the end of the day the vendor's priorities were aligned with ours, they want to sell hosted mail/docs/etc service and having people with bad experience (even one) really limits them. So I think Slack would also be similarly aligned with maintaining their security and the security of their clients for exactly similar reasons.
The issue that Schneir pointed out about protecting your data when you're SaaS provider goes chapter 7 on you, that one is still real. And while there are people with cash hoards who could do it, I've yet to see someone spend money to buy a SaaS company so that they could get access to the data of a competitor. Although to be honest I did wonder a bit about Yammer. Killing a potential competitor (Whatsup, Instagram) sure, but actual industrial espionage would seem to be an unlikely outcome. (Would make for a fun story though, if you're reading Charlie :-)
Worse yet, what if the government decides it wants data that Slack holds and forces their hand?
I don't think this problem isn't solvable. Public crypto could help alleviate some of the pain. For instance, what you say holds true for most Google services (Gmail, search data, hangouts, data from Android), Github (private repos), Amazon (credit card data, purchase data), Uber/Lyft (travel data) or basically any popular WWW service with wide enough adoption. Nothing peculiar to Slack.
I wonder if the concerns you raised could be done away with if they started using crypto similar to ones used by Telegram or say, Signal by Open Whisper Systems.
Re: Data Retention: Slack could provide a TTL field and that would help solve that.
Users will need to demand it -- but I wonder if many users know enough to ask.
Gmail (at least free Gmail for individuals) won't have end-to-end encryption because their business model is to scan your email and serve you relevant ads.
But Slack, I don't see why not. I would like to try Slack on my team, but sending all of our unencrypted internal communications to a third-party is a bad idea. even if nothing bad happens, it's a bad idea.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
Is investing at Slack today at a 3.8B valuation a good investment? Maybe, maybe not. But it doesn't seem crazy to me. That's all I'm saying. They already make a lot of money, they're growing fast, and they're in a potentially very large market.
They're in a shrinking market. It's not like they "discovered" chat. They slapped a good interface over IRC and centralized everything on their servers. Everyone and their dog is now writing chat apps, including existing big enterprise companies. So while slack got a large initial boost from developer-driven teams, other companies with existing large userbases are now catching up (and fast).
Slack is one part decent app five parts hype. It's not worth anywhere near 3.8B, and it now has immense shoes to fill because it apparently thinks it's worth that much.
Assuming the latest numbers from TC are correct, they're at annual reoccurring revenues of somewhere between from 70M-140M (depending on average per seat revenue). In the past 12 months they've gone from 100,000+ paid seats to over 800,000+ paid seats. The investors are valuing (and expecting) future growth.
For comparison: Atlassian is estimating $440+ revenue for their fiscal year, and has a market cap of $5.5B.
For the "irc is just as good as Slack, you should just use irc" crowd, Slack's mobile clients are pretty good. Ever tried to get a non techie person to use irc on a mobile device? Ever used irc on a mobile device? The experience is terrible.
Slack's clients also have persistence, as in shows the most recent history of communication.
Not everyone uses screen/tmux with irc (though they should).
I hate this argument. Yeah, IRC is open and there are tons of clients for it, but Slack is the only one that I've used that a) retains history without you having to think about it, and b) is actually really really REALLY nice to use.
That said, if all you need is simple team communication, IRC works great
Why does anyone thinks that a centralized chat service is a good idea? I especially don't get why open source projects move to a platform they cannot even control or commit to.
Because it's easy for everyone to use, even non-technical people. And it requires no maintenance, so the people running the project aren't spending time doing things that are not running the project.
I agree, it's just sad to see several areas of the market move towards centralized closed source solutions. It's as though a new generation of developers don't even know what open source is, including the dangers these "easier" solutions bring to the table and how they shape the future.
So why isn't the open source community moving towards an open source, all in one solution like this? To just ignore the popularity of Slack, and insist that everyone just use IRC and handle the other stuff themselves is just foolish.
I love Slack but I fell like they are making the same mistake as Dropbox have done.
They have taken a great business and is pumping it up way beyond it's natural growth trajectory and is ignoring what I consider the most important advice for 99% of businesses": Be patient for growth not for profit as Clayton Christensen is saying.
