[HN Gopher] Salesforce completes acquisition of Slack
___________________________________________________________________
Salesforce completes acquisition of Slack
Author : kalendos
Score : 239 points
Date : 2021-07-21 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slack.com)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| 2022: Salesforce announces Chat Cloud
| chupchap wrote:
| Will be rebranded to Messaging cloud in the Dreamforce after
| that
| spbaar wrote:
| 28b to get live message actually working
| weego wrote:
| I too am looking forward to migrating my Slack account to
| Salesforce CloudTeams(tm)(r) Beta account
| rubixdude wrote:
| I think you're joking, but let's be honest, that's exactly
| what's going to happen.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I saw Salesforce buy/eat Demandware. It's called Salesforce
| Commerce Cloud now. I bet something similar will happen to
| Slack.
| phponpcp wrote:
| I saw it too, and IMO the ecosystem is better than ever
| now. It took a few years of stagnation for SF to really dig
| their hooks in, but everything is nice and integrated now.
| Aboh33 wrote:
| Slackforce
| volkk wrote:
| and that is exactly when slack will die and something else
| will come in to take its place. an endless cycle
| codingdave wrote:
| Salesforce already has its Chatter service. It UX is one of the
| weak parts of Salesforce, but the integration with the rest of
| SF is really not bad. I could totally see Slack simply
| replacing Chatter, using those integrations, and improving
| Salesforce. It also opens up the entire Slack ecosystem for
| upsell into SF products.
|
| In other words, yes, I totally agree and think you are 100%
| correct.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Who needs Slack when you can use, as we do, Zulip?
|
| Yes, OK, I need to use Slack to participate in communities set-up
| by others.
|
| Thank you Kandra Labs and Dropbox: https://zulip.com/history/
| gentleman11 wrote:
| There is also Mattermost
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| Why every successful product has to be bloatware?
| rchaud wrote:
| Because it wouldn't be worth billions otherwise. Feature bloat
| is a key part of the "emperor's new clothes" strategy that
| 'simple' products like Dropbox are pursuing, now that they're
| public and are under pressure to show growth.
|
| That's how you get stuff like Dropbox Paper.
| APock wrote:
| Dropbox paper is amazing though if you need to create an
| "easy to collaborate that look decent" document. And it does
| not affect in anyway your experience with the "cloud sync"
| functionality
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Salespeople love bloatware. The more features salespeople can
| speak about the more successfully they can sell the product.
| istorical wrote:
| enterprise customers have large feature set requirements to
| support their enterprise scale, regulatory obligations,
| international presence + the tendency not to reject any feature
| request ask that could yield an additional customer combined
| with how unique feature requests often are between customers
| serverholic wrote:
| Basically companies get bloated, then they need bloated
| software that supports all their bloat. They pay big money so
| they get what they want.
| xeromal wrote:
| Corporate compliance
| fouric wrote:
| Because software developers selling software are (1)
| incentivized to offer lots of features, because different
| individuals and businesses have different needs, but also (2)
| not very strongly incentivized to either (a) make the program
| particularly easy to use/integrating those features well with
| each other (which is one thing you might be thinking of when
| you say "bloatware") or (b) make the program particularly
| performant (which is another thing you might be thinking of).
|
| Open-source tools, while they might not always limit feature
| scope (e.g. Blender, Firefox, Emacs, Audacity, Krita) (although
| this isn't necessarily a bad thing), seem to be better at
| delivering good performance even for applications with larger
| feature-sets, partially because their developers are
| incentivized to optimize for performance due to their own
| pride.
| tracedddd wrote:
| $27.7 billion. Seems quite high given Discord's momentum. Haven't
| really been spending much time on Slack for a couple years and
| most new companies/projects seems to be selecting Discord. I
| suppose Salesforce has the money, though. I wonder if they are
| going to try to reposition it.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I don't think enterprises are using Discord. It's a gamer thing
| really isn't it? It doesn't have a very grown-up image.
| slap_shot wrote:
| Is Discord used in the enterprise? I've only used it for a
| gaming community a long time ago.
| tracedddd wrote:
| To be honest, I'm not that in touch with enterprise. Despite
| Discord's appearance as a platform for gamers it has pretty
| much dominated slack for a non-self hosted solution for the
| areas I'm familiar with. Small teams, OSS, cryptocurrency,
| strongly distributed WFH type startups, conferences, etc.
| Private channels are role based so the general public can
| integrate communication tightly with the main team while they
| work behind the scenes. I wouldn't be surprised if Discord
| launches a professional de-gamer-branded version soon. Target
| markets aside you simply get more from Discord for most
| general use cases and it feels like Slack is playing catch up
| rather than leading (like they used to) on some popular
| features.
| dannyw wrote:
| Also, Discord has capable APIs and a fairly open developer
| program. You can make some really amazing and useful bots.
| impendia wrote:
| I'm an academic. Since the pandemic began I've used Discord
| on multiple occasions for work -- for example, if someone
| runs an online conference it's common to create a Discord and
| encourage chat among the conference participants.
|
| But these are all fairly informal use cases, initiated by
| individual academics and not by "the university".
| bachmeier wrote:
| If you ask university IT about Discord, they'll probably
| tell you emailing .docx files back and forth is just as
| good.
| impendia wrote:
| My university's IT staff is surprisingly good. But they
| seem to be hamstrung by questionable decisions being made
| over their head.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Discord seems like a good choice for communities, but I've
| never seen a company use Discord for internal company chat,
| whereas almost everyone seems to use Slack or Teams.
|
| Anecdotally, I see Slack as something I use for professional
| purposes, and Discord as something I chat with my friends on. I
| have Slack on my work Mac, and Discord on my personal Mac. I
| see Slack as an extension of Skype for Business/Lync/other
| business tools, and I see Discord as a better Mumble/MSN
| Messenger.
| dannyw wrote:
| Discord could easily fix that with a more professional
| offering (perhaps under a sub-brand with slightly tweaked
| designs, but general UI familiarity).
| wallacoloo wrote:
| I think a good third of the engineering teams at my company
| tried out Discord at the start of stay-at-home because of the
| way it integrates voice chat right next to the text channels.
| It was probably the most similar replacement to an open-
| office floor plan we could find (very low friction to start
| conversations, and anyone watching can choose to hop in if
| they want).
|
| We quit that after screensharing was super low quality
| compared to Zoom -- apparently (even paid for a Discord
| "server boost", but no fix. I think it was an issue with the
| Mac client or something). I think one or two teams still use
| it, but for the most part everyone's back to slack + Zoom
| now.
