Venture capitalists are cashing their investments by IPOs - sure sign that the next financial crisis is starting soon :) Dotcom Bubble 2.0 is ready to burst.
EDIT: I do not imply that venture capitalists poses some insider knowledge. It is not necessary. It's just the fact that when bullshit companies with bullshit product, that generate losses instead of profit get valued at $16B (other recent examples include Lyft and Uber) it means that economy is in crazy state, and it does not take much to induce panic. My guess is one of these unicorns will fill for bankruptcy soon, thus pushing the market over the edge.
Yet, I have no real evidence that points me to its truth. The thinking seems to be predicated on VCs having inside knowledge or excellent speculative skills. That might be true, but presumably they're not the only strong speculators.
Are we seeing other major players move out of tech? We're certainly not seeing massive liquidation in general.
I would encourage people to read the Pets.com 10-Q to understand what the dot com bubble was like from a corporate finance perspective, because there are deeper lessons than "Some companies with substantial Internet operations IPOed."
Slack, unsurprisingly because it sells software, has positive gross margins rather than negative gross margins; they're healthy at ~80%. They appear to be able to turn $1 of sales and marketing spend in Year 1 into > $1 of software revenue in year 2. Their churn rate on a dollar basis is 43%. Excuse me, -43%; a cohort of SaaS customers paying $100M in year 1 will pay $143M in year 2 due to growth in number of seats more than offsetting churning accounts.
There is no price at which a rational person should want to own Pets.com. There is, very clearly, a price at which a rational person should want to own Slack.
I don't think people who say this were even around at the time of the dotcom bubble. There were public companies adding "tech" to their names and seeing their values rise 10x in a day. THAT was a bubble.
I don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even Facebook isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.
Free is there to be a sales demo without deadlines with a casual shrug for people who aren't going to pay, I wouldn't ever use slack if it wasn't my intention to play and slack wouldn't miss me.
I never used Slack out of choice either. I've used it because I was forced to due to others' decisions. So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.
> So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.
I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments).
But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.
Well then you missed the entire point of my comment, which was specifically about the free plan, and specifically about when you haven't had a chance to run such a script incrementally.
...OK, so you chose to communicate on it in order to communicate with "others", presumably due to an employer wanting you all to use Slack. In that situation, your communications are often legally not your own property (though it is arguable, at least in the US).
If you're using it personally, the limits on message counts are made quite clear. Exceeding them makes export difficult or impossible without paying. So don't exceed them.
A huge chunk of Slack's value prop (after decent UX) is exactly the fact that they have all of your communications. No chat admins, servers to manage and back up, or networking hell to orchestrate non-text content sharing in a multiparty way. Also makes corporate folks who pay for it happy as they have pretty good auditability/retention controls--not perfect, of course, but better than a truly p2p/federated solution, and again: no infrastructure management needed.
You don't have to be happy with it, but those are features, not bugs, and are valuable to many.
You also just, y'know, don't have to use Slack. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. If the hill you want to die on is "I won't work for any company/team that uses this chat platform", well, that's your choice (hell, there's not even an argument to be made about ubiquity making it a false choice; Slack has plenty of competitors, both paid/hosted and FOSS/federated, in active use by big companies). But don't pretend that a lack of local history or easy export is some sort of highway robbery or hostage situation.
No, I'm not referring to employment communications or personal communications. There are other categories where I've had no choice but to use the same communication channels others were using despite the content of my communications being emphatically mine.
I actually had the same question. Maybe community or neighborhood groups or volunteer activities? I'd probably just call all that personal but I could see a distinction.
Is that still the case? That there is no way to export message history? I'm trying to find a way to publish messages from my Slack channel to my website in real-time so that I can give visitors a look at what they are signing up for. Similar to how Pieter Levels has nomadlist.com/chat/ set up (if anyone knows how he does that, please let me know).
It was as far as I was able to tell when I checked many months ago. I've seen no indications that anything has changed, but would love to hear otherwise...
"Corporate Export
On the Plus plan, Workspace Owners can apply to access a self-service tool called Corporate Export. This type of export includes content from public and private channels and direct messages. If Corporate Export is enabled for your workspace, Standard Export will not be available."
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...
I don't use or even like Slack, but what is the problem with that?
I mean they are already giving you the oppportunity to use a limited version for free, you can't expect them to give you one of the most useful features imho when you are just using their resources and infrastructure in exchange for nothing; it doesn't make any business sense.
If I'm a non-paying user of Slack (or whatever other SaaS with a free tier) I am not entitled to anything whatsoever, I'd be grateful for the fact that they allow me partial functionality at all.
I don't know exactly what made them add that feature or when that happened (it was before 2011, I think), but AFAIK they never outright blocked you from even viewing older messages. And even then it was possible to scrape it I think, if my Googling right now is any indication.
What does "well deserved" even mean? Does it just mean not evading your privacy to generate income via ads? Does it mean not being too aggressive / abusive of customers?
Personally, I would just call that normal / decent behaviour. Alone, it doesn't mean you deserve a ridiculous billion dollar evaluation
Just double checked this and exported the history from my free plan -- in Slack I can only see messages back to November 2018, but the export includes all messages back to our beginning in 2016.
As others have said, this 'Standard Export' doesn't include direct messages and private channels, so there's still some amount of 'hostage taking'
I miss this from Lotus Sametime: all of your conversations were stored in local XML files. It was very useful to "grep" through these to find some piece of information that someone told you years ago.
Nah, this is a super slanted view of things. Their business succeeds because they've made a best in class amazing thing, not because everyone begrudgingly wants to see their history, lol
For me it’s a usability thing—I tend to lose track of SPA tabs, often by closing the window or not being able to differentiate them from content tabs. I do use web apps but I vastly prefer using my machine’s window manager and window buttons/lists.
I use a tool like applicationize (https://applicationize.me/) to make a chrome app for a site. It mimicks an app, but is running as a tab in chrome. Saves memory but gives the benefit of separate window and workspace management (I can tab to it, it can have icon etc).
Using lots of browser tabs instead of applications appears to me to be a step backward in usability. Instead of relying on the window manager to organise your work, you add cognitive load instead.
Eh, you can just put Slack into it's own window if you're going to use multiple tabs for it. Personally, I just pin it next to my email and it works fine.
I'm not a fan of how much RAM or CPU it uses. I tried the desktop app hoping it would be better, but it seems like it's perhaps worse (I use Firefox, so
Not great for web developers. We have enough tabs open and if every window is a chrome icon it’s a pain to find stuff. I’ve got karma tests running, selenium tests, incognito windows testing security etc etc.
> Why does anyone use the app instead of the site?
Because on Android at least the website detects that you're on a mobile device and switches to read-only mode. Correct, you can't even post a reply without fudging user-agent or installing the app.
As a web developer I’m often using my browser as a guinea pig. Hell a selenium test shut the whole shit down and hijacked it today. I’m not going to run slack in the browser.
A chat client that takes multiple hundreds of MBs of RAM and sucks battery life prodigiously should be, if not illegal, at the very least a violation of unwritten international norms.
It's actually not the first to do this. Adium (AIM) and Colloquy (IRC) switched to WebKit theming in the 2000s, when computers were /really/ too slow to run it.
I've never experienced this very common criticism of slack on here. When I occasionally check, Slack is using around 500mb or RAM. A lot for a chat app? Sure. But it has little to no affect on either my 16gb or 8gb machines.
RAM alone isn’t the problem. The issue is that is so laggy and slow. Poor algorithms on 500mb of bad data structures can bring any modern machine to its knees.
Just reloaded the Slack tab in Firefox to clear down 1GB of RAM use.
As I do every day.
Every single day.
For the one single channel I join. with no PMs and no threads, no file transfers, no voice or video anything.
Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if it was astonishingly good. But it isn't. It isn't even basically competent, it's terrible. Terrible at scrolling back, terrible at editing previous lines, appalling at completing names properly, bad at search, and completely lacking at customizing when it displays 2MB animated gifs inline.
I would expect a 4Gb machine would mean I never have to check on a text chat client. Apparently not.
They're both. They're selling a service to consumers, which they buy with their personal data. They then use that data to sell to advertisers in the form of better targeted ads.
They didn't even run ads for the first three years of their existence.
You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy.
What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.
My personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards.
This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.
The internet’s previous models were doomed to fail. Service providers did not have a reliable monetization scheme. Client apps for open protocols have rarely had wide adoption and longevity, especially anything you had to pay for. I can think of plenty of examples of paid client apps from the late 90s/early 2000s... email clients, web, irc, etc. that just aren’t around because not enough people would pay for the client to sustain their development.
Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.
And yet, the Internet exists because short sighted profit requirements were kept at bay, and eventually the Internet managed to create more value for society than any online service ever by a margin so large that logarithm of the difference is amazingly large.
I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable.
Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top.
If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.
> as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society
Found the bug.
> there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards
It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols.
While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that governments can sometimes wake up and restore competition.
Perhaps in 50 years using open standards will be encouraged e.g. by providing a tax discount
> It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols.
I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.
This isn't really what we're talking about. A better analogy are laptops, phones and tractors - which you are not allowed to repair and only work within a closed ecosystem that you either have to opt into our out of, and where opting out has an extraordinary cost.
I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.
My Dad _just_ upgraded from an iPhone 5. Do you think his Xs won’t last as long?
I agree the laptop situation is a bit shitty. I hate the USB-C everything on my work laptop. Everything works fine on my personal computer but as soon as I plug my usb hub into a usb c adaptor everything stutters.
Love their privacy stance though. Best in the business for sure.
Also, what’s abusive? And what’s fraudulent?
Apparently their new monitors are very well priced. And building the same machine you’d get in a MacBookPro or different model ends up being more expensive or similarly priced.
I could be wrong, and I am, certainly, an Apple fan, but I will criticize when I think it’s appropriate and don’t hold views concretely.