Depends on stage and market penetration. It's usually an S-curve.
It says they're at 2.7M active users, which they frame as a lot for an enterprise app, so that probably means 10-100K companies - that seems huge for a company growing 3.5X user growth.
I'm a great fan of Slack. Large portion of revenue for an b2b app like Slack will come from big corporations and businesses with more than 200 employees.
Microsoft/Google are heavily invested on large enterprises. These big giants can pull off a product like Slack and sell to all the big clients. Microsoft already sells communicator to large corps. They can switch that to Microsoft-Slack version and bundle it with their office products taking the large (90% revenue) out of Slack pocket.
Slack has to go really big to hit enterprises hard or they will be just serving small medium businesses which will have churn burn and less LTV.
Without seeing their financials I'm not sure if I am qualified to explain their valuation.
That said, if I had the money and was invited to participate in this round I would have. More so than any other software I have seen, Slack has organic buy-in from everybody outside I.T. Once introduced is spreads like wildfire throughout any company I have heard about. Unlike much (most) software introduced to them Slack has an easy to see value for them, has almost no setup barriers, and is usable with little to no training.
All of the objections in this discussion are from an I.T. perspective ("you can just use self-hosted IRC for free") or a compliance perspective (having worked many years in the financial services industry I understand that there are compliance requirements but those are always written by lawyers and often their understanding of the security tradeoffs between self-hosted, with company employed security professionals, and the cloud, with vendor employed security professionals, are dubious at best).
I sometimes feel that programmers would write Excel from scratch in order to add two plus two.
But where is their moat? It seems like these sort of apps come and go with fashion. In my company some people use Slack but there's also a mix of various other solutions from Jabber to HipChat to IRC. Can't say that Slack is spreading like wildfire in our fairly large company... It is getting some use, people say it's ok, and that's about that...
Their moat is the developer ecosystem and apps on the Slack platform.
But it's also the fact that while it's easy to get started, the value and dependence on Slack increases rapidly by your team's investment in using it.
Slack takes no time at all to do an initial team setup so you can just get started and as mentioned nothing needs to be learned to dive right in. Users are rewarded for discovering new things and further rewarded by cool points for sharing the tricks and secrets they uncover with others.
The ability to search and find a file or a key part of a conversation that happened a year ago faster than you could an email. This feature only gets better the more your conversations happen in Slack — you'll never lose anything again.
In terms of features, many of the best customizations involve apps working with Slackbot and Zapier. Setting up these custom features takes time and tweaking to get them exactly perfect — switching costs you won't want to deal with a year from now once they've become part of your routine.
233 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadEdit: downvoters, where am I wrong?
I guess if OP believes slack IS substantially different from irc, then nevermind, but that should be their call to make.
Yes, that's where slack comes in. Except, instead of "install some software" you just "create an account" and log in and. Oh, that's it. Create a room, invite friends, or whatever. Post, DM people, scroll back, add rss feeds etc. It all just works. Nice android app too.
Not that i'm trying to sell slack; i can take it or leave it. I'm sure there are alternatives to that. But I have literally no idea why in 2016 anyone would want to subject themselves to irc (plus whatever other crap you have to install/configure to make it bearable).
Although I'm not trying to discount what you want for chat... Everything you just desribed is super easy for me to do with IRC. I can customize it to look however I want, and just connect with the protocol. That's why I "subject myself to irc". All the commands you have trouble remembering, are customizeable, and muscle-memory for me.
> Now I can use a browser.
hmmm... that sounds like the opposite of what I want. To each their own I guess.
> Not that i'm trying to sell slack
Not at all. I asked for a comparison, and that's what you provided. I guess I just don't have any personal interest in it over IRC. Cheers!
There are plenty of old school ways to share/synchronise files among a group of people. You could run an FTP server and a bunch of automated scripts etc. Or you can just install Dropbox for your non-technically minded users and it just works. The interface is nice and mobile app support is great. Slack is similar in that regard.