| hu3 wrote:
| To add to anecdotes here, I've consulted in two companies
| that started using Discord this year.
|
| They replaced Teams+Slack with Discord.
| bdcravens wrote:
| When I freelance, I bounce around a lot of different Slacks.
| I've yet to see a company use Discord.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| On the topic of Discord for professional use, does anyone know
| if it's possible to have different display accounts for the
| same login? I'm in a few different Discord groups for real-life
| friends, an online-only game, and one for FOSS development. I'd
| like to have different display names and profile pictures for
| each one, but so far all I've found is having to maintain 3
| email login accounts and log out and back in when I want to
| switch communities. Is this really the intended way to do this?
| tracedddd wrote:
| You can change your display name on a per channel basis after
| you join. They can still see your account tag if they click
| on your account, so there's no way to disassociate accounts
| with a single login. There's also no way to change avatars
| per channel, AFAIK.
| Navarr wrote:
| Per-server* and only if that server has it turned on.
| Servers can disable the ability for users to change their
| name
| tracedddd wrote:
| Yes, per server, thanks for the correction. I believe
| it's on by default, I've rarely seen it turned off.
| crowbahr wrote:
| I'd use discord over slack if they had account switching, but
| there's no way I'm going to cross pollinate my leisure
| communications platform with work.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| I'm not even thrilled about integrating all of my leisure
| time stuff under one identity (you can have a different
| nickname per-server, but the underlying account name is still
| quite visible).
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| I posted a comment here about why this is a problem:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24832204
| mpeg wrote:
| Discord is used heavily by OSS communities and other such
| projects; but I've yet to see it used by companies.
|
| It really doesn't target the enterprise customer, or even SMEs
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Also Gitter?
| mosseater wrote:
| I just installed an XMPP server (ejabberd). It's amazing how much
| money is in things that are already solved freely. This is chat!
| CHAT! TEXTUAL CHAT WITH OCCASIONAL VIDEO CALLS! WebRTC is a
| thing! IRC/XMPP is a thing! Sad techops people running out of
| things to host is a thing!
| keewee7 wrote:
| I think both Slack and Discord are good examples of products that
| entered already well established niches and still succeeded.
|
| Slack launched in August 2013 as a plain text chat service
| without voice and video calls. Skype and HipChat already existed
| for a decade before Slack entered the market.
|
| In just seven years Slack went from being an internal team chat
| app to making a $28 billion exit.
| asddubs wrote:
| It helps that microsoft completely ruined skype and turned it
| into an unreliable piece of shit
| [deleted]
| KronisLV wrote:
| Are there any sites that attempt to describe exactly what's
| wrong with Skype? I've been using it for years and haven't
| observed anything outright wrong with it. Is particular
| functionality broken or something?
| mavhc wrote:
| Firstly there's 3 versions of skype backend: original p2p,
| microsoft's intercept all your calls, and Lync.
|
| Then they renamed Lync to be Skype for Business, and now
| had to try to make those 2 systems work together.
|
| Then Windows 8 comes along and they rewrite the client in
| Metro, but it doesn't do everything, so the Win32 client
| still exists.
|
| Also recall that MS had MSNMessenger, so guns all pointing
| at each other.
|
| Then they got social network jealousy, so tried to do
| something with Skype, then gave up.
|
| I've still no idea if skype can call Lync/SfB/Teams or not.
|
| I assume at some point they didn't bother making
| Android/iOS apps because they wanted WinPhone to be a
| thing.
| api wrote:
| Both Skype and FaceTime abandoned P2P at the expense of
| privacy and (usually) call quality because there used to
| be a patent troll called VirNetX going after large
| companies employing P2P networking. They had some
| ridiculous patent on "having two devices talk on a
| network, mediated by a third" and won in the Eastern
| District of Texas of course. That patent is now expired.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| It's the same with Apple's FaceTime. It was originally
| intended to be P2P, but VirNetX sued them. Some believe
| that's why Steve Jobs' claim of it becoming "open" to
| non-Apple devices never materialized.
| ohthehugemanate wrote:
| My friend who worked at Skype at the time tells me the
| rebuild was because of the rise of mobile devices, and
| the limitations of mobile internet at the time. Skype's
| original architecture used peer to peer routing, ie
| network quality relied on there being always-on nodes in
| between the calling parties. Demand for mobile Skype
| grew, but no one wanted to use their expensive, limited
| bandwidth mobile internet to be a router in the Skype
| network. Not to mention, those mobile connections weren't
| stable enough to be useful for nodes anyway.
|
| Hence the redesign around a client-server model, where MS
| could guarantee call quality a lot better, and which
| allowed for mobile to thrive.
|
| None of which excuses the UI of course, or problems with
| the back end. Or lync, or any of the other problems. But
| it does give some context.
| mijoharas wrote:
| > Also recall that MS had MSNMessenger, so guns all
| pointing at each other.
|
| If anyone is wondering, I believe this might be a
| reference to this "microsoft organisational chart" [0].
|
| [0] https://external-
| preview.redd.it/PUA8tCYtXm11ZBA1oLmqESSwjZn...
| tomrod wrote:
| This comment will identify the core issue:
|
| Feature creep expressing as bloat.
| yoz-y wrote:
| One of the contentions is that skype evolved from an
| utilitarian entreprisey chat/voice app into a wannabe
| social network.
| keb_ wrote:
| I can only speak for myself, but I've had co-workers who've
| corroborated my experiences:
|
| * Slow startup, slow everything
|
| * File uploads work maybe 50% of the time
|
| * Calls are frequently dropped
|
| * Sometimes will just flatout stop responding and crash in
| the middle of chat or a call.
|
| * Resource hog
| user5994461 wrote:
| * File uploads work maybe 50% of the time
|
| File uploads are blocked by company policy. And it fails
| with a cryptic error or no error at all when blocked,
| rather than giving a meaningful explanation.
| abakker wrote:
| No persistent chat, doesn't reliably report availability
| status / presences, tells you messages were sent when
| they weren't, messages don't always arrive on all
| devices, message with error that says "message couldn't
| be delivered" but they were delivered so you send them
| many many times...
|
| the list goes on.
| redm wrote:
| I wonder if those issues could be related to a poor
| network connection to the Skype servers, and maybe poor
| handling of lossy or high latency connections. I haven't
| seen any of these issues with Skype.
| prepend wrote:
| Perhaps, but I've never had these problems with Zoom or
| Discord or Slack or Jabber or anything else. So it's a
| Skype problem as far as I'm concerned.
| forgotAgain wrote:
| They could be but if network connection was a prime cause
| Microsoft would have highlighted that fact. Have they
| shown that is in fact the primary issue?