I don't know much about the X since I stopped at the iPhone 7 and I am probably not going to buy any of their exorbitantly priced phones. That being said, in their pursuit of thin phones they ran into design issues with boards flexing so that BGA components will eventually fail. They became aware of the problem and then proceeded to make the same mistake again in later models rarther than fixing the problem. (The flexing problem isn't that they will break after one "bending event", but rather than they fail over time as your phone is subject to mechanical stresses of what is within the range of normal use. Typically because the tiny balls under BGAs will let go)
I'm mostly talking about their laptops and their iMacs. The USB C connectors are of course inconvenient, but I actually like them. Again, the problem is that in their pursuit of thinness they ended up designing keys that are very sensitive to dust (and not very nice to use). In subsequent models they kept at it, so the quality of keyboards doesn't seem to be a priority. Some laptops have a tendency to develop display problems due to bad design. For instance blowing hot air on parts that can't take hot air or laying out connectors so that they will fail more easily.
Now these are design flaws, which brings us to the "abusive and fraudulent" part. If you want to get these things fixed under warranty you _may_ be okay. Except the process appears to be entirely decided by chance. For instance they have put moisture indicators inside the macbooks that not only react to liquid damage, but which turn from white to red (indicating moisture) over time depending on the humidity in the air where you use it. (Most people don't know how these things work, so they'll accept it). So they'll accuse you of having spilled liquid in your laptop and refuse to fix it even when this is not the case. Accusing their customers of lying isn't a very good way to behave.
In many cases they will also claim that your laptop is in need to expensive component replacements. Either because they claim that the component cannot be repaired or when their service technicians fail to correctly diagnose the equipment. The repair costs quoted are supposed to make you buy a new computer rather than fix the one you have.
On top of that they have the gall to claim that independent repair shops are somehow less qualified than Apple. Which naturally rings true in the ears of most people; they designed it so they should be the best to fix it, right? However, this doesn't seem to be generally true. Especially since Apple and their authorized resellers appear to have very limited diagnostic and repair capability and the qualifications vary.
When you do send in an Apple device, you have to be aware of the fact that it isn't Apple that repairs your equipment - it is a subcontractor. And they are not always the best.
Wich brings us to the bullying. Apple do their best to kill the independent repair market any way they can. Often by filing lawsuits against repair shops and then putting them out of business. When confronted with this they us their go-to excuses. Like protecting the consumer from unqualified repair shops.
They do this by denying independent repair shops access to the supply line - meaning they work hard to make it difficult to obtain spare parts and components. Compare this to, for instance, Samsung, which sell parts online to make it easy for repair shops to get the needed parts. In order to get parts for Apple products there is an entire market for broken laptops that are bought and sold to repair shops in order to provide donor boards for components.
Of course, then there is the fact that they seem to deliberately make things harder to repair or upgrade. For instance batteries that are glued in unnecessarily, increasing the chance of destruction if you try to replace them. Or soldering in components that the user may want to upgrade later (like RAM and SSDs). For instance on my ma...
* Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly.
* DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's inserting itself in the conversation.
Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.
> DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection
since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that)
Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack
Are you sure? Wouldn't it be a direct connection, just between two NAT gateways? With each using the ports to track which connection belonged to the host behind the NAT?
If the connection is already established, sure. How did you establish it though? There are ways to hook clients up that are both NAT’d, (STUN, etc) but DCC doesn’t use any of them.
I'll admit I haven't been on IRC in 20 years, but while I remember fiddling with active/passive FTP settings and port forwarding every week at the very least, I do not remember any times where I had similar issues on IRC (using mIRC and later various Linux IRC clients, mostly Xchat and BitchX) in the 1890's. I don't know how it would have worked though, thinking about it.
(and I think from the above description of my typical computer use at the time, it's quite obvious what I was doing, and how that would have given me plenty of opportunities to run into all sorts of (compatibility) issues)
When using DCC send in passive mode the sender listens on a local port (59 by default) and sends the receiver a CTCP message (an IRC protocol PRIVMSG message wrapped in \x01) containing their IP address in integer format and the port number. If the receiver accepts their client connects to the sender's open socket and the file is immediately dumped through the connection.
In theory there must be some scheme for forwarding the port through a firewall on the sender side, which might be setting the sending device as "DMZ". Or you can put the burden on the receiver by using active mode.
mIRC should really support UPnP by now but I don't think it does?
> Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.
It takes a lot of heat because it is very customisable and get locked down in large corporation.
I worked in company that ran an old shitty very version on underpowered server and disabled feature like rich text editing but force you through a 5 page wizard with in total tens of mandatory field to fill for any jira ticket. People at that company used an excel file on a shared drive to escape the jira hell.
Also there is the crowd of Agile purist that complain that Jira is too bloated for agile and ignoring the extra feature is not good enough because mostly "trust issues".
More recently there are stuff like plandek that create metric on your jira usage. In the wrong hands, this is modern day LOC metric.
Agree 100%. Almost every Jira complaint I see is a byproduct of the way our company centrally manages and locks it down. Things like custom fields and workflows require submitting a ticket and waiting a few weeks. That said, it can still be customized and made to work well for most internal teams.
You could have a point with Slack but Jira is really terrible. I used it for a customer years ago and I'm so happy any other customer is using something simpler. Jira could be OK if operated by a specialized team paid to do project management and to shield developers from the complications of the tool. It's not only the design, it's the sheer amount of functionality. We don't need all of that.
I'd go with Github simplistic issues all the time instead of wresting with Jira. YouTrack from JetBrains is a reasonable compromise. Redmine is also ok.
Every single one of my clients uses Jira, and nobody I've ever met had a problem with it. It works, it's flexible, it's pretty easy to use. It's the industry standard, and for good reason, as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Confluence is OKish. But Jira is absurdly bad. I'm talking about the UI for creating Issues and Epics etc. The front-end devs that wrote it simply didn't have the ability. The parser for entering markup such as preformatted code blocks just doesn't work a lot of the time. The newer "Visual mode" just doesn't work a lot of the time. It simply needs to switch over to markdown and use a 3rd-party parser and renderer. The Visual Mode preview doesn't render using a fixed-width font. have you ever clicked on the little "Link" symbol in the top right of the text entry box? Obviously that should copy the current URL to the system clipboard. But they didn't know how to look that up on StackOverflow and instead made it a normal link to the current page (so you reload the page accidentally), with the link title saying
> title="Right click and copy link for a permanent link to this comment."
! You enter `bq.` to quote a line of text. This is all just some crap that someone with no design sense or standards came up with after 10 seconds thought.
I'm talking specifically about the quality of the UI. It is far, far, below the quality of UIs put out by respected modern products.
Not that it really matters much, but a lot of the design issues you're highlighting are due to the age of the software and Atlassian's seeming commitment to not breaking backward compatibility. In particular, Jira predates Markdown, so the software adopted the text formatter of the day, which was textile[0]. This is where the `bq.` syntax comes from. Jira didn't invent it from whole cloth -- it was adopted because that was the standard of the day. Likewise, it predates StackOverflow by a good 7 years. Some of the JavaScript used is old enough to be a college freshman.
As and end user, you may not (and probably should not) care about the historical context of its design decisions. But it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers. They've simply placed a large premium on backward compatibility and are still around today in large part because of that. Having said that, they really should find a way to support both Textile and Markdown if for no other reason than Bitbucket uses Markdown and it's confusing as hell having to switch between the two syntaxes if your company uses both products.
Backwards-compatible with people's brains is one aspect of it, sure. No one likes a constantly evolving UI that shuffles things around. But, also backwards-compatible with already entered issues. I wholeheartedly agree they should support Markdown, but I don't think they can just dump Textile in the process either, since it'd affect a load of already entered issues.
As for the link issue, I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. I have an icon that looks like the Android "share" icon and that drops down a dialog with a link to the current page and a target user field. The link icon in the text entry field just adds a textile formatted link. I'm probably just overlooking something, but I'm not seeing what you described. And I never use the visual editor, so I can't speak to its quality.
I should note that I don't work for Atlassian and never have, so I don't have a horse in this race. But I have been using Jira since maybe 2004 due to its early adoption by the Apache Software Foundation. Jira is hardly perfect, but it's the least bad issue tracker I've used. At some level, I'm sure it's just a matter of preference. E.g., I know plenty of people that laud the GitHub issue tracker and I don't get it. It works well enough for small projects, but is too limiting for any project of non-trivial size, IMHO. I also find more than 2 or 3 labels in the issue list to just be a distracting sea of colors.
I hope you're able to find something that works well for you. I'll add that if you're using an on-premise version of Jira in your company, there's a high likelihood that you're running a dated release. I've found that some of the more aggravating issues people run into have actually been fixed, but not deployed in their environment. If you can find access to a running instance of the latest version, you might find it to be a more less frustrating experience.
I've never heard anyone call Jira the industry standard. There's way too much fragmentation in that market for anyone to be able to make that claim.
Jira can work well or it can work very poorly. It really depends on what you're trying to do with it and what resources you're willing to pour into it. That's why some people love it while others hate it.
It looks like the industry standard from where I'm sitting. Of all the companies I've worked for in the past 15 years, both as employee and as freelancer, I think only 2 didn't use Jira. 3 if I count my private projects (I used Pivotal).
In all that time, the only thing I've really heard people complain about, was when it was slow or down.
> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software.
You need to explain a claim like that.
On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?
The fact that the performance of the application is awful. You would think that a $16B company could move away from Electron and make native applications for their platforms.
>On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients.
It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully".
But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user.
The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances.
On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste.
On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.
I use Slack every day in the Desktop Electron app and the iOS app.
Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive.
OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a different window.
You use ⌘-k to switch channels. Partially drafted messages are retained. I think I prefer that to a mess of windows that I'd have to manage though of course I don't mean to impose my preference on you.
I have the desktop client open and it's using about 800MB memory between the main process and 3 helper processes. I agree it's a lot, but it seems 100% standard for modern applications. Everything seems to be built around the assumption that people have a $2000 laptop like rich westerners might. So I don't agree with it but I wouldn't single out Slack for criticism beyond any other modern consumer tech company.
Just my two cents, but I have to kill and restart the Slack app every morning because if left alone too long it starts eating 100+% of CPU and then becomes unresponsive (while still pegging the CPU). No other vanilla Electron app I've used does that.
It wasn't claimed to be "beautiful", it was that it "works beautifully". And if it's not accessible, for a serious amount of people, it doesn't work. At all.
