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They'll just do what Anthropic does: let it Ralph Wiggum a pile of broken shit, and then say "wewwwww, doing pwogwamming is vewwy hawd, UwU >_<" when it won't build and fails at basic use cases that would be easy to test automatically
They almost have, you could wrangle group projects + group chats together pretty easily and you'd be close-ish. The claude cowork experience backed by google drive with the openai group projects and group chat would, imo, be a really awesome way to work!
> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success.

Not sure if the author has used Teams.

But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.

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There are already a ton of slack alternatives. Slack connect is the main thing that is blocking a lot of people from moving off slack, otherwise chat is a commodity.
I have used Slack Connect once in my 8 years of using slack. I agree it can be a moat, but that's not the case for everyone.

Slack doesn't have one "main thing" it's doing perfect. They have just all around great product, with some weaknesses here and there.

- Solid mobile app

- very good API with good SDKs

- easy to build very rich slack bots, with good building blocks

- Good notification management

- Workflows for non technical people that make automation easy

- Good level of customization

- Good enough performance

- Video/Audio calls are good enough

So when a company is questioning what tool to use Slack is an easy go-to. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" type of tool.

Can you live without it? yeah. But do you really wanna focus on what chat platform your company should be using or just focus on your product?

My personal experience with using Slack as just a in-company chat app has been fine. I enjoy using Slack more than Teams or Discord.

All their integrations kinda suck though, and its not uncommon for integrations to randomly break with no discernible changes elsewhere.

> I enjoy using Slack more than Teams or Discord.

Surely we can raise the bar for team chat out of hell....

Is it me or does the article mix characters with different fonts weights through the text?
just you. i use default substack font with some bolding
OT latent space podcast is great, most recently interview with jeff dean. Worth a listen
thank you for listening!! team works hard on it. Jeff was an absolute bucket list GOAT to have on the show and to launch the pod with the new Deep Think is just icing on the cake. Every 3-4 months people remember that Google (and Jeff) has low key been accumulating basically every advantage under the sun that all the other AI majors are struggling to pull together themselves.... and then constrained by bigcorp politics. it seems like they are figuring things out though.
I use Slack every day, and I love it. Integrations are simple and reliable, giving us useful information about critical things.

Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.

because there is a spare copy of Chrome jammed into the app bundle.
Slack's software quality has been in absolute freefall over the past couple of months.
Does anyone use Mattermost? I remember thinking it wasn't too bad, and I guess it's open source.
> Developers routinely complain about Slack’s API costs and permissions

What? What API costs is the op talking about?

Developers will always hate to ask the system owner for changes to permissions don’t think you can just fix that.

If the company has enough grc red tape, integrating with slack can become almost impossible I can imagine

Why not ask for a federated slack?
We use Slack at work, and everyone we work with uses Slack, and we all work together with Slack Connect. I suspect if we moved to a competitor that’s pretty much the main impact we’d see, and it wouldn’t be good unless everyone else work with moved too. I think that network effect is probably the only meaningful differentiation in that space.
You could also look at it as: in order for a Slack competitor to compete with Slack's network effects, the new program will need to offer an easy way to extend chat workspaces with external collaborators. It's not impossible, but it does make Slack's moat explicitly clear.
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Funny, didn’t even mention using the massive amount of compute available to them to build it!

A prompt ran through a Wiggum loop over the course of a week/month and viola

I for one would love this - if it’s done well - except that it would presumably be locked in to OpenAI agents
I'd rather it build docs. Or at least have a feature in chatgpt that lets you highlight something and start a comment thread, rather than a multi-page essay response as a continuation of the chat itself.
If AI is soo productive why do they even sell it and don't hoard it for themselves to build a competing offer to everything ?
What evidence is there that OpenAI will be more benevolent than Salesforce? Perhaps we shouldn’t give large corporations more opportunities for data mining.
> OpenAI spends time and money building a slack competitor, because they've apparently run out of good ideas

> Slack uses AI to improve the existing product

> Slack is still marginally better, so businesses continue paying for it

> OpenAI now on the hook for maintaining one of many cheap slack clones

> Investors are left scratching their heads...

Late stage bubble behavior

I hate Slack. Total information overload. I’d prefer a tool that encourages people to think more before hitting send.
One of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. A company with the premier LLM, asking companies to outsource the platform running all internal communications. What does OP think we are all doing here in business? This is the Ycombinator community edition of Rodney King's famous "Why can't we all just get along".
signal should just add better API / bot stuff and then we could all use that. there's no way OpenAI would be trustworthy for this; slack certainly isn't
The Signal protocol can’t support large groups of people.