| prepend wrote:
| Personal Skype is annoying because it expires credits, so
| every couple months I have to log in and send a single text
| to spend some money.
|
| All my other Skyping is just messaging and calls for free
| so it's lame that they keep trying to expire the money I
| spent.
|
| Skype for business is a giant ball of shit and perhaps the
| worse messenger product I've ever used, and I've used them
| all since IRC and text in 1993. Here's how it sucks: -Calls
| and video consume large bandwidth -Client will peg cpu at
| 100% for unknown reasons while idling -Sometimes client
| will freeze in the background and not take calls or IMs
| -can't drag and drop images into chat. Sends them as
| attachments -not reliable. Calls will drop. Individuals on
| calls will drop. Screen share works or doesn't work
| unpredictably. Video works or doesn't work unpredictably.
| -Messages aren't delivered, sometimes with an error that
| says "prepend couldn't be reached so message wasn't
| delivered" even though the user shows as online and green
| -Sometimes that message actually was delivered -Mobile does
| not sync chats with desktop
|
| Instant messaging is so simple and using Skype is worse
| than nothing. I'd rather email than have a tool that works
| 90% of the time. Imagine is SMS sometimes didn't deliver
| messages. Who would use that.
|
| Coupled with Skype being the reason why all other instant
| messenger apps were banned from orgs. In 2001, my company
| was using yahoo messenger, for free, without any of the
| problems above with 200 people IMing hundreds of times a
| day (although we never video or voice called). In 2021, my
| org pays for Teams and Skype and we use a mix of
| SMS/iMessage and a million other things because no one IMs
| any more.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| > Imagine is SMS sometimes didn't deliver messages.
|
| SMS does not have a delivery guarantee.
| prepend wrote:
| It does not, yet it's pretty darn reliable.
|
| Comically, Skype does have an SLA including delivery and
| sucks at it.
|
| I don't need delivery guarantee, I just need reliability.
| If I could even predict when Skype works or doesn't, I
| could at least plan around it.
| asddubs wrote:
| Last time I used it, it just flat out stopped working, and
| nothing I tried could fix it. I could type messages but
| would not receive any messages anyone else was sending,
| though on their ends it would show the messages as sent.
| Tried the web client, same thing. I told my friends they
| could now reach me on discord if they wanted to continue
| talking to me, and that's the last time I used skype, years
| ago.
|
| Even before then, it was extremely spotty with occasionally
| refusing to deliver messages, not being able to hear the
| other person on calls, and other stability issues. But it's
| been so long, I don't remember the exact details anymore,
| just that it gradually went from a piece of software that I
| really liked to something that was giving me the most
| trouble out of any software I was using.
| briffle wrote:
| I think part of the problem is there are 2 different
| products Skype and "Skype for Business" the second one is
| basically a rebranded MS communicator.
| dnautics wrote:
| is this a trend? Cisco webex started of relatively easy to
| use and then rapidly became unusable, Zoom feels like it's
| going in that direction, Google meet is arguably more usable
| than its predecessors, but (maybe because they keep changing
| their product name[0]? which is a key part of usability)
| nobody seems uses it anymore
|
| [0] messenger? was it hangouts? meet? Is it duo now?
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Zoom feels more performant than Meet, but Meet's latest
| product update a month or two ago made it significantly
| better. Interface is cleaner and it feels much faster to
| the point that it feels almost as fast as Zoom.
| dnautics wrote:
| yep, but like i said the the UX failure in meet is not
| technical but literally changing the product name. Who
| knows. Will it get replaced by duo in 1.5 y?
| robbick wrote:
| Can't see this and not post this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E - A message from
| Skype CEO
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Thanks for the laughs :)
| MR4D wrote:
| I hope that case study is taught in business schools. That
| Microsoft did such a bad job is stunning to me.
|
| And Teams is darn near unusable due to interface weirdness,
| but Windows 11 integration gives me hope that this problem
| can be fixed.
| thayne wrote:
| Hopefully, Salesforce doesn't repeat that with Slack
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > That Microsoft did such a bad job is stunning to me
|
| Google also managed to do a similarly bad job. Google Talk
| was quite popular.
| joshstrange wrote:
| This, 100 times this. I don't think I'll ever understand
| how Google so horribly lost the "Chat Race". They were in
| early, had a product, let it flounder, then launched
| multiple other chat services that all were bad in their
| own way.
| swiley wrote:
| With Microsoft's luck and finesse the Windows 11
| integration will just kill Windows.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| From 400B to > 2T market cap in the past 5 years. Not
| sure that's dumb luck.
|
| Teams is terrible, Azure DevOps is painful, windows has a
| had a lot of misses; but .NET is awesome, Azure is my
| favourite all-round IaaS/Paas and lots of their new
| initiatives are pleasant surprises, so IMO Microsoft is
| at their best as any time in the past 10+ years or
| longer.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| This is a popular opinion that I tend to agree with on a
| personal preference level, but Microsoft's userbase across
| Teams and Skype is still much larger than Slack's... so
| they're certainly not doing a very bad job outside of the
| realm of HN opinion.
|
| Salesforce is probably banking on a similar bundling tactic
| to 365, which makes the sale seem like a tactical move
| reflecting the reality that better doesn't always matter.
| Plus Microsoft is also working on a CRM to rival
| Salesforce.
| MR4D wrote:
| Slack never went after schools during Covid - Microsoft
| did. My guess is that their markets are different and
| that's why the user count is so different.
|
| Of course, Teams is free when you have Office365, so....
| there's that.
| asddubs wrote:
| I'd say the comparison to discord is the more relevant
| one
|
| e: and zoom
| api wrote:
| I smell outsourcing, or trying to save money by hiring
| really green programmers and designers and putting them on
| something too big for their experience level.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| It's unbelievable to me how Teams can be this bad on pretty
| much all platforms. I'm not surprised that it's bad on
| Linux, but it continuing to record your microphone after
| you leave a meeting until it's closed is downright
| acceptable (if you don't believe me, open pavucontrol after
| a meeting).
|
| On Android, I've had it crash twice this week when trying
| to expand a message I sent.
|
| Not to mention the terrible and inconsistent UI of course,
| but I think that's already what it's known for.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I wouldn't mind teams being bad if we could just pretend
| it doesn't exist. However Microsoft find creative ways to
| shove it down our metaphorical throats, even for us using
| Linux, because many companies downright require the use
| of teams for communication in the corporation because it
| was sold with a bundled license.