Maybe people are generally jaded to to the slowness of cross-platform Javascript apps, but if you take a step back you can really see how bad it is.
I had people at my last job who had to quit Slack because of how hot it was making their laptops, and how much memory it was using.
At my current job, Slack is definitely one of my most rate limiting applications for how quickly I can get things done. Scrolling in chat, searching, switching channels- these are all actions that are extremely slow, and sometimes seem like they don’t work at all.
Ye. It's silly how single page text search is now a hard problem to get done right with JS text edit fields.
It's the same thing with the Swarm review CI tool. If you diff a big enought file, but still quite small for a conputer, it get slow or crashes.
Also the same thing with MS Teams. The prior conversion are not loaded at startup and if you scroll it shows place holders instead of the text for some seconds.
If you think Slack works beautifully you probably do not care about the things I find offensive about it. Like the slowness of switching contexts or the fact that it can only have one conversation on screen at any given time (which in turn makes the slow switching painful).
And this is before we get into the fact that it devours RAM and uses more CPU than is reasonable, making it somewhat pathetic if you think of programming as a craft.
I think the whole argument of "unicorns exploiting legal grey areas" falls victim to Hanlon's razor. I don't really believe these companies set out to bend or break any laws, it was more a case of the legal system not catching up fast enough. Uber started as a service to hire limousines, not a platform company.
If governments weren't so concerned with party politics, infighting and staving off populist surges, we'd probably have a proper definition for a "gig economy" worker by now. A definition that would allow them to keep the flexibility that they appreciate so much, whilst still having proper worker protections for sick pay, holidays and all the rest.
It's strange that you explicitly brought up Uber and still hold this opinion. Out of all the companies, they have most aggressively skirted labour laws in every country they are in, and have been selectively banned from some countries and cities due to their continual breaking of the law. Not to mention lobbying efforts to minimise the effects of labour laws.
They didn't start as a company for the sole purpose of exploiting legal grey areas, but they certainly have consistently done so since their inception.
Is 16B really too high of a valuation when Atlassian is double the market cap at 32B? Both have similar products (collaboration/productivity) and are extremely sticky.
Atlassian has a wider suite of products. I would say HipChat is the Slack alternative. Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello. And Atlassian is more developer centric whereas Slack is monetizing enterprise users.
Actually hipchat was quite nice to use, fast and responsive for awhile, and I loved some of their built in emoticons. I think they didn't really maintain it and keep it up to date with the competition.
Atlassian products are more mission-critical. Most companies actually need some tool that does what Jira or Bitbucket does. They don't really need Slack.
I've worked at companies both with and without Slack. Something like Slack might be mission critical for a remote-first company, but comparing the two situations, I've actually noticed better communication without Slack than with it.
We use slack at the three companies I currently work on and it's mostly a distraction and a place to quickly share files. It's good for some shared notifications. My most active slack is one I have with friends.
I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long term viability. It’s just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a company once the old one gets too noisy.
Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before something shinier comes along.
Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded.
They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
Wouldn't the Slack bot integration provide a better moat. If they can get orgs using a lot of bots for CI reporting, etc switching gets more difficult at least. Not sure how many teams get that tightly integrated with bots though.
Building the integrations is easy, if all the integration is is a notification. I've got half a dozen custom slack integrations that i've written for my team, it's no more than a day of work sunk in so far, including the infrastructure in our product to figure out who, what and when to notify.
If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.
- deal with APIs of the many platforms that are being integrated
- maintenance and SLAs
I honestly doubt you can create half a dozen good integrations that require more than just notifications in a channel (for example, PagerDuty notifications and the like).
I don't really know I've been at the same company for a while and we've only used Skype for Business and before that Sametime for our chat infrastructure. I've seen a couple articles written about making them but not sure how many people actually use similar bots with the ability to kick things off or change things.
They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark.
There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.
I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
Why do you make it sound like some shady back-door deal? Our grey-beard entirely Linux using ops staff would drop Slack for MS teams at the drop of a hat to get that money back in the budget. You can only waste so much money when the entire office demands Office.
Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will always come out cheaper than Office + $other_thing.
Can confirm. Desktop Linux-using ops staff here, we're moving from dropbox to onedrive in the next ~month, and I'd switch from Slack to Teams if it didn't suffer from the same problem all MS IM products (UWP/Chromium Skype- & Lync-based alike) seem to face: intermittent failures to push notifications.
We route alerts through IM primarily, and are remote-first. I get that some folks here complain about their inability to ignore chat notifications, but there's a decent chunk of us that need to find our uninterrupted time where we can, not when we want.
> Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive.
A few weeks ago the startup I work for started using NextCloud as a stop-gap till we get O365 and OneDrive. It is ridiculously simple for us at-least to just copy over our entire Dropbox folder to the NextCloud one.
I hear that. I wish I could deploy Nextcloud at my company. We have plenty of resources and storage. Not paying per user per month would be so so so nice.
My company is already paying for Teams as part of our O365 Installation. We won't use it, simply because of the network effect the Shared Channels have created.
We have shared channels with Integration Partners, Suppliers, Enterprise Customers... These are extremely valuable ways of communication once setup, especially with simple file-transfer thrown in, etc.
Leaving Slack would mean slamming the door in the face of these entities, something we're simply not ready to do for the cost-savings that ditching Slack would mean.
If that's what's best for your company, great. For others, competing against MS Teams means that they will face an uphill battle on the sales side - to put it mildly. In terms of the cost savings aspect once MS reaches feature parity-ish, there will be significant pressure on the CIO to consider a migration away from Slack. Both of these pressures raise valid questions about the valuation and future of Slack.
I don’t know a single enterprise client that enables external Slack users. People are far too careless with what they share in IM (like private SSH keys and IP addresses), and Slack history is a juicy target for hackers diving for secrets.
Enterprise users usually just use it for internal messaging.
Microsoft isn’t Oracle. They put Teams in the bundle and slowly break whatever they are replacing. In this case Skype.
If you’re big enough for Microsoft to care about you, you already have embedded SEs compensated based on OneDrive and Teams adoption. Your IT middle management pushes teams.
Your CIO is getting the cyber pitch based in the insecurity of your O365 implementation. The fix is to buy Azure AD or the next bundle (EMS), or maybe the E5 O365/Windows subscription.
I'm not sure they'll be able to compete against a worse but integrated solution like MS teams long term. No doubt it's worse but the bundle is cheaper with when you're already paying for Windows and Office. Same story with G Suite.
MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.
I use Teams in a very large org. Sometimes, the lack of integration and capability is a benefit. People don’t message me unless they actually need something.
I have _never_ used teams. I have seen it creep up in enterprise focused orgs but I have still never used it.
As a remote worker Slack is my office, essentially, and I think it's done an amazing job at being an office for remote first companies. I can't speak for Teams.
Agree - there was a lot of talk about Slack in our org, until everyone realised we had Teams already as part of O365 and it delivers on most of the use cases you set up from Day One.
It's actually pretty good for managing discreet work streams, and even for organising personal work (kind of against the "Team" ethos, but having a channel for myself keeps my work visible and tabs keep important things to hand easily).
My very-large project switched chat apps in one weekend (backed by a few weeks of prep by IT team). We had JIRA integration on day one, and one or two missing things within a week. It wasn't that big a deal.
I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.
The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough” and it’s already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft’s other options.
Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.
It is currently abhorrent. They do appear to be updating regularly, but so much of the UX should have been fixed at the beginning.
- Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile.
- UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information
- teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there
- this means nobody uses teams but chats, which are only recently pinnable (!?!?)
- the pages, plugins and sharepoint files is great, but too restrictive.
Compared to Slack or Zulip, it is still very behind. However, once our 70k organisation moved to office 365 and started using teams, we sheepled and didn't want the team to use a fragmented tool and bit the bullet. So yeah. Watch out for teams.
Yeah, we use teams and have had none of those issues. In fact, I'd say it is better than Slack now, which is what we used before switching to Teams last fall. Plus Teams is in the whole Microsoft enterprise bundle already. Slack's biggest challenge will be Teams. Or their enterprise market share will boil down to, enterprises not using Microsoft, .. so Google...
One little detail: the MS offering should work adequately.
If Lync (Skype for Business) is any indication, building well-working enterprise messaging is hard. Unless cost-cutting is your central concern, you want your internal communication to use the best, least-friction tools. Here Slack has quite an advantage.
Yes, I know, but it seems most of the value Microsoft Teams provide is in its video conferencing capabilities. Why is Slack said to be competing with one and not the other?
You think enterprise companies switch a product they’re already using with all the integrations to another (possibly inferior) product just because of price? That’s not usually been my experience
That’s the definition of Enterprise Software - the buyer is not the user. They are already paying for Office. Why pay extra for Slack? You really don’t want to go head to head with Microsoft’s Enterprise sells.
> The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets “good enough”
Also, Google Chat. AFAIK it's free if your company is already using the work version of Gmail, though don't quote me on that. It's out now, and does the job well enough.
My current employer went with Google Chat, I think mainly due to the cost difference with 10k+ employees.
I've never worked anywhere where Salesforce was available outside of select teams. In fact, last time I had access to it I kept finding my access had been 'lent' to another user because the per seat license was so expensive.
Slacks biggest paying customers are enterprises using it for internal chat. Not very sticky overall since enterprise customers are used to vendors constantly raising prices.
Messaging apps are cyclical. I remember icq! Slack should become part of Google.. that would help Google widen its user base and perhaps a robust video conferencing system can piggy back on top of it.
Companies switched to slack because hipchat didn't work very well. Slack works pretty well. It would be much harder for there to be internal political motivation to change unless someone does something significantly better which I cannot imagine.
The product is compelling enough that Microsoft is trying to position their clone as the lynchpin of everything in O365 that isn’t mail.
It’s a platform that is attractive to all sorts of players. Apple has a huge enterprise business that they completely ignore. Google, Cisco, other enterprise plays are easily imaginable.
While messaging apps have tended to be cyclical, I'd argue Slack has become much more than a simple messaging app at many large companies with their integrations and bots, and they are intrinsic to many teams' workflows (e.g. "ChatOps" is a real thing).
I see Slack as more akin to something like Excel, where people who really depend on it (in a way much more than person-to-person chat) go beserk if it's taken away.