1. Send messages to people that are offline. 2. Easily see unread messages in a channel. 3. Markdown formatting. 4. @everyone/@channel notifications (not to be abused). 5. Simple Github integration (and other apps). 6. Mobile notifications (in fact, just the overall state of "mobile")
I'm sure every single one of these could be added to irc via bot or something like that. The beauty of slack is that I can set up a slack team and do all of the above without having to really muck around with that. Much lower operational overhead.
I love IRC, but the features don't compare. You might be able to implement some/most/all of the missing features, but they're not available out of the box.
Like you said, we are willing to pay, but for about $7 per user we aren't getting much more than the free plan...
We are an entirely remote company, and we found that videochat during our standups really helps. Currently we are paying $5 a month per user for Google apps and only using a very small portion of it (basically just the video chatting), and they allow up to 25 people which is perfect for us.
we routinely have meetings with 15-30 people and we use Sococo[1] for all our audio and video. The office layout is also really nice. Everything else we've tried for video hasn't cut it, in comparison.
Note that Sococo will try to push you to their new browser based product. Last time we tried it, it was far worse than the 'classic' version we still use. But they don't really show 'classic' on their website anymore.
[1] https://www.sococo.com/
That sounds horrible.
You get the occasional feedback screech or something, but for the most part we aren't animals and we all know how to mute our mic's. And the added benefit of a face means you can get more body-language which helps prevent the "talking over" that happens on conference calls.
Plus the way we have it setup now we can all "mute" one another, so if someone is causing an issue and doesn't know it (or stepped away for a second) we can instantly mute them and move on.
https://blog.discordapp.com/upcoming-feature-preview-friends...
One of my biggest complaints is the lack of easy to manage private channels. There's a super complex and powerful permissions system quite obviously based on mumble, but if I want to make a quick private channel to talk to two people, it's easier to make a whole new server than just another channel.
In comparison to a free plan sure but in what real business is $7/user/mo too expensive for anything? That's less than an hour's minimum wage[1].
[1]: Technically it's quite a bit less as min wage in the U.S. is $7.25 and that doesn't include corporate payroll tax or medicare/social-security matching
The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers?
None of those are businesses. Maybe I should have clarified but I meant a business as one where employees work for an organization that derives value from their work (say $A), the organization pays the employees some form of compensation ($B), and the expectation is that the value derived by each employee is more than the compensation (i.e $A > $B).
In that model I don't see many places where ($A - $B) < $7.
But they still require history, easy to use chat systems, easy integration into Dev systems, etc.
That's what was better about IRC: you can self-host and get all of slacks features for very cheap.
Not everyone is KDE e.V.
The network effect leads to lots of open source projects having to choose slack – which, in turn, means they end up having to pay, without having revenue.
I never see the slack app in my top battery users; I saw the hipchat app in the top battery users all the time before I uninstalled the app. I don't leaving it running for work, but not at the expense of 10-15% of my battery.
https://status.hipchat.com/
It could be similar to people complaining that Reddit or Imgur is down or unstable, but that mostly happens to Americans. So Europeans get the benefit of an overbuilt infrastructure, because the companies try to scale to the load generated by Americans.
Trying out their hosted Jira solution recently felt quite a bit like a throwback to the 90s.
I'm not going to trust them again, sorry.
(We ended up using Youtrack instead. A lot faster, a lot cheaper, but less flexible.)
I don't find our self-hosted Jira slow or a throwback to the 90s. It also cost $10. But these things are opinions. :)
Recently hipchat released a major UI rewrite, and now there's no way to turn off autocorrect. It's almost useless for developers discussing code, if every technical term you type gets replaced with the first non-technical word that is "close enough."
(Happy April 1st!)
I generally avoid Reddit these days, except occasionally dipping into the VR sub-reddits. The level of stupidity, entitlement, and general melodrama is ludicrous.
It's like when you're subjected to the nonsense of a person who's become accustomed to being the smartest person in a dumb room.
HN is just a smarter room. Like Reddit 10 years ago. We should defend that.
(I just lament a slight lack of light-heartedness!)
I think that's the point of the question?
Not that this is a dig against you or Asana; it's just that this is how the world works.