| dole wrote:
| Praise Electron. I can't imagine the cross platform
| headaches Teams has induced on its developers. Sometimes
| you have to wonder whether Win11's new hardware
| requirements and Electron/Teams' crappy performance are
| related.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Judging by how cross-platform was done before Electron,
| the macOS app would probably lag way behind and Linux
| users would get nothing at all.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| We can't pretend Microsoft doesn't have the resources to
| do something like this right. They just don't focus on
| user experience.
|
| This is not limited to teams. Azure Active Directory,
| Windows Servers, Sharepoint, OneDrive... they all have
| terrible UX.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| Considering Slack and Discord also use Electron, and not
| only have much more functionality but also do it pretty
| much flawlessly (to reasonable extents), I don't buy this
| argument.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah it's fine to call Electron a little memory piggy,
| but there's no reason stable apps can't be built on it. A
| company like MS should be embarrassed that their app
| sucks so badly.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| It doesn't just record for too long, it also seems to
| record on multiple microphones. I have an Elgato Wave 3
| microphone that has its own mute mechanism, but even when
| it's muted in hardware, Teams is somehow able to tell
| when I'm speaking and alerts me if I'm muted within
| Teams. It's pretty creepy - the Wave 3 seems to mute
| itself just fine, I've tested it again and again and it
| always works flawlessly, yet Teams always shows the
| alert. My best guess is that Teams probably records other
| microphones as well (my webcam has one, too). No idea how
| to verify that on macOS, though.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Every time I'm done with a Teams meeting, I `killall -9
| teams` because I can't trust it to behave if I leave it
| in the background.
| OedipusRex wrote:
| Teams is the worst UI I've ever used in an application.
| kleiba wrote:
| Seconded, yet my university chose it as the collaboration
| app for all employees.
| briffle wrote:
| For the same reason as most others: "its included for
| free in our existing subscription. Is your other tool
| free?"
| kleiba wrote:
| Aren't there tons of free or even open-source tools?
| smolder wrote:
| Yes, but someone would have to be responsible for making
| the entirely reasonable choice to use them. No one gets
| blamed for buying into the status quo and following "best
| practices" (by popularity), even when they're bad
| practices.
| easton wrote:
| Not that include hosting (with a SLA), SSO support, and
| integration with all of the other apps you already use
| (well, at least Office). And if you pay for a Microsoft
| license that includes compliance stuff, it automatically
| does Teams too.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Teams is not free, it's a free addition to the
| subscriptions that almost every IT department buys
| already. So you can think of it as a subsidized moat, or
| a loss-leader for new clients. Any competitor needs to
| figure out how to cover the not insignificant costs of
| running this service, plus to give them their due,
| Microsoft support is better than almost everyone else in
| the enterprise setting.
| basch wrote:
| It's not even free in that it mostly just replaces the
| Lync/SharePoint interfaces. It's a feature people were
| sold that was rewritten and replaced, and the old feature
| removed.
| IceCreamJonsey wrote:
| The fact that "Click to expand" / auto-collapse is the
| default for almost all conversations and there is no way
| to toggle it off is inexplicable to me.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| You've obiovusly never used Azure DevOps. Nothing will
| make you miss Jira like moving to DevOps.
| skeeterbug wrote:
| The UI is bad, but I will take Teams over using WebEx for
| meetings.
| rhacker wrote:
| There must be something they're doing right as there are
| so many people talking about how bad it is. (They all
| have it installed)
| acoard wrote:
| Microsoft included Teams with their offerings that most
| businesses already subscribe to. So, it's essentially
| "free." It makes it really had to pick other options.
| Especially because it has Active Directory.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Nobody was ever fired for choosing Microsoft. Same goes
| for some of Azure usage I've seen.
| dnautics wrote:
| obligatory reading about enterprise software (apologies
| for it being a twitter thread)
|
| https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171
| 776...
| zinglersen wrote:
| I feel like this could be said about paid APIs as well?
| The ones purchasing/signing the contract (business) and
| the ones using the API (developers) have completely
| different 'needs'.
| dzonga wrote:
| business school, is the wrong place to teach that. I can
| bet 90% that the acquisition was messed up by the suits.
| but anyways what can plebs like us do ? we didn't go to
| fancy mba school, but can bet we would've done a way better
| job.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| Makes me sad to think about how Microsoft also did this to
| Sunrise. They even shut Sunrise down and yet never brought
| the functionality to Outlook.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Great insights.
|
| Any hypothesis on _why_ they could pull this off? Better sales?
| Better product? Both?
| echelon wrote:
| A key difference is that Slack was worried it couldn't complete
| with Microsoft's entire business suite. They had big ambitions
| but ultimately had to exit.
|
| A smarter play might have been to buy similar office services
| years ago and create a package of their own.
|
| Discord is relatively safe from this and can continue to grow
| atop its gamer user base.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Indeed. The week Slack became available, I was asking around
| for recommendations for a service that was "HipChat but nicer
| to use" and got a lot of scoffing in reply. Eventually someone
| linked Slack and said it looked dumb but maybe I could try it
| and see if it was different enough. Of course it was exactly
| what I wanted and got the right bunch of people talking to each
| other at work.
|
| I'm pretty sure every one of those scoffers had multiple Slack
| accounts within a couple years. :)
| kwanbix wrote:
| I have been using chat systems since ICQ. I really don't get
| the hype on Slack and Discord. Discord in particular is so
| crowded, and I like tight interfaces, that is overwhelming.
| Maybe it is the servers that I have, but I am sure that the app
| allows that, like at the time MySPace allowed crazy profiles.
| josephd79 wrote:
| too bad Discord doesn't allow 3rd party chat applications.
| Something like irssi for Discord would be awesome.
| dannyw wrote:
| https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
| d3nj4l wrote:
| They exist, but they're technically ToS violations, and
| mentioning that you use one in large public servers is
| taboo. Doesn't stop people from using them, as discord
| has been lenient so far, but you'll have only yourself to
| blame if discord does ban you.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I was on a team that was on HipChat that switched over to Slack
| shortly after it came out. One simple reason: reliability. At
| that time HipChat had _frequent_ outages. It 's certainly all
| over HN when Slack goes down but I think that's partly because
| it actually is down quite rarely, and because of this
| reliability people have built more and more mission critical
| integrations into Slack, like ChatOps.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Atlassian feels like a Xerox or Kodak of the modern age. A lot
| of their products were for a while the only option, and never
| bothered to evolve.
|
| Now we've got competitive options through Slack instead of
| Hipchat, Asana instead of Jira, and Notion instead of
| Confluence.
|
| Heck even Trello became competitive enough for Atlassian to
| acquire them.