Basically M$ is pushing hard to switch off Skype For Business (SFB) in favor of Teams, especially when still on-premise.
The new features are being developed only for Microsoft Teams and the user base is a click away from a decent Slackish app.
Another killer feature of Teams (inherited from Lync and SFB) is the trunking possibility with a legacy SIP PBX (so called Microsoft Team Direct Routing, or some form of similar creative name from Redmond market intelligence).
So, I think that the future of Slack is probably the same as the future of Spotify, both like the article says incidentally direct-listed at the NYSE (and not via a formal IPO).
Both will have a trusted user base, a better interface, but motivated tech giants competing into the same market.
Slack isn't a consumer company, they are an SaaS enterprise company. Most SaaS enterprise companies trade at far lower multiples.
A decent comp for Slack would be Dropbox, which has $1.4B and rough valuation of ~$10B
It is overvalued, but then so are a lot of tech companies. I think Slack is a good app, one of the tech startups of true value from this boom cycle, but it’s overvalued. When the likely market adjustment happens, it’ll get a haircut, but it will deservedly survive and prosper.
Even if we ignore the time value of money, Slack needs to quadruple its revenue and turn it all into profit to justify a 16B valuation. I can see it happening since so much is being integrated into it from 3rd parties, but it's a very tall order.
Solid revenue and solid growth. I was not saying Slack has no monetization, but getting from 400M to 16B is 40X growth. To expand that quickly would require monetizing your existing users most of whom use the free tier. How does Slack really plan to do that?
I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but Slack could already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
And how many of the free users are the same people? I am active on 7 or 8 slacks (all free) with at least 5 or 6 different emails. Sure they can easily link my from my device, but do they when they can inflate numbers?
The thing that drives me nuts is the pricing model. Why don't they just let users pay for themselves? Then I could be paid on all of the slacks that I use for $10/mo or whatever they charge.
It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B for that is a complete insanity.
This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era
At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales
Very zen, worth rethinking the value of this statement too.
Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you better get to the real quality differences.
Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you start conversations about the depth of a thing instead of emotional discussions defending your positions.
Anyone could build Facebook, the value is the existing userbase. I would think that slack would be one of the easiest tools to replace because its only used within organisations so you can get everyone to switch at once.
The entire slack userbase could vaporise within weeks if slack made a wrong move. Slack doesn't really bring anything special to the table.
I agree, but in a less disparaging manner. I'd say rather, the barrier to entry is super low, many competitors exist, and some arguably better. I don't feel they have runaway velocity like say, FB achieved early on when in a similar boat.
Dropbox took on a problem users have (how can I sync my files between multiple computers?) and provided a great solution to it.
Slack takes a problem users have ("my coworkers keep bugging me with stupid questions") and makes the problem worse, because now your coworkers can see that you're online and demand instant answer :)
Slack is also very popular with open source and hobbyist communities. People often seem to assume that it's used only at work, which I guess makes some amount of sense given that the vast majority of paying customers are probably workplaces. Slack would already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
Slack made 140m in the first quarter of this year, their valuation is based on how fast they've grown their business and how fast it continues to grow. They don't sell ads, they sell seats, they're a SAAS company. 16B is not insane for a company that has grown revenue at their pace and continues to grow revenue.
My company is in the middle of switching from Slack to Microsoft teams. The water cooler talk is that we're paying Slack $1000-$2500 per year per user.
It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.
I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.
Both my current company and the one prior to that did the same switch.
We all preferred Slack but the cost was just ridiculous and no one could justify it. Teams came for 'free' with all the other Microsoft stuff we were already paying a licence for.
When i moved companies, i went from Slack to Teams also. Dont notice the difference really. Our company did it because of the same reason they use outlook.
We started using slack just for our dev/eng teams at work, and the interest grew to some of our customer side teams and non-technical teams, but management have been reluctant to expand Slacks licensing. Then we realized Teams is included with our MS licenses, so now we're giving the non-dev/eng side of the company that. It's only a matter of time before someone with a little sway asks "Why are we paying for this when we have Teams?" the murmurs have already begun, it just has to hit the right ears, so the days are numbered.
Well they work out their own deals per business. Their standard rate is 180$/user/year (without pay-up-front discounts) but that doesn't include SSO or terabyte storage per user. I'd be curious to know what add-ons a corp might stretch the budget for, I can't find details for what they charge for SLA
Why/how is your org paying that much per user? I was under the impression that Slack topped out at well below that figure even for all the enterprise bells and whistles. I assume there are additional services/features that I’m not aware of? On-premise or dedicated hardware? Special data location requirements?
I wish them all the best. But I do hope they stay small in spirit and nimble.
One of my favourite things about slack is /feedback and the fact that someone will get back to me within 24hrs. There is no product of this scale that has such a low barrier to feedback/questions/bug report.
Except in my experience they don't actually fix the bugs. For literally years the Slack app would get into a zombie state if your network changed in any way: switched WAPs, got on/off the VPN, switch from wifi to ethernet, etc. The app would still think it had a network connection but it actually didn't. The only way to fix it was with a hard refresh. To this day I still reflexively do a ctrl-r whenever my network changes. Because after reporting this bug to them over and over and over I got fed up and just moved on. I honestly have no idea if the bug has actually been fixed, ctrl-r has just become complete muscle memory for me now.
Interesting, I'm on MacOS and in a similar environment (switching vlans etc.) and the socket just reconnects fine both on the web version and the 'app'.
It’s possibly fixed now. I first encountered this in 2016. Many coworkers complained of it and Slack always acknowledged it was an issue they were looking into whenever I reported it.
Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free.
I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert have already been converted. I expect CAC to go up and payer conversion to stagnate at best. I don't see how they can 2-3x their revenue this year (unless there are drastic, risky changes).
In addition, the slow iterations on the mobile and desktop clients, and the meteoric rise of Discord are enough cause for concern. I don't see how this investment would have legs.
How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on?
I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.
For my purposes, voice chat is not a useful feature. I want our team's communications to be in text form so that we can communicate asynchronously, people don't have to be online at the same time and it's easy to read back through what has been said previously. I'm communicating with people all around the world, a very different use case to a team all working in the same office or time zone.
This isn't the whole story. Discord also mines user data and sells it to advertisers:
"Information You Provide: We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature."
"Data We Collect Automatically: When you interact with us through the Services, we receive and store certain information such as an IP address, device ID, and your activities within the Services. We may store such information or such information may be included in databases owned and maintained by affiliates, agents or service providers. The Services may use such information and pool it with other information to track, for example, the total number of visitors to our Site, the number of messages users have sent, as well as the sites which refer visitors to Discord."
"If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Discord Service, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance."
I say this as an avid user of Discord, which I use on a daily - dare I say hourly - basis. I'm perfectly fine with them collecting data on my gaming habits and the harmless stuff I talk about with friends. I don't think I would be okay with running a business through them, especially one in a similar vertical.
> How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community.
At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack.
It's not particularly tailored, but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business.
The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every day at NuCypher.
Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
> I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional.
I don't even know if I know what that means in 2019. As far as appearance, Discord is much more fun. Is that what you mean?
Slack doesn't seem particularly professional to me.
> Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?
It's not as disastrous as this person makes it seem. It's a rest call you can use to have slackbot do or say whatever you want for integration purposes. You can customize the name of the bot as well as its icon, which would allow you to "impersonate" someone.
The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration.
And since we're talking about Slack's use in business, if someone does that you fire them. It might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
> t might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
But these two are not mutually exclusive. Many business use cases eventually require a public community chat, and Slack is a dead-end for them. Discord on the other hand has served us well.
Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels.
But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples:
I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows.
FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).
For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable.
Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.
It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room.
Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...
TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines.
The historical context of discord, is that every gaming group would have some sort of chat app (mainly IRC, more recently hipchat, yammer, slack) as well as a push-to-talk voice app (ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, ...). Discord is merely combining the best of both (slack, and all its api support, with built in voice channels).
Nobody has to use voice. In many communities, most don't. But as the above said, it's a super frictionless way to talk if needed and is a lot less formal than "starting a call/meeting". You just publicly hop into one of a dozen visible channels and anyone else can hop in with you to discuss an issue or just hang out mostly-not-talking.
And you still cannot leave a channel in Discord. You can mute, but that's not the same thing — it still clutters your sidebar, and still downloads contents from it.
Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot messages you get over time.
Discord bots are out of control. They remind me of the days of IRC and eggbot scripts and eggbot hosts: every channel went out and bought a cheap VPS or eggbot host to run their scrappy little bots. Except somehow worse and incredibly annoying.
I don't think Discord is ready, or even trying to be ready, for enterprise use. Not yet!
Obviously downloading contents from muted channels is not an issue. Also you can both mute and hide the channel which effectively leaves it. And obviously slack bots are just as powerful as discord's so it's just a matter of servers electing to add crazy bots or not. Everyone bitches about giphy... these are some real stretches if these are your actual complaints about enterprise readiness, rather than data/admin policies, account segregation, etc. Do you have a vested interest somewhere?
We switched from Slack to Discord in our community and I prefer it. It feels faster to me, the Slack app on a Mac got really slow after a while.
I wish Discord added Telegram style voice messages and it would be perfect.
To be totally honest I still think forums like phpbb where much better but they didn't really transitioned to the mobile world. I miss them.
I'm guessing the answer is "yes", but have you taken a look at their S-1 filing? There is tons of addressable market out there for them, and their paying cohorts (year-by-year) have been accelerating in next-expand ARR (page 68):
I do agree that product iteration has been slow. That's been a big problem for Slack, and it's my biggest speculation on their valuation. As someone who has seen inside the company (don't work there), their engineering teams have a ton of technical debt they've been making their way through and trying to set right.
My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the existing, extremely locked in, userbase.
It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.
I’m starting to see Slack show up in all sorts of places far beyond software development teams. Accounting firms, non profits, and even a home inspector I worked with... I can’t imagine they’re even close full market penetration.
No me neither, totally agree. Both are channels for growth. I just mean I see the expanding existing users channel dwarfing the acquiring new customers channel in terms of speed of growth. At this point I see it being significantly easier for them to 2x an average user's subscription through more services than 2x their entire userbase.