However, great products are worth paying for. If/when they start to charge or you exceed the free tiers' limits, you'll have to make difficult choices based on what they're worth to your business.
Presumably this was part of the pitch (build on-premise version, hire the good salespeople from MS and Oracle, profit).
https://quip.com
I was sceptical, but Quip's combination of chat and group-editable documents feels actually much better for dev teams than Slack, which ends up very unstructured.
(I have no association with Quip at all, but recently had the chance to use it in a Slack-like context.)
Quip has chatrooms that work like Slack (or IRC, or any other group chat in the history of the Internet).
So what's the different use case?
(I don't see Quip having such an advantage -- although Quip seems like a perfect fit for Microsoft's product portfolio... Hmm...)
Positioning can definitely hurt a product.
Quip is the Evernote killer.
That said, this was a year ago, maybe it's better now?
https://basecamp.com/
It's highly unlikely we'll ever see an on-prem Slack.
I think Slack is on its way to really challenging apps like skype and gotomeeting for the enterprise use-cases.
One nice thing about slack is that writing these integrations are very, very simple.
Slack is the only SaaS that has access to, and STORES PERMANENTLY, every important private message, group message, document, commit, internal URLs, .... of your company.
At some point in the future, slack will get hacked. Every sufficiently popular product does. It's only a matter of time. And when it does, the data hosted by slack will be an absolute treasure trove for competitive intelligence, "insider" trading, hacking, and a variety of other bad, bad things.
Not to mention, an arbitrary number of employees at slack can read the internal communications of any company using their product. I'm sure slack has some "security" measures in place to prevent this, but it would only take one rogue employee with the keys to the kingdom to snoop on any data imaginable. This seems incredibly dangerous to me...
I'm not a Slack shill, have never used the product, don't know anyone who works for the company.
But.
Has Facebook ever been hacked to this degree? Has Google ever been hacked to this degree? Has any sufficiently popular social-media/enterprise-knowledge-sharing app been hacked to this degree?
What makes you so completely certain that they will be hacked and that a 'treasure trove' will be available to the supposed hackers?
Seems like unwarranted FUD tbh.
Instagram could have been: http://exfiltrated.com/research-Instagram-RCE.php.
And we don't know how linked instagram and FB are. Is the instagram app signed by facebook? etc.
Yes, security researchers have reached FB servers in the past few months.
> Has Google ever been hacked to this degree?
Yes, by Mainland Chinese agents a few years ago.
I know of similarly large networks that are currently owned.
And almost everybody has an IPMI problem, whether they realize it or not yet.
(Silicon Valley engineer here.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Platform_Managemen...
Let's say you have a server, reachable on a certain network address on a LAN.
I can turn on AMT, I can set up server management answerable at the SAME address. network traffic to and from the machine and network is undisturbed.
I can install bios updates, configure aspects of the machine, all kinds of things, just with AMT. I have read in some cases you can configure the machine this way even if its powered off.
How does that affect your everyday company, with orders of magnitude less competence/intelligence per capita....?
My question is this; what company that uses Slack has good enough opsec that Slack is the vuln to be exploited.
Please name one company where Slack could even potentially be the easiest point of entry.
Easiest point of entry? No. Single point of entry? Yes.
That said, I think any hacker would die of boredom reading my company's Slack channels before they hit any nugget of interesting information!
Again and again, the issue is not the encryption algos, it's the bits between the keyboard and chair. People are stupid.
There are very few holdouts that have no privileged corporate information in one SaaS or another - SFDC, github for enterprise, Workday, netsuite, etc...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
Slack got hacked last year: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/27/slack-got-hacked/
You're also exposing yourself to a lawsuit.
If it was worth digging through actual trash, I'm sure an electronic dump would be more highly valued.
Isn’t Gmail in roughly the same spot?
Edit: Never mind, others have already mentioned a couple, down the comments - for example, http://www.mattermost.org/
http://alternativeto.net/software/slack/?license=opensource
But what if you do need to collaborate on pieces constantly? Bouncing emails back and forth isn't the best. If you don't have an office environment that's conducive to collaborating like that, slack is also a boon here. Doubly so if members of the team are distributed. What if you've got issues with your email where there's a ton of it, and 90% of it is only mildly important? If lots of the people sending out that email instead just sent chats to a channel that you turn off notifications for, you won't see notifications for it and your inbox is cleaner.