| crawsome wrote:
| You can't even CC someone ex a vendor) in a Jira ticket
| without them having to make themselves an account.
|
| Atlassian and all Jira products are ugly, and have more menus
| and settings scattered around than microsoft.
| polote wrote:
| > Notion instead of Confluence
|
| Google luck replacing Confluence with Notion if you are a
| company of more than 100 employees
| mijoharas wrote:
| How come out of interest?
| polote wrote:
| There is not even an admin panel in Notion.
|
| As soon as you have a lot of documents, the search is
| super slow. Search that is super limited regarding its
| filtering capabilities.
|
| Not possible to impose a structure on documents, no
| review before publishing. The right management system is
| super unflexible, the folder system is too flexible, the
| UI overall is not built to support thousands of docs,
| almost no analytics...
|
| So yeah Notion looks better at first, but I dont know any
| company of more than 100 employees that would trade it
| from Confluence.
|
| (I'm building a competitor to Confluence that looks good
| and is UX friendly, but to me I'm not building a
| competitor to Notion, Notion is very limited in term of
| the functionalities companies need)
| prepend wrote:
| I'm not the person you asked, but when I looked at it,
| Notion was too expensive for large teams.
|
| I work in an org with shifting project teams and the need
| for persistent docs and paying $100/user for thousands of
| people who will minimally contribute to material made by
| dozens of users was too expensive. I used to use hosted
| confluence but not use GitHub (for like $50/year) and
| GitLab community hosted (for a little devops labor).
| InspiredIdiot wrote:
| I'm no Atlassian fanboy but Asana is only a replacement for
| Jira in specific use cases. I've used Jira Server
| successfully on large software projects. Not amazing but I've
| now used enough other products to say "pretty good". Jira
| Cloud... not great for that use case. Fewer features and
| every click seems to require a 300ms minimum REST call.
| Asana, even more limited functionality. After years there is
| still no way to automatically remove completed work from the
| board. But the UI and flow are pretty good and snappy so for
| certain use cases like smaller shorter-term projects it can
| be good.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| The UI lag is real. I checked why, and it turns out every
| ticket returns permissions for every single UI element on
| the component.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| The 'fat app' if you're on a Mac is about 100x better
| than the browser version for some reason..
|
| I still only try to touch it once a day though. :}
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| Atlassian really needs to get it together. At my agency we're
| moving away from BitBucket because it has degraded so much
| over the past year. I was fine with the lack of features, but
| they've been actively making the product worse.
| ep103 wrote:
| When they bought the company that now makes what they sell
| as Bitbucket On Premises, they should have literally thrown
| away their cloud offering, and just offered that... in the
| cloud.
|
| This years long process of badly re-implementing bitbucket
| on prem into the cloud, feature by feature, while the rest
| of the world evolves passed what they bought years ago is
| absurd.
| bberenberg wrote:
| Stash (now called BitBucket Server) was built in house,
| it wasn't acquired. As far as I know, the BB Cloud and BB
| Server teams didn't have aligned roadmaps.
|
| Source: I was an employee there when this was being
| built.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I know it's a favorite pastime on HN to bitch about Jira, but
| I actually commend Atlassian for "New Jira". IMO they had an
| _incredibly_ difficult problem: how to simplify the app that
| had grown pretty monstrous over the years, but in a way where
| you don 't piss off every company that has their own specific
| workflow so if you don't support their particular way of
| doing things, they crap all over your changes.
|
| I'm very happy with the new jira that we've been using for
| the past ~18 months, and I think it strikes the right balance
| between simplicity and ease of setup while still supporting
| the features we need.
| mijoharas wrote:
| For more than a year or so am unable to upload an image
| from my fairly normal linux desktop to jira (across two
| different computers). I've minimised my use of the tool
| because of this.
|
| I either use slack as a "cdn" posting my image there and
| putting a link, or simply ignore it.
|
| I actively avoid jira, as it is slow, and buggy.
| vosper wrote:
| Yeah "new Jira" is a big improvement.
|
| I recently had to setup a project and workflow for a new
| team, and was steeling myself for a configuration
| nightmare. But then I saw there's a new way to create
| projects. It is _so_ much simpler to configure workflow,
| statuses, etc in these new projects. Because they 're
| designed not to be shared across the whole org. The
| configuration is contained within the project.
|
| So they've created a de-enterprised process for configuring
| Jira, and made it far more suitable for smaller companies,
| or for teams that self-administer. All the clunky stuff is
| still there, but completely separate and you don't have to
| use it.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| I could agree with you from a UX-flow perspective, but the
| tech is so shoddy that i loathe it. Everything is a "web
| 2.0" monstrosity of load times and popin. Open the wrong
| link and it takes you 40 seconds for components to popin,
| pull data, render, move to the highlighted component, it to
| popin, pull data, render, and finally you get what you
| want.
|
| The UX-flow might be good, not sure, but the tech is so bad
| it actually inhibits users. The use of independent
| components might be neat when loading a Jira card from
| Bitbucket pull requests (which works), but it makes loading
| Jira cards from... Jira, terrible. Imo.
| user5994461 wrote:
| >>> Open the wrong link and it takes you 40 seconds
|
| There's nothing in JIRA that take anywhere near 40
| seconds to open.
|
| If you really have pages that take double digit seconds
| to open (you can open your browser's development tools to
| measure), it's more likely administrator in your company
| that is to blame for doing a horrible setup running the
| web service on a toaster and the database on a NAS.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| You're right, i'm sensitive to load times and exaggerated
| by approximately 4x.
|
| I just (loosely) timed it, it took ~10-12s to open a
| backlog selected issue card _with cache_ from refresh. I
| used that example because it highlights the list i gave
| before.
|
| 1. The page loads, a bit slow in general.
|
| 2. The dom has loaded, so now backlog issues are loading.
|
| 3. The backlog issues are loaded, so now the selected
| component opens.
|
| 4. The selected issue component starts loading data.
|
| 5. Your data is now finally visible.
|
| The ~10-12s is loosely evenly spread through the entire
| steps 1-5. This is on Jira Cloud, no "toaster NAS" unless
| you want to blame Jira Cloud for running a toaster, in
| which case i'd agree.
|
| The problem in my mind isn't the servers. Opening the
| network tab, you see requests responding a bit slow,
| maybe 50-500ms, but not _terrible_. I'd like to see all
| requests below 300ms personally.
|
| The problem is the UI design. Everything executes
| dynamically and sequentially. The URL indicates exactly
| what sort of page i want to see, but nothing is loaded
| until the JS loads, renders, makes a request for whatever
| data that individual component needs. Any sub-components
| to this then get rinse and repeat once they are actually
| loaded.