I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
This is why being able to aggregate multiple channels into a single window would be a huge win. Right now you have to flip between multiple "tabs" to find anything.
I'm biased because I like Slack, although I haven't tried Discord so I'm only comparing it with the usual competitors that are terrible, but it does feel very sticky to me. It's replaced email for my JIRA and Google Drive notifications, it's replaced Google Hangouts for most of my team chat and 1:1 video calls. And I'm not even using all the plugins many of my colleagues are using yet.
They really seem to have gotten a lot of Google Wave ideas to catch on and have even kept some IRC bits. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Congrats to the team on this massive valuation. Makes a lot more sense to me than Snapchat at $19B...
Another area it's very sticky is 'SlackOps' - i.e. putting your devops commands and notifications into Slack.
Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.
I wish you luck! This is a pretty smart wave to ride, I think. Having gone the DIY route setting up my own bots backed by lambdas etc, which was a fair amount of work, I will definitely say there's an obvious market opportunity here for an easy 'set up in a few clicks' solution that hooks into a bunch of the obvious services (CI, cloud, kubectl, etc).
> For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1]
My question is where the hell is that money going?
That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It’s the GDP of some minor lower/mid-economy nations’ cities. Their losses are equal to half the entire GDP of Palau.
Maybe I’m detached. But I don’t understand the cash flow in chat apps today. It’s absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and will easily be replaced in a few years, as always happens.
Why is it so bizzare? Do you think that Palau has enough people engaged in producing goods or services that deserve more than their current GDP?
I think comparing the valuations of a US company HQ'd in one of the most expensive cities in the world, that has created a tool that is used by nearly all organizations around the world for communication is well worth the crazy valuation.
I’m not talking about their supposed $16b value. I’m wondering where the money they’re actually spending is going.
They’ve lost nearly $150 million in a year. How? What does that money even go to? Even paying their devs incredibly generous wages and benefits, server costs, advertising, deals with businesses, etc, I can’t imagine the losses being that big. It’s insane amounts of money to burn through.
That doesn’t seem like that big of a number for a large corporation that Slack is now. Tesla had a net loss of 700mm[1] last quarter. Their business is more capital intensive for sure but still. Just looking at a 150mm net loss and saying it’s a big number doesn’t tell you much.
Since when has a company making poor over-priced decisions ever justified a better valuation? It's the complete opposite.
If Airbus decided to pay twice as much for planes would you say they should be valued higher?
While there is intangible benefits that come from deciding to setup shop in one of the most expensive cities on Earth I'm far from convinced a messenger app company couldn't thrive elsewhere.
What they offer is not unique nor difficult to create. Doubt they'll ever manage to pull in $1B a year to justify that price, the required business model for it would have their customers looking elsewhere overnight.
Overpaid executives. I worked for a darling in the security space that has not posted a profit ever in it's 7 years post-IPO (they could at this point, but choose not to). Yet the company paid the CEO, multiple years I was there, over $300M annually. The current CEO makes a "base" $128M and has incentives of over $400M dangling in front of him. Yet any time the company misses guidance do you know what they blame? Paying the "field" (sales and field engineering) too much in commission and stock grants. Yet if you roll up all executive and board grants on an annual basis you're north of a Billion (with a B) in pay. Yet... No analyst has the nerve to ask that question point blank on the earnings call.
Beyond executives and the board? Marketing. I'm now at a much smaller F round startup that blew $350k+ on the RSA conference and another $150k+ on expenses for said show. The return on that is miniscule.
Where does the money go? I feel like most startups I've been in have been very good at funneling the funds exactly where they want it. Profitable doesn't seem to be the goal anymore, but more of to sink as much cash into executive pockets as quickly as possible.
>No analyst has the nerve to ask that question point blank on the earnings call.
Ooooh, I need to Google to see if this has happened. Obviously investors and analysts would prefer to have those talks privately to avoid alienating anyone important, but it has to have happened sometime.
Their CEO is paid ~$10M (total comp) [0]. The other listed executives are paid much less. Even if they cut executive compensation to 0, they would still have massive losses.
Slack targets the same market that made Microsoft big: the corporate sector. For big companies, even recurring licensing costs for Slack are trivial, and it gives the managers of the bigger companies a feeling of importance to be able to negotiate big bulk discounts. In this corporate sector market, all you need to do to get rich is to be the established player, which Slack very much seems to become.
As for the easily being replaced part, Slack will just buy up any competitor while its small. Just like how Facebook did it with Instagram and Whatsapp. Facebook is deemed uncool by the younger generation but not Instagram and Whatsapp.
> Not a fan of Slack but they do have more than chat: voice and video, screen share, drawing on screen, shared control
Most of the features are a no-go in large enterprises and from what I've seen, enterprises will also choose better tools for some of that functionality (like zoom over slack video).
Is this another one of those companies whose S1 says "We're not profitable and may never be"?
Why is that the right time to go public? Once the company has an obligation to move towards profitability, doesn't that expose its investors to the risk of another startup subsidizing the same product or service with VC money, undercutting the new established brand?
Like if slack wants to become profitable they probably need to push more people to the paid version of the app, but then won't another company just make a clone and convert some VC cash into a runway with which to poach slack's userbase, and eventually file an S1 saying "we're not profitable and may never be"?
I'm struggling to understand why this keeps working, because no one seems to have a problem with it at all.
Well, you aren't wrong. But I think there are unicorns that are good investments, particularly cloudflare and juul. There are other unicorns I view as highly speculative but potentially viable. But slack? No way. Not at this valuation. If it ever makes this much money, let alone this much profit, I'll eat a hat.
Zoom works perfectly every single time. I've managed to make Slack's audio call feature work only rarely. I wish Slack had decent shared whiteboard, screenshare, and audio/video conferencing but that is a hard problem and they are currently not able to deliver. Zoom does flawlessly.
The thing that really struck me about Slack was its level of polish, esp compared to other software around the time of its release.
The overall level of polish on similar apps has risen since then so that’s less of a differentiator, but I still refer to Slack as a great example of polish and consistency in product, with mostly great UX as well
We tried HipChat for a whole day before bouncing. It was so bad. Had hilariously poor UX, using commands like \code to get a single line of monospaced text, iirc.
Weirdly enough, I had heard that HipChat used to scale better than Slack. Supposedly Uber used to use the former rather than the latter because once an org hit a certain threshold in thousands of users, Slack was no good. This was years ago, however.
Uber did use HipChat instead of Slack, but mostly because Slack was uninterested in standing up servers for Uber. My understanding is that Slack basically ran a single server instance for each Slack team.
Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional. It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone.
Uber eventually replaced it with a (forked) Mattermost cluster.
" It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone."
That was my hipchat experience a few months ago. Thankfully I don't have to use it anymore
It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got Twitter!), but Microsoft is investing in React Native for Windows which could prove really interesting. Hopefully Microsoft doesn't settle for just making Electron better.
Not really comparable, the web already has massive adoption, just needs to get better at high-performance client apps. And with WebAssembly + PWAs, and WebGPU in development, it's getting very close.
I would replace "the future" with saying that it's much more profitable for vendors and less convenient for users, so it's being adopted as fast as vendors can overcome users's resistance.
It is actually much more convenient for users. They can switch computers/phone/OSes and have the same experience. The same is not true with native apps.
I don’t want the same experience cross platforms. I don’t want the “Mac experience” when I am using Windows (see iTunes) or the “Windows experience” when I am using a Mac (old versions of Office).
No, what you want is the same experience. Which is what the web gives you. What you are describing is native apps trying to replicate the same experience and failing because they are native.
Edit: Native apps require more maintenance which adds to the delta in experience. If a single app is created (web) there is no delta.
It's more convenient for some applications, but it's not the case yet for many applications. Evolution of browsers will probably favour web platform for everything except the more close-to-the-metal ones.
Yup, you used a web app to post your comment. Apple dropped Flash for native web HTML5. Is the future really to develop an app that can only run in 4 places (Windows, mac, ios, and android) dominated by three major companies?
I think from an app developer's perspective, web-based apps are definitely the way to go. That's because it's so incredibly difficult to build a good web, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android app. I'm hopeful that one day making good native apps will be as easy and accessible as web development.
It’s significantly easier to build a good native app than a good web app.
However, it’s significantly harder to build several native apps for each OS/platform with the same level of polish and functionality than a single web app that will work on all of them.
Do Microsoft and Apple really want native apps? I've got the opposite impression: they've tried very hard to herd desktop apps into Apple Store model. Third party vendors, like Adobe, are also forcing clients to adopt subscription schemes.
Those are still native apps. I believe parent is comparing to bloated Electron crap that requires an entire Chromium instance to put a GUI on what is basically IRC and text editors.
Sorry I wasn't clear. The underlying problem is piracy. Big players like Adobe can still use the subscription model. For most vendors, the easiest choice is going the web route.
Deployment is another PITA that makes App Store model desirable for the vendors. For Apple and Microsoft it's even better because they get a cut, they curate their platforms and have the upper hand over vendors lest they become competition.
I don't even think they need to make a native app; I use plenty of Electron apps day to day, like VSCode, Atom, GitHub Desktop and they're all fine.
Slack however is borderline unusable. Ghost processes, background workspaces silently closing and not delivering notifications, processes pinned at 100% CPU, silent crashes, pauses while typing, and even sometimes character drops.
I've tried it on three laptops from two vendors all with 16gb of memory, 100% SSD and an i7.
I've got Mac user friends that tell me they've never had any of the above issues, and I believe them. I've used it on a Mac, though not as a daily driver, and it's fine.
It just feels to me like Windows is a second tier platform for Slack, where they're fixing the bare minimum to not lose market share.
The pain of forking development into multiple separate teams with completely different technology stacks, bugs, and coordination overhead is just not worth it for most startups. It slows you down when you need to be able to adapt quickly. A lot of unicorns in the past would have addressed this by simply focusing on one platform initially but for an application like this that is not feasible. Even Linux support is not optional for a company like Slack since a lot of the decision makers on stuff like this tend to be in the IT department which in many companies would include at least a few Linux users. By going all in on Electron, they ensured access to all relevant platforms from day one.