Of course it can be disastrous, with channels turning into nothing but a bunch of GIF sharing and other stupid shit. The onus is on the team to keep work channels clean and focused, and have appropriate channels for goofy stuff that people will naturally tend to participate in.
Note that I'm not saying whether or not this ultimately allows work to happen more efficiently. I honestly can't tell if using Slack makes things easier in the long run, but I certainly prefer using it over email if I can.
Seems to work just fine for the linux kernel.
It's a lot better than someone coming over to your desk and poking you.
My policy is that if the email is going to be less than two paragraphs, it's better to send it as a Slack message (or IRC or whatever your team uses). But if you need to elaborate on an idea, or bring someone up to speed on something, then write an email, and make sure it's exhaustive.
I get its uses, but I rarely see those in practice.
We're using Mattermost here and pretty happy with it, it's got missing areas but it does let you self-host pretty easily.
I think most of the perceived hype is generated by Slack itself and its SV valleys. I doubt that more than a handful of Fortune 500 companies even allow its usage.
http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-flaw-lets-you-see-other...
There are a number of high profile companies that have gotten hacked as well, some of which had REAL damage done as a result.
Running On-Prem is no safeguard for hacks, and you are trading one set of vulnerabilities for another set.
Following that same line of reasoning, services like AWS shouldn't be used either, as they also provide a new threat vector for attacks.
////
This is from Mattermost's web site:
> Mattermost is written in Golang and React and runs as a single Linux binary with either MySQL or Postgres.
For an on prem solution, you've now taken on the responsibility for maintaining at least a few linux machines. Including patching, hardware failure etc. Next comes the database, including performance tuning, security configuration and patching. Finally when updates to Mattermost software itself, ensuring you stay up to date with that.
If Messaging is somewhat critical, you'll need to ensure you have fail-over/fault tolerance in your architecture.
You'll also want to make sure when you patch, you do a rolling patch, so you don't accidently break messaging.
Plus you'll want to backup your message data and run through DR protocols.
This will be in addition to maintaining all the other corporate IT internal systems a company may use.
Think about it this way: Slack's entire business revolves around secure company communication. That's just a blip on High Profile Co's list of priorities.
Slack maintains a bug bounty program. What's the likelihood that High Profile Co is doing the same for their messaging app?
I think the parent poster's point is, concentrating all of these user accounts into one location makes it a more enticing target. Robbing a bank is more enticing than robbing a liquor store. To strech the analogy a bit, and support your point, Banks are better at securing the money.
So, to be explicit, in house maybe not as secure as slack, but the possible rewards are just your company's value. If 1000 companies are all in the slack pool, slack ought to be 1000 times better than a single company alone. Because the reward for a hack is so outsized.
* There's no API to set retention settings or defaults
* There's no API to audit retention settings for private channels
* Non-admin users can change retention settings for DMs and private rooms
* There's no way to enforce that private rooms and DMs get a maximum retention setting
https://spideroak.com/articles/press-release-semaphor-to-giv...
This made me laugh: "Semaphor is not slack about privacy."
At the end of the day the vendor's priorities were aligned with ours, they want to sell hosted mail/docs/etc service and having people with bad experience (even one) really limits them. So I think Slack would also be similarly aligned with maintaining their security and the security of their clients for exactly similar reasons.
The issue that Schneir pointed out about protecting your data when you're SaaS provider goes chapter 7 on you, that one is still real. And while there are people with cash hoards who could do it, I've yet to see someone spend money to buy a SaaS company so that they could get access to the data of a competitor. Although to be honest I did wonder a bit about Yammer. Killing a potential competitor (Whatsup, Instagram) sure, but actual industrial espionage would seem to be an unlikely outcome. (Would make for a fun story though, if you're reading Charlie :-)
Targeted towards international NGOs operating in rough areas, but works for other business too.
Not free though. Seems security comes at a premium.