|
| When you stack components on components on components
| that all need to sequentially load data a 1-2s load time
| starts to stack up, fast. And best of all, network
| requests are slowed down by how fast your DOM renders?
| Ugh.
| jgalentine007 wrote:
| We've had performance issues with cloud Jira / Bitbucket
| the last couple months. Doing simple merges can take 2
| minutes in the background. I encounter 5-10 second slow
| downs multiple times a week with other parts of the UI.
| GitHub is instantaneous in comparison.
| sofixa wrote:
| What's the excuse for Jira Cloud? It sometimes takes up
| to 60s to open a popup window with an issue's details.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I am so curious as to what setup causes these horrific
| load times. I never, never have performance issues like
| these with Jira Cloud. A "slow" load for me is about 4
| seconds, normally cards open in a second or two.
| ralgozino wrote:
| I used to manage an on-prem Jira installation at
| $OLD_JOB, the amount of network traffic that the page to
| view an issue does is absurd. If you have a speedy
| connection or most of the page cached you won't notice,
| but switch to slower connections or a congested
| enterprise VPN and it's painfully slow. Open the
| browser's toolbox, disable the cache and reload. See for
| yourself.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| I gave an example here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27909949
|
| But in addition to that, 1-3 seconds per click is
| horrible imo. I have to literally pause, and slow down my
| workflow, because every input (navigation click) takes
| 1-3 seconds to load? That sort of delay starts to drag on
| users, imo.
|
| Wasn't JS based UI's supposed to _lighten_ the load? Make
| web pages faster because they could just ask for the data
| that changed? This feels like such a massive step
| backward from simple HTML, like HN.
|
| 1-3 seconds being good, or even okay, is abysmal to me.
| Especially when the full page isn't needed, just a
| handful of data. Something is fundamentally broken with
| this version of the "modern web". And i say that as a web
| developer who loves complex frontend technologies. But to
| me if the user isn't getting a faster response, the
| frontend tech would be better off as plain HTML.
| odiroot wrote:
| HipChat had probably the best native desktop chat client for
| Linux. I really miss it.
| nodesocket wrote:
| I just sold all my $WORK shares on Monday. Curious, would my
| broker just have sold the shares and then issued some $CRM
| shares?
| avrionov wrote:
| Whoever once the $WORK stock it will be replaced automatically
| with 26.79 in cash and 0.0776 Salesforce shares per share.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Wonder if Atlassian still thinks it was a good idea to retire
| Hipchat and take 10% of Slack.
| pram wrote:
| HipChat was an unmitigated dumpster fire. The backend literally
| couldn't scale for many reasons, and it was a rats nest of
| different databases and random libraries. For example, each
| connection required a discrete process for managing the BOSH
| session (as in, one process had to be dedicated for the entire
| time someone was connected to HipChat)
|
| Stride wasn't really any better, their whole strategy was to
| outsource the backend to PubNub
| davidjgraph wrote:
| Wouldn't they have been paid for their 10% and made a profit?
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Probably, but going forward they no longer have a chat app
| and more or less either have to revive HipChat or refer
| people to a competitor.
| bachmeier wrote:
| They had already announced the retirement of Hipchat long
| before they made their deal with Slack. They agreed to stop
| development of their Slack competitor named Stride. IMO Stride
| had a lot of potential.
| dannyw wrote:
| Stride wasn't really going well. There were some obvious,
| serious issues with technical and product management, for
| example the insistence on using Jira's javascript-based
| textbox rewrite ("Fabric") as the GUI element for composing
| messages, under the spiel of 'unification'.
|
| As "Fabric" is a web component, this meant that mobile apps
| for Stride essentially had webviews for their input box,
| introducing additional latency (critical for typing), bugs,
| inconsistent editing behavior to native iOS/Android UIs, and
| performance issues especially across lower-spec android
| devices (it's just a textbox FFS!).
|
| Plus, engineers were wasting time figuring out how to sort
| browser and webview compatibility issues, instead of, you
| know, implementing a textbox using native technologies which
| isn't rocket science. To make matters worse, the team working
| on Fabric was juggling between fixing INPUT BOX bugs on Jira,
| on Confluence, and on Stride, making it a gigantic mess that
| kept multiple product managers distracted for the wrong
| reasons.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Is the input box technology choice really that
| insurmountable a problem to fix in the future?
| Bhilai wrote:
| I cant help but feel sorry for Salesforce engineers who will have
| to work on figuring out how to integrate the monolith with Slack
| and figure out the user permissions and access control nightmare.
| zippergz wrote:
| I can't help but feel sorry for the Slack engineers who are
| used to working at a nimble and innovative company, and now
| will be beaten down by bureaucracy only rivaled by large
| governments.
| Bhilai wrote:
| Based on my experience, Salesforce does leave acquisitions to
| do their own thing for a long period of time - Heroku,
| Tableau and Quip are examples of that. But yes, its a big
| bureaucracy and things can move at a glacial pace.
| nevir wrote:
| It sounds like they kinda ran morale for Tableau folk into
| the ground; and a bunch have/are jumping ship
| xena wrote:
| This happened at Heroku too.
| kaidon wrote:
| Speaking from experience, getting absorbed as a small nimble
| company into a behemoth is akin to slowly boiling a frog
| alive. Things usually start out as business as usual for
| quite a while, at least for engineering; other departments
| are heavily impacted immediately. Then... the beuracracy
| creeps and grows and soon you have some corporate IT nonsense
| on your machine that blocks DNS lookups to github.com so you
| don't "leak intellectual property" and now you can't build
| your software any more and your manager is a plant.
| trasz wrote:
| What's innovative in Slack? From my - purely user - point of
| view it's just IRC, only worse in terms of functionality.
| spiderice wrote:
| The idea that Slack is strictly worse than IRC in
| functionality is laughable. Maybe IRC does some things
| better, but Slack certainly offers improvements as well.
| u801e wrote:
| Slack and Teams have always been laggy for me, meaning
| there's a perceptible delay between the time you press
| the keys on the keyboard and when the text appears on the
| screen. This isn't an issue with GUI IRC clients or many
| of the older chat platforms that were in use in the early
| 2000s.
|
| The UI issues, at least for me, are the problem.
| anthk wrote:
| Kopete. We could do everything Slack did (even with
| inline Youtube videos, LaTex and video chat) under an AMD
| Athlon XP and 256 MB of RAM. And with KDE3 in the
| background.
|
| cc /u/spiderice
| trasz wrote:
| They are laggy, their logging and search support is a
| joke, they are non-interoperable, lack scripting support,
| and the UI is less responsive than MIRC on a 90 MHz
| Pentium.
|
| I'm certain they do have some advantage though, apart
| from marketing. I'd love to find out what.
| anthk wrote:
| Maybe lack of signing-in everywhere, but Jabber solved
| that and with Bitlbee or any CLI tool you could IM from
| that 90MHZ Pentium.
| Revery42 wrote:
| Easier account creation and file sharing, I believe.
| [deleted]
| trasz wrote:
| So can you give some examples?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > nimble and innovative company
|
| Given slack has barely changed at all in the past... 6 years,
| I would hardly call it "nimble and innovative" any more.
| jjice wrote:
| Someone please correct my ignorance, but is the core of
| Salesforce (the traditional sales application) essentially a
| glorified CRUD app with integrations?