The reality is, that most of their user base is completely fine with performance as is, which I agree is not ideal. But it's good enough. My guess is that they will gradually fix issues by benefitting from Electron improvements, swapping out bits of js for more efficient WASM based stuff, etc.
Mostly native app strategies are an extremely bad idea for small start ups these days. You triple the cost (or worse) of your development and inevitably you are going to do better on some platforms than others. I know people obsess about native on platforms like IOS but I find it interesting that there are quite a few unicorns out there succeeding with glorified electron/react native code bases. Slack is basically shipping a web app packaged up as an electron app on Android, IOS, Mac, Windows, and Linux. You can run the thing in a browser pretty much without loss of functionality.
I just explained you how not doing that was crucial to their growth strategy. Not having to coordinate bugs, features, and releases across multiple teams with different tech stacks is really nice when you are trying to outpace your competitors. Most of these follow a similar strategy. Pure native chat apps are not that common anymore.
They will be “successful” once they become profitable. Until then, they still haven’t proven that they have a business model where they can charge customers enough to cover expenses.
They could be profitable tomorrow by decreasing their advertising spend. Their current customers are absolutely profitable, they're just choosing to use some of that money investors are throwing at them to keep growing.
> Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it's hard for people to understand why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying it for themselves.
It isn't.
I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people, but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their business is hoarding users to the point that it's the "default" app in their given context.
I'm not saying it's bad. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it anyway.
Eh, maybe I'm in the minority here, but I've been forced to work on MS teams for a project and it's atrocious compared to Slack. Not to mention the lack of a client for linux, their web app doesn't work in chromium for no reason (it does in chrome), and the UX is just shit.
Slack just works and their UI/UX is on point, everything is intuitive. Their client is slow and eats RAM, but I totally see that it's more useful than other chat applications.
MS Teams works well enought for me at work. All I want is having a chat window with the old messages on top to be able to send copy pasted variable names and chat abit.
Skype for Business doesn't save the conversation and is useless (it mails it to you ...), for example.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 484 ms ] threadEDIT: I do not imply that venture capitalists poses some insider knowledge. It is not necessary. It's just the fact that when bullshit companies with bullshit product, that generate losses instead of profit get valued at $16B (other recent examples include Lyft and Uber) it means that economy is in crazy state, and it does not take much to induce panic. My guess is one of these unicorns will fill for bankruptcy soon, thus pushing the market over the edge.
Yet, I have no real evidence that points me to its truth. The thinking seems to be predicated on VCs having inside knowledge or excellent speculative skills. That might be true, but presumably they're not the only strong speculators.
Are we seeing other major players move out of tech? We're certainly not seeing massive liquidation in general.
It does, however indicate that the VCs think that the company in question has peaked.
Unless the argument could be made that somehow, going public is going to really boost Slack's business going forward and was the only way to do so.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90289512/exclusive-wework-to-reb...
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100683/000089161800...
Pets.com paid $10.5M for pet food then sold it for $8.7M, while needing $23M to keep the lights on that quarter.
Compare to https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/ :
Slack, unsurprisingly because it sells software, has positive gross margins rather than negative gross margins; they're healthy at ~80%. They appear to be able to turn $1 of sales and marketing spend in Year 1 into > $1 of software revenue in year 2. Their churn rate on a dollar basis is 43%. Excuse me, -43%; a cohort of SaaS customers paying $100M in year 1 will pay $143M in year 2 due to growth in number of seats more than offsetting churning accounts.
There is no price at which a rational person should want to own Pets.com. There is, very clearly, a price at which a rational person should want to own Slack.
This price is not that.
Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed.
It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.
Choose your customers.
I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments).
But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.
If you're using it personally, the limits on message counts are made quite clear. Exceeding them makes export difficult or impossible without paying. So don't exceed them.
A huge chunk of Slack's value prop (after decent UX) is exactly the fact that they have all of your communications. No chat admins, servers to manage and back up, or networking hell to orchestrate non-text content sharing in a multiparty way. Also makes corporate folks who pay for it happy as they have pretty good auditability/retention controls--not perfect, of course, but better than a truly p2p/federated solution, and again: no infrastructure management needed.
You don't have to be happy with it, but those are features, not bugs, and are valuable to many.
You also just, y'know, don't have to use Slack. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. If the hill you want to die on is "I won't work for any company/team that uses this chat platform", well, that's your choice (hell, there's not even an argument to be made about ubiquity making it a false choice; Slack has plenty of competitors, both paid/hosted and FOSS/federated, in active use by big companies). But don't pretend that a lack of local history or easy export is some sort of highway robbery or hostage situation.
Are you just trying to be infuriating?
What are you talking about then? All of my communications are either personal or employment related, almost by definition.
I mean they are already giving you the oppportunity to use a limited version for free, you can't expect them to give you one of the most useful features imho when you are just using their resources and infrastructure in exchange for nothing; it doesn't make any business sense.
If I'm a non-paying user of Slack (or whatever other SaaS with a free tier) I am not entitled to anything whatsoever, I'd be grateful for the fact that they allow me partial functionality at all.
Personally, I would just call that normal / decent behaviour. Alone, it doesn't mean you deserve a ridiculous billion dollar evaluation
"Well deserved" describes the outcome.
So you might say the outcome is well deserved only if decent behavior comprised the process.
As others have said, this 'Standard Export' doesn't include direct messages and private channels, so there's still some amount of 'hostage taking'
I agree. There is no law against half-assed, bloated Electron based desktop software that can bring even recent hardware to its knees.
There are plenty of lightweight clients that use the Slack API. I don't see why people complain so hard that the official client is heavy.
Weechat with Slack is a dream feels like the good-ole IRC days.
I'm not a fan of how much RAM or CPU it uses. I tried the desktop app hoping it would be better, but it seems like it's perhaps worse (I use Firefox, so
Because on Android at least the website detects that you're on a mobile device and switches to read-only mode. Correct, you can't even post a reply without fudging user-agent or installing the app.
Ended deleting the desktop client.
Office/company slack, project A slack, project B slack, ... and in no time slack starts to use more RAM than docker/VMs I am developing on.
As I do every day.
Every single day.
For the one single channel I join. with no PMs and no threads, no file transfers, no voice or video anything.
Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if it was astonishingly good. But it isn't. It isn't even basically competent, it's terrible. Terrible at scrolling back, terrible at editing previous lines, appalling at completing names properly, bad at search, and completely lacking at customizing when it displays 2MB animated gifs inline.
I would expect a 4Gb machine would mean I never have to check on a text chat client. Apparently not.
They didn't even run ads for the first three years of their existence.
What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.
This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.
Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.
...while creating others: fragmentation and lock-in
I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable.
Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top.
If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.
Found the bug.
> there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards
It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols.
While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that governments can sometimes wake up and restore competition.
Perhaps in 50 years using open standards will be encouraged e.g. by providing a tax discount
I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.
I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.
My Dad _just_ upgraded from an iPhone 5. Do you think his Xs won’t last as long?
I agree the laptop situation is a bit shitty. I hate the USB-C everything on my work laptop. Everything works fine on my personal computer but as soon as I plug my usb hub into a usb c adaptor everything stutters.
Love their privacy stance though. Best in the business for sure.
Also, what’s abusive? And what’s fraudulent?
Apparently their new monitors are very well priced. And building the same machine you’d get in a MacBookPro or different model ends up being more expensive or similarly priced.
I could be wrong, and I am, certainly, an Apple fan, but I will criticize when I think it’s appropriate and don’t hold views concretely.
I'm mostly talking about their laptops and their iMacs. The USB C connectors are of course inconvenient, but I actually like them. Again, the problem is that in their pursuit of thinness they ended up designing keys that are very sensitive to dust (and not very nice to use). In subsequent models they kept at it, so the quality of keyboards doesn't seem to be a priority. Some laptops have a tendency to develop display problems due to bad design. For instance blowing hot air on parts that can't take hot air or laying out connectors so that they will fail more easily.
Now these are design flaws, which brings us to the "abusive and fraudulent" part. If you want to get these things fixed under warranty you _may_ be okay. Except the process appears to be entirely decided by chance. For instance they have put moisture indicators inside the macbooks that not only react to liquid damage, but which turn from white to red (indicating moisture) over time depending on the humidity in the air where you use it. (Most people don't know how these things work, so they'll accept it). So they'll accuse you of having spilled liquid in your laptop and refuse to fix it even when this is not the case. Accusing their customers of lying isn't a very good way to behave.
In many cases they will also claim that your laptop is in need to expensive component replacements. Either because they claim that the component cannot be repaired or when their service technicians fail to correctly diagnose the equipment. The repair costs quoted are supposed to make you buy a new computer rather than fix the one you have.
On top of that they have the gall to claim that independent repair shops are somehow less qualified than Apple. Which naturally rings true in the ears of most people; they designed it so they should be the best to fix it, right? However, this doesn't seem to be generally true. Especially since Apple and their authorized resellers appear to have very limited diagnostic and repair capability and the qualifications vary.
When you do send in an Apple device, you have to be aware of the fact that it isn't Apple that repairs your equipment - it is a subcontractor. And they are not always the best.
Wich brings us to the bullying. Apple do their best to kill the independent repair market any way they can. Often by filing lawsuits against repair shops and then putting them out of business. When confronted with this they us their go-to excuses. Like protecting the consumer from unqualified repair shops.
They do this by denying independent repair shops access to the supply line - meaning they work hard to make it difficult to obtain spare parts and components. Compare this to, for instance, Samsung, which sell parts online to make it easy for repair shops to get the needed parts. In order to get parts for Apple products there is an entire market for broken laptops that are bought and sold to repair shops in order to provide donor boards for components.
Of course, then there is the fact that they seem to deliberately make things harder to repair or upgrade. For instance batteries that are glued in unnecessarily, increasing the chance of destruction if you try to replace them. Or soldering in components that the user may want to upgrade later (like RAM and SSDs). For instance on my ma...
Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service?
Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers.
"Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it with Qt (old Qt). Cool huh?
* Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly.
* DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's inserting itself in the conversation.
Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.
since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that)
Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack
I'm more a Unix person that a network person so it's possible I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what it is. Thanks for replying.