I don't think this problem isn't solvable. Public crypto could help alleviate some of the pain. For instance, what you say holds true for most Google services (Gmail, search data, hangouts, data from Android), Github (private repos), Amazon (credit card data, purchase data), Uber/Lyft (travel data) or basically any popular WWW service with wide enough adoption. Nothing peculiar to Slack.
I wonder if the concerns you raised could be done away with if they started using crypto similar to ones used by Telegram or say, Signal by Open Whisper Systems.
Re: Data Retention: Slack could provide a TTL field and that would help solve that.
Gmail (at least free Gmail for individuals) won't have end-to-end encryption because their business model is to scan your email and serve you relevant ads.
But Slack, I don't see why not. I would like to try Slack on my team, but sending all of our unencrypted internal communications to a third-party is a bad idea. even if nothing bad happens, it's a bad idea.
No.
Is investing at Slack today at a 3.8B valuation a good investment? Maybe, maybe not. But it doesn't seem crazy to me. That's all I'm saying. They already make a lot of money, they're growing fast, and they're in a potentially very large market.
Only time will tell how far they get.
They're in a shrinking market. It's not like they "discovered" chat. They slapped a good interface over IRC and centralized everything on their servers. Everyone and their dog is now writing chat apps, including existing big enterprise companies. So while slack got a large initial boost from developer-driven teams, other companies with existing large userbases are now catching up (and fast).
Slack is one part decent app five parts hype. It's not worth anywhere near 3.8B, and it now has immense shoes to fill because it apparently thinks it's worth that much.
For comparison: Atlassian is estimating $440+ revenue for their fiscal year, and has a market cap of $5.5B.
You 'raised' 200M.
Slack's clients also have persistence, as in shows the most recent history of communication.
Not everyone uses screen/tmux with irc (though they should).
That said, if all you need is simple team communication, IRC works great
It makes no sense.
They have taken a great business and is pumping it up way beyond it's natural growth trajectory and is ignoring what I consider the most important advice for 99% of businesses": Be patient for growth not for profit as Clayton Christensen is saying.
Is that that insane for a successful startup? I think that comes out at 2.4%/week which is a bit lower than YC tends to aim for.
It says they're at 2.7M active users, which they frame as a lot for an enterprise app, so that probably means 10-100K companies - that seems huge for a company growing 3.5X user growth.
Microsoft/Google are heavily invested on large enterprises. These big giants can pull off a product like Slack and sell to all the big clients. Microsoft already sells communicator to large corps. They can switch that to Microsoft-Slack version and bundle it with their office products taking the large (90% revenue) out of Slack pocket.
Slack has to go really big to hit enterprises hard or they will be just serving small medium businesses which will have churn burn and less LTV.
That said, if I had the money and was invited to participate in this round I would have. More so than any other software I have seen, Slack has organic buy-in from everybody outside I.T. Once introduced is spreads like wildfire throughout any company I have heard about. Unlike much (most) software introduced to them Slack has an easy to see value for them, has almost no setup barriers, and is usable with little to no training.
All of the objections in this discussion are from an I.T. perspective ("you can just use self-hosted IRC for free") or a compliance perspective (having worked many years in the financial services industry I understand that there are compliance requirements but those are always written by lawyers and often their understanding of the security tradeoffs between self-hosted, with company employed security professionals, and the cloud, with vendor employed security professionals, are dubious at best).
I sometimes feel that programmers would write Excel from scratch in order to add two plus two.
But it's also the fact that while it's easy to get started, the value and dependence on Slack increases rapidly by your team's investment in using it.
Slack takes no time at all to do an initial team setup so you can just get started and as mentioned nothing needs to be learned to dive right in. Users are rewarded for discovering new things and further rewarded by cool points for sharing the tricks and secrets they uncover with others.
The ability to search and find a file or a key part of a conversation that happened a year ago faster than you could an email. This feature only gets better the more your conversations happen in Slack — you'll never lose anything again.
In terms of features, many of the best customizations involve apps working with Slackbot and Zapier. Setting up these custom features takes time and tweaking to get them exactly perfect — switching costs you won't want to deal with a year from now once they've become part of your routine.