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Sure, CRM/SFM is just database stuff. The rest is merely
| software.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| It's more of a managed database with a default scheme that is
| proven to be able to build sales tools around
| Igelau wrote:
| So... yes?
| thehappypm wrote:
| So is Facebook
| spiderice wrote:
| > a glorified CRUD app
|
| I feel like this can be said about most application development
| nowadays, especially anything web based. It's one of the
| reasons I'm losing steam as a web developer. It feels like no
| matter what project I do or company I work at, I'm really just
| doing CRUD all day. The only variations are the names of
| resources and the slight data manipulation you do between the
| HTTP request and storing it in the database.
|
| Has anyone else experienced this same feeling?
| croes wrote:
| Will get tough because Windows 11 has Teams integrated.
| joobus wrote:
| Slack is better than Teams, imo.
| iamtheworstdev wrote:
| That's why IE never had any market share. It just wasn't any
| good..
|
| oh wait.. it didn't have to be. it was bundled with Windows.
| tyingq wrote:
| That's the sort of brilliance of Microsoft's approach...Teams
| doesn't have to be better, it just has to be good enough, and
| only good enough in the eyes of the procurement teams.
|
| Leadership folks buy O365 because it's the cheapest way to
| get Office, Sharepoint, Exchange and so on. Enterprise Teams
| comes with it whether you want it or not, "no extra charge".
|
| Then, when someone wants Slack, the discussion becomes "We
| already have Teams. I see Slack does x and y a little better,
| but is that worth X dollars?".
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| While I agree slack is better, Teams is improving and slack
| seems to be devolving into a worse platform with lots of
| anti-features. The simplistic and focused approach that
| made me love slack have gone away.
|
| The whole integration aspect of teams with office365 is
| also a huge draw.
| tyingq wrote:
| >The whole integration aspect of teams with office365 is
| also a huge draw.
|
| Ah, yeah, should have mentioned that. Attachments in
| messages go into OneDrive, MS Forms is used to post a
| Poll/Quiz, Click on people's names, and you can see org
| hierarchy from AD, Meetings from Outlook/Exchange are
| tied to Teams, and so on.
| doctorsher wrote:
| Agreed, but that is not exactly difficult to do. Teams is a
| total dumpster fire.
| croes wrote:
| Word is worse but still the standard application in most
| companies.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Apart from a few minor quirks (pop-under call dialog is
| most annoying), for me Teams just works.
|
| Just today I had over a dozen different calls, most with
| screen sharing, several with participants joining and
| quitting during the call. Several included me taking
| control of the other's screen. We even swapped screens over
| a dozen times between participants in one call.
|
| I chatted a lot with my coworkers (corona home office
| turned into summer home office) including sending
| screenshots and similar.
|
| I participated in discussions on the team channels, again
| with attachments.
|
| We used the Excel integration to edit a spreadsheet
| attached to a meeting in collaboration during the meeting.
|
| I took a couple of calls on my mobile phone while I was
| making lunch, as well as chatting, continuing the chats
| seamlessly on my desktop when I was done.
|
| This all just worked. This is more or less a typical Teams
| day for me these days. However based on the comments on HN,
| clearly it seems I'm an outlier.
|
| Yes the UI is lacking significantly in some areas, and
| there are some annoying bugs, but "total dumpster fire"
| isn't what I'd call it.
| prepend wrote:
| Teams works great for meetings and sucks for chat and
| persistent chat. I never use Slack for calls, I use it
| for IMs.
|
| Teams has problems with its UI, organizing
| teams/channels, notifying, and basic always on functions.
| At least every other day, Teams secretly signs me out and
| I'm offline until I try to do something and sign in
| again, just to get IMs and missed calls. That has never
| happened with Slack.
|
| Also Teams/SharePoint sucks so hard for web site and doc
| collaboration. Search doesn't work well and it's hard to
| get users organized around content. I'd rather have a
| shared Word doc than a Teams site.
| hughrr wrote:
| +1 reason not to upgrade.
| throwslackforce wrote:
| How much money did the typical Slack engineer get out of this?
| dannyw wrote:
| I actually find this to be a really interesting question.
| Founders do have significant sway in these kind of deals, in
| terms of advocating (or not advocating) for employees.
|
| How are Slack employees doing financially?
| bitbckt wrote:
| The direct listing was good to most everyone I know (lots of
| former Twitterati at Slack), and this deal doesn't seem to
| have changed that situation.
|
| The post-acquisition exodus has started, which might imply
| folks aren't interested in joining The Machine regardless of
| the money.
| fartcannon wrote:
| 30 billion dollars is so unbelievably high for such a basic
| thing, that it makes me think some kind of money laundering is
| going on.
|
| Meanwhile, the most advanced robotics company on earth got sold
| for less than 1 billion.
|
| My mind boggles.
| cvhashim wrote:
| Hype-based valuation?
| thehappypm wrote:
| It's really that the number of customers of these types of
| things is astronomical. Basically any business in the world
| might use Slack. And many, many do, especially high-value
| Western businesses.
|
| Boston Dynamics is great but who is buying robots?
|
| People spend more money on their electric bills than on
| iPhones.
| normac2 wrote:
| It's almost all economies of scale and "rich get richer" type
| effects, much like the big social networks. You make something
| that catches on (in Slack's case it really did have an edge on
| the existing stuff) and from then on you've got your loyal user
| base for whom it would be too much of a project to move to
| another thing.
|
| Slack is a great product, but at the end of the day it's a
| mildly more convenient way of doing stuff that you could do in
| 2002 with IRC and email. And Mattermost is a pretty good FOSS
| substitute.
|
| (This isn't counting audio and video calls, but those have been
| pretty good since around the time of Google Hangouts, long
| before Slack had audio/video.)