(and I think from the above description of my typical computer use at the time, it's quite obvious what I was doing, and how that would have given me plenty of opportunities to run into all sorts of (compatibility) issues)
In theory there must be some scheme for forwarding the port through a firewall on the sender side, which might be setting the sending device as "DMZ". Or you can put the burden on the receiver by using active mode.
mIRC should really support UPnP by now but I don't think it does?
It takes a lot of heat because it is very customisable and get locked down in large corporation.
I worked in company that ran an old shitty very version on underpowered server and disabled feature like rich text editing but force you through a 5 page wizard with in total tens of mandatory field to fill for any jira ticket. People at that company used an excel file on a shared drive to escape the jira hell.
Also there is the crowd of Agile purist that complain that Jira is too bloated for agile and ignoring the extra feature is not good enough because mostly "trust issues".
More recently there are stuff like plandek that create metric on your jira usage. In the wrong hands, this is modern day LOC metric.
Herding exists, but at some point I suspect the fact that more working business use the one rather than the other would have some meaning.
That being said, the good thing about mIRC / Bugzilla is that no-one prevents you from using them for your business, so go for it !
People who complain about these products probably aren't in the position to use something else, or they probably would have switched already.
I use IRC all the time, and IRCCloud makes it comparable to Slack.
I'd go with Github simplistic issues all the time instead of wresting with Jira. YouTrack from JetBrains is a reasonable compromise. Redmine is also ok.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Confluence is OKish. But Jira is absurdly bad. I'm talking about the UI for creating Issues and Epics etc. The front-end devs that wrote it simply didn't have the ability. The parser for entering markup such as preformatted code blocks just doesn't work a lot of the time. The newer "Visual mode" just doesn't work a lot of the time. It simply needs to switch over to markdown and use a 3rd-party parser and renderer. The Visual Mode preview doesn't render using a fixed-width font. have you ever clicked on the little "Link" symbol in the top right of the text entry box? Obviously that should copy the current URL to the system clipboard. But they didn't know how to look that up on StackOverflow and instead made it a normal link to the current page (so you reload the page accidentally), with the link title saying
> title="Right click and copy link for a permanent link to this comment."
! You enter `bq.` to quote a line of text. This is all just some crap that someone with no design sense or standards came up with after 10 seconds thought.
I'm talking specifically about the quality of the UI. It is far, far, below the quality of UIs put out by respected modern products.
As and end user, you may not (and probably should not) care about the historical context of its design decisions. But it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers. They've simply placed a large premium on backward compatibility and are still around today in large part because of that. Having said that, they really should find a way to support both Textile and Markdown if for no other reason than Bitbucket uses Markdown and it's confusing as hell having to switch between the two syntaxes if your company uses both products.
[0] -- https://textile-lang.com/
bq. commitment to not breaking backward compatibility
Backward compatibility with what? People's brains? We're talking about markup language and rendering right, which is not an API consumed by machines.
bq. it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers.
So why is the new "Visual Mode" WYSIWYG text entry mode so terrible? And why that absurd "link" icon in the top right of the text entry widget?
As for the link issue, I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. I have an icon that looks like the Android "share" icon and that drops down a dialog with a link to the current page and a target user field. The link icon in the text entry field just adds a textile formatted link. I'm probably just overlooking something, but I'm not seeing what you described. And I never use the visual editor, so I can't speak to its quality.
I should note that I don't work for Atlassian and never have, so I don't have a horse in this race. But I have been using Jira since maybe 2004 due to its early adoption by the Apache Software Foundation. Jira is hardly perfect, but it's the least bad issue tracker I've used. At some level, I'm sure it's just a matter of preference. E.g., I know plenty of people that laud the GitHub issue tracker and I don't get it. It works well enough for small projects, but is too limiting for any project of non-trivial size, IMHO. I also find more than 2 or 3 labels in the issue list to just be a distracting sea of colors.
I hope you're able to find something that works well for you. I'll add that if you're using an on-premise version of Jira in your company, there's a high likelihood that you're running a dated release. I've found that some of the more aggravating issues people run into have actually been fixed, but not deployed in their environment. If you can find access to a running instance of the latest version, you might find it to be a more less frustrating experience.
Jira can work well or it can work very poorly. It really depends on what you're trying to do with it and what resources you're willing to pour into it. That's why some people love it while others hate it.
In all that time, the only thing I've really heard people complain about, was when it was slow or down.
You need to explain a claim like that.
On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?
It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully".
But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user.
The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances.
On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste.
On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.
Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive.
OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a different window.
You use ⌘-k to switch channels. Partially drafted messages are retained. I think I prefer that to a mess of windows that I'd have to manage though of course I don't mean to impose my preference on you.
I have the desktop client open and it's using about 800MB memory between the main process and 3 helper processes. I agree it's a lot, but it seems 100% standard for modern applications. Everything seems to be built around the assumption that people have a $2000 laptop like rich westerners might. So I don't agree with it but I wouldn't single out Slack for criticism beyond any other modern consumer tech company.
I had people at my last job who had to quit Slack because of how hot it was making their laptops, and how much memory it was using.
At my current job, Slack is definitely one of my most rate limiting applications for how quickly I can get things done. Scrolling in chat, searching, switching channels- these are all actions that are extremely slow, and sometimes seem like they don’t work at all.
It's the same thing with the Swarm review CI tool. If you diff a big enought file, but still quite small for a conputer, it get slow or crashes.
Also the same thing with MS Teams. The prior conversion are not loaded at startup and if you scroll it shows place holders instead of the text for some seconds.
Price/sales = 42, bubble stock ...
And this is before we get into the fact that it devours RAM and uses more CPU than is reasonable, making it somewhat pathetic if you think of programming as a craft.
Other electron based apps like Discord perform better so I'm not sure why Slack is so crappy.
If governments weren't so concerned with party politics, infighting and staving off populist surges, we'd probably have a proper definition for a "gig economy" worker by now. A definition that would allow them to keep the flexibility that they appreciate so much, whilst still having proper worker protections for sick pay, holidays and all the rest.
They didn't start as a company for the sole purpose of exploiting legal grey areas, but they certainly have consistently done so since their inception.
There’s a disclaimer these unicorns put in their S1s - “we are not profitable and may never be” - Atlassian probably didn’t have to do that.
That should count for something right?
"We may not be able to sustain our revenue growth rate or maintain profitability in the future."
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015...
> Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello.
And thank goodness for that, because those are awful as well.
Jira I've always hated... gawd. Just something about the way it does thing... so complicated. Hated that product.
BitBucket is what it is - almost never used the web interface.
Confluence is their other product... also not great and just a bit annoying to use for some reason.
You don't think it's Mission Critical?
Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before something shinier comes along.
They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
They were simply the first company to do hosted chat well enough that it didn't constantly piss people off. I wouldn't call that a sticky moat.
If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.
- deal with the target platform's API
- deal with APIs of the many platforms that are being integrated
- maintenance and SLAs
I honestly doubt you can create half a dozen good integrations that require more than just notifications in a channel (for example, PagerDuty notifications and the like).
There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.
well put - and - even more so: hosted business chat. all they have to do is keep on keeping on.
I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will always come out cheaper than Office + $other_thing.
We route alerts through IM primarily, and are remote-first. I get that some folks here complain about their inability to ignore chat notifications, but there's a decent chunk of us that need to find our uninterrupted time where we can, not when we want.
A few weeks ago the startup I work for started using NextCloud as a stop-gap till we get O365 and OneDrive. It is ridiculously simple for us at-least to just copy over our entire Dropbox folder to the NextCloud one.
We have shared channels with Integration Partners, Suppliers, Enterprise Customers... These are extremely valuable ways of communication once setup, especially with simple file-transfer thrown in, etc. Leaving Slack would mean slamming the door in the face of these entities, something we're simply not ready to do for the cost-savings that ditching Slack would mean.
Enterprise users usually just use it for internal messaging.
If you’re big enough for Microsoft to care about you, you already have embedded SEs compensated based on OneDrive and Teams adoption. Your IT middle management pushes teams.
Your CIO is getting the cyber pitch based in the insecurity of your O365 implementation. The fix is to buy Azure AD or the next bundle (EMS), or maybe the E5 O365/Windows subscription.
MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.
I think it is hard for cost conscious organizations with o365 to justify slack.
As a remote worker Slack is my office, essentially, and I think it's done an amazing job at being an office for remote first companies. I can't speak for Teams.
It's actually pretty good for managing discreet work streams, and even for organising personal work (kind of against the "Team" ethos, but having a channel for myself keeps my work visible and tabs keep important things to hand easily).
I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.
I think your company should start working on that problem ASAP.
Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.
- Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobody uses teams but chats, which are only recently pinnable (!?!?) - the pages, plugins and sharepoint files is great, but too restrictive.
Compared to Slack or Zulip, it is still very behind. However, once our 70k organisation moved to office 365 and started using teams, we sheepled and didn't want the team to use a fragmented tool and bit the bullet. So yeah. Watch out for teams.
I haven't moved to it yet because I require a chat application that works and allows people to contact me.
Teams has it's own issues, but messages getting delivered isn't one of them.
If Lync (Skype for Business) is any indication, building well-working enterprise messaging is hard. Unless cost-cutting is your central concern, you want your internal communication to use the best, least-friction tools. Here Slack has quite an advantage.
99% of value of Slack for our team is in the text-related features.
Seriously, Flow is good stuff.
Also, Google Chat. AFAIK it's free if your company is already using the work version of Gmail, though don't quote me on that. It's out now, and does the job well enough.
My current employer went with Google Chat, I think mainly due to the cost difference with 10k+ employees.
Or Salesforce Chatter. Enough companies handing Salesforce good money that adding this on makes sense.
The product is compelling enough that Microsoft is trying to position their clone as the lynchpin of everything in O365 that isn’t mail.
It’s a platform that is attractive to all sorts of players. Apple has a huge enterprise business that they completely ignore. Google, Cisco, other enterprise plays are easily imaginable.
I see Slack as more akin to something like Excel, where people who really depend on it (in a way much more than person-to-person chat) go beserk if it's taken away.
The thing that drives me nuts is the pricing model. Why don't they just let users pay for themselves? Then I could be paid on all of the slacks that I use for $10/mo or whatever they charge.
This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era
At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales
MySQL is a nicer alternative to managing really big CSV flat files on a filesystem.
Facebook is an RSS, address book, message share.
Etc.
>nothing is worth anything
Very zen, worth rethinking the value of this statement too.
Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you better get to the real quality differences.
Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you start conversations about the depth of a thing instead of emotional discussions defending your positions.
The entire slack userbase could vaporise within weeks if slack made a wrong move. Slack doesn't really bring anything special to the table.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Slack takes a problem users have ("my coworkers keep bugging me with stupid questions") and makes the problem worse, because now your coworkers can see that you're online and demand instant answer :)
It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.
I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.
We all preferred Slack but the cost was just ridiculous and no one could justify it. Teams came for 'free' with all the other Microsoft stuff we were already paying a licence for.
One of my favourite things about slack is /feedback and the fact that someone will get back to me within 24hrs. There is no product of this scale that has such a low barrier to feedback/questions/bug report.
I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert have already been converted. I expect CAC to go up and payer conversion to stagnate at best. I don't see how they can 2-3x their revenue this year (unless there are drastic, risky changes).
In addition, the slow iterations on the mobile and desktop clients, and the meteoric rise of Discord are enough cause for concern. I don't see how this investment would have legs.
I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.
Discord has better options for channel control.
Slack has better integrations with software development tools
https://discordapp.com/sell-your-game
"Information You Provide: We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature."
"Data We Collect Automatically: When you interact with us through the Services, we receive and store certain information such as an IP address, device ID, and your activities within the Services. We may store such information or such information may be included in databases owned and maintained by affiliates, agents or service providers. The Services may use such information and pool it with other information to track, for example, the total number of visitors to our Site, the number of messages users have sent, as well as the sites which refer visitors to Discord."
"If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Discord Service, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance."
From the Discorc Privacy Policy: https://discordapp.com/privacy
I say this as an avid user of Discord, which I use on a daily - dare I say hourly - basis. I'm perfectly fine with them collecting data on my gaming habits and the harmless stuff I talk about with friends. I don't think I would be okay with running a business through them, especially one in a similar vertical.
At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack.
It's not particularly tailored, but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business.
The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every day at NuCypher.
Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
> I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional.
I don't even know if I know what that means in 2019. As far as appearance, Discord is much more fun. Is that what you mean?
Slack doesn't seem particularly professional to me.
Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?
The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration.
It's not a problem.
> t might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
But these two are not mutually exclusive. Many business use cases eventually require a public community chat, and Slack is a dead-end for them. Discord on the other hand has served us well.
But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples:
- Can't change avatar based on server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600...
- Real account name shows up on profile even if you provide a different nickname to the server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S...
I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows.
FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).
Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.
Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...
TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines.
Wish you the best on your launch!
Nobody has to use voice. In many communities, most don't. But as the above said, it's a super frictionless way to talk if needed and is a lot less formal than "starting a call/meeting". You just publicly hop into one of a dozen visible channels and anyone else can hop in with you to discuss an issue or just hang out mostly-not-talking.
Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot messages you get over time.
Discord bots are out of control. They remind me of the days of IRC and eggbot scripts and eggbot hosts: every channel went out and bought a cheap VPS or eggbot host to run their scrappy little bots. Except somehow worse and incredibly annoying.
I don't think Discord is ready, or even trying to be ready, for enterprise use. Not yet!
People have been asking about if for awhile (a year plus) now.
https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/
I do agree that product iteration has been slow. That's been a big problem for Slack, and it's my biggest speculation on their valuation. As someone who has seen inside the company (don't work there), their engineering teams have a ton of technical debt they've been making their way through and trying to set right.
It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.
They really seem to have gotten a lot of Google Wave ideas to catch on and have even kept some IRC bits. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Congrats to the team on this massive valuation. Makes a lot more sense to me than Snapchat at $19B...
Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.
We waited for ever for threading to come to slack... and when it landed we were so disappointed.
> For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1]
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter-financ...
I don't understand valuations.
Doubling revenue without increasing losses is a great sign.
That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It’s the GDP of some minor lower/mid-economy nations’ cities. Their losses are equal to half the entire GDP of Palau.
Maybe I’m detached. But I don’t understand the cash flow in chat apps today. It’s absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and will easily be replaced in a few years, as always happens.
I think comparing the valuations of a US company HQ'd in one of the most expensive cities in the world, that has created a tool that is used by nearly all organizations around the world for communication is well worth the crazy valuation.
They’ve lost nearly $150 million in a year. How? What does that money even go to? Even paying their devs incredibly generous wages and benefits, server costs, advertising, deals with businesses, etc, I can’t imagine the losses being that big. It’s insane amounts of money to burn through.
[1] https://ir.tesla.com/node/19771/html#CONSOLIDATED_STATEMENTS...
If Airbus decided to pay twice as much for planes would you say they should be valued higher?
While there is intangible benefits that come from deciding to setup shop in one of the most expensive cities on Earth I'm far from convinced a messenger app company couldn't thrive elsewhere.
What they offer is not unique nor difficult to create. Doubt they'll ever manage to pull in $1B a year to justify that price, the required business model for it would have their customers looking elsewhere overnight.
Beyond executives and the board? Marketing. I'm now at a much smaller F round startup that blew $350k+ on the RSA conference and another $150k+ on expenses for said show. The return on that is miniscule.
Where does the money go? I feel like most startups I've been in have been very good at funneling the funds exactly where they want it. Profitable doesn't seem to be the goal anymore, but more of to sink as much cash into executive pockets as quickly as possible.
Musk was the highest paid (and that was incorrect, he was not paid that much - that was the max.)
Ooooh, I need to Google to see if this has happened. Obviously investors and analysts would prefer to have those talks privately to avoid alienating anyone important, but it has to have happened sometime.
[0] https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/#s5328ABFAF...
As for the easily being replaced part, Slack will just buy up any competitor while its small. Just like how Facebook did it with Instagram and Whatsapp. Facebook is deemed uncool by the younger generation but not Instagram and Whatsapp.
Most of the features are a no-go in large enterprises and from what I've seen, enterprises will also choose better tools for some of that functionality (like zoom over slack video).
S&M:
- Sales people aren't cheap
- Marketing tech isn't cheap
- Advertising isn't cheap (especially when your investors say "SPEND IT ALL AS FAST AS YOU CAN")
- Steaks/strippers with clients isn't cheap
These valuations just seem nuts.
Why is that the right time to go public? Once the company has an obligation to move towards profitability, doesn't that expose its investors to the risk of another startup subsidizing the same product or service with VC money, undercutting the new established brand?
Like if slack wants to become profitable they probably need to push more people to the paid version of the app, but then won't another company just make a clone and convert some VC cash into a runway with which to poach slack's userbase, and eventually file an S1 saying "we're not profitable and may never be"?
I'm struggling to understand why this keeps working, because no one seems to have a problem with it at all.
That's over 40x current revenue for a company that lost almost $400,000 a day last year.
The overall level of polish on similar apps has risen since then so that’s less of a differentiator, but I still refer to Slack as a great example of polish and consistency in product, with mostly great UX as well
Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional. It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone.
Uber eventually replaced it with a (forked) Mattermost cluster.
That was my hipchat experience a few months ago. Thankfully I don't have to use it anymore
Does resource consumption matters to me? yes, but that is because I compile stuff, run VMs, do simulations, like many other developers.
My grandma or dad at his office? they could do just fine with 1/10th of their resources.
This is not an argument for wastefulness, but the reality of business world and the value of computing resources.
"Rid Belly Fat NOW! Click Here!"
2019, celebrating the eleventh consecutive "This is the Year of Linux on the desktop"...
Edit: Native apps require more maintenance which adds to the delta in experience. If a single app is created (web) there is no delta.
However, it’s significantly harder to build several native apps for each OS/platform with the same level of polish and functionality than a single web app that will work on all of them.
Deployment is another PITA that makes App Store model desirable for the vendors. For Apple and Microsoft it's even better because they get a cut, they curate their platforms and have the upper hand over vendors lest they become competition.
Slack however is borderline unusable. Ghost processes, background workspaces silently closing and not delivering notifications, processes pinned at 100% CPU, silent crashes, pauses while typing, and even sometimes character drops.
I've tried it on three laptops from two vendors all with 16gb of memory, 100% SSD and an i7.
I've got Mac user friends that tell me they've never had any of the above issues, and I believe them. I've used it on a Mac, though not as a daily driver, and it's fine.
It just feels to me like Windows is a second tier platform for Slack, where they're fixing the bare minimum to not lose market share.
At least it’s not another Box spinning beachball.
The reality is, that most of their user base is completely fine with performance as is, which I agree is not ideal. But it's good enough. My guess is that they will gradually fix issues by benefitting from Electron improvements, swapping out bits of js for more efficient WASM based stuff, etc.
Mostly native app strategies are an extremely bad idea for small start ups these days. You triple the cost (or worse) of your development and inevitably you are going to do better on some platforms than others. I know people obsess about native on platforms like IOS but I find it interesting that there are quite a few unicorns out there succeeding with glorified electron/react native code bases. Slack is basically shipping a web app packaged up as an electron app on Android, IOS, Mac, Windows, and Linux. You can run the thing in a browser pretty much without loss of functionality.
I've worked for companies 1/2000th that with native binaries on all 5 big platforms (linux/win/osx/ios/android).
Even that seems like a lot to spend, and that is just the loss...
I wonder where the money goes.
Granted it is a big impressive product but still it would be interesting to track expenses for a company as they approach unicorn status.
Cost of Revenue: $51M
R&D: $157M
Sales & Marketing: $233M
General & Administrative: $112M
[Source: their S-1]
That was an amazing implementation of an application.
Would LOVE for someone to buy Screenhero back from Slack and bring it back to life. Truly a shame as it is.
It isn't.
I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people, but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their business is hoarding users to the point that it's the "default" app in their given context.
I'm not saying it's bad. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it anyway.
Slack just works and their UI/UX is on point, everything is intuitive. Their client is slow and eats RAM, but I totally see that it's more useful than other chat applications.
Skype for Business doesn't save the conversation and is useless (it mails it to you ...), for example.