| muglug wrote:
| Most of Boston Robotics' products are at least a decade away
| from being cheaper than humans for anything but the most
| trivial of tasks.
|
| BR requires a lot more investment before they can become a
| worthwhile purchase.
| ascorbic wrote:
| It's a basic thing with getting on for $1bn in ARR. It's also a
| platform for hundreds of apps and integrations.
| warrenm wrote:
| Interesting that it was _Salesforce_ that went after them
| sudhirj wrote:
| Salesforce also owns Heroku, which is interesting, I guess. I
| don't full understand the game that's being played, though.
| They own the way I deploy all my apps, and the way I
| communicate with my colleagues, but I'm not seeing the synergy.
| Both products will do better with enterprise sales and adoption
| and Salesforce does that well? Is that it?
| linuxftw wrote:
| I think there's some synergy in reducing management structure
| to save costs on Heroku and use it as a revenue stream. Also,
| salesforce has a large enterprise sales force, so this is
| another product that can be sold by the same team.
| [deleted]
| arcturus17 wrote:
| They mainly own a set of enterprise solutions. Salesforce is
| now a massive cloud ERP that has CRM, eCommerce and other
| modules - Heroku is actually pretty small within that
| universe.
|
| It makes sense to me that they would want to own
| conversations in order to cross-sell and up-sell solutions in
| their portfolio, and also defend against Microsoft which has
| Teams.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Heroku has a good use case as being the quick default way
| to deploy Salesforce platform applications, so there's
| definitely some synergy there, but the Heroku for everybody
| else is languishing a bit.
|
| Slack, don't know, maybe it's going to be the default
| communications platforms for Salesforce products and
| integrations.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's what I see it as - Salesforce defending their core
| product against encroachment by the Office 365 suite - if
| your company is already on that and Microsoft begins
| offering Salesforce-like products, selling Salesforce
| itself becomes a harder prospect.
| jerf wrote:
| Oh, Salesforce probably has some grand ambition of becoming a
| "platform" in which "salesforce" proper is "just" first among
| equals. Moreso than the degree to which Salesforce is already
| a platform, I mean. Eventually probably headed for being a
| Company in a Box.
|
| For instance, this just went by on New:
| https://blog.zoom.us/start-using-zoom-apps/ Zoom, unsatisfied
| with being the dominant video chat app, now wants to be a
| "platform" for running apps.
|
| While I understand the nominal business case, the business
| schools teaching MBAs to reach for this particular golden
| ring could probably stand to emphasize the importance of
| continuing to develop the core product as the foundation you
| expect to stand on in order to become this larger "platform";
| seems like in practice, this sort of thing is also an
| announcement that their core product is now going to begin a
| long slide into a decaying buggy mess as it gets
| deprioritized internally in favor of the "platform" product,
| whereas the platform product usually fails, often non-
| trivially precisely because they got so excited about all
| that sweet, sweet lock-in walled-garden platform money that
| they let their foundation rot and all the wallets they meant
| to lock in their walled garden wandered away.
| pfarrell wrote:
| > Salesforce probably has some grand ambition of becoming a
| "platform" in which "salesforce" proper is "just" first
| among equals.
|
| I think they started that in the late 2000's and
| accomplished it by 2011 or so. Salesforce was the first
| business to prove SaaS was a viable business model and then
| launched themselves as a generic application builder that
| we now call PaaS.
|
| I don't disagree with your view, but to me, Salesforce
| isn't another wannabe platform. They're the one who figured
| out how to make that path work. (Also, arguably AWS)
| hajile wrote:
| In the case of Zoom, this is probably a necessity. It is
| only a matter of time before the big companies muscle in on
| video chat now that the pandemic has shown demand and
| forced their hand.
|
| If zoom doesn't have a strategy to either diversify or get
| bought out, they are probably doomed to a slow death.
| w4llstr33t wrote:
| Zoom still has the best UX from what I can tell though,
| and they already have wide adoption.
|
| I've also started to hear Zoom as a noun in place of
| meeting, "let's do a Zoom", etc., even with people who
| don't work in tech.
|
| They took over due to being the best offering. They seem
| entrenched to me now, but who knows...
| brightball wrote:
| Probably similar to how organizations go through the approval
| process for Google, Amazon or Microsoft. Once the company is
| approved, any of their services are green lit for use at the
| company.
|
| I could see Salesforce approaching it from that direction.
| Good investment that gets them in the door of more companies.
| pc86 wrote:
| I didn't realize people were still using Heroku. Aren't there
| at least 3-4 cheaper and better alternatives?
| dannyw wrote:
| Heroku is perfectly fine, and it's also squarely targeted
| at the small end of deployment. Why fret about $20/month vs
| $30/month when you have bigger issues to worry about?
|
| Also, to their credit, they have kept the free tier still
| going, more or less. I'd have expected Salesforce to have
| killed that.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Like what? Nothing I've seen comes close to the ease of use
| and developer experience. My only gripe is that they're US
| and EU only, would like an APAC region.
|
| Fly.io is a leap ahead, probably move there next. But
| what's a better Heroku than Heroku?
| pm90 wrote:
| Neutralizing MS teams is probably what they ultimately want.
| mpeg wrote:
| It does makes sense; Salesforce has been trying to be the
| operating system for work and real time communication was
| lacking.
|
| When I was there, we used Chatter in org62 and it was awful.
| Yet a lot of time and money was invested into trying to make it
| work.
|
| With Slack, they have a very easy upsell for their enterprise
| customers to keep them away from Teams; as well as inheriting a
| huge userbase that is very familiar with Slack - imagine
| getting feeds from Marketing and Sales Cloud on a slack
| channel, taking customer requests directly on Slack via Service
| Cloud, etc
|
| Note that these are mostly things you can do today, but by
| bundling it into the Salesforce suite of products they will
| greatly increase adoption by cross-selling.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If you look out from Salesforce Tower, right across Salesforce
| Park you see the colorful logo of Slack HQ.
|
| People don't think brand advertising produces sales, and it's
| impossible to prove for each individual transaction, but I'm
| sure it does work!
| tayloramurphy wrote:
| It's pretty frustrating how many OSS projects use Slack but there
| are no options available to pay for a discounted pro plan. We'd
| love to pay a flat-ish fee for the community but it creates a
| disincentive to grow. Their active user fair pricing helps a bit,
| but it's not great.
| nimbius wrote:
| why not just run a mattermost server instead?
|
| https://mattermost.com/
| Narretz wrote:
| One reason you already mentioned, you have to run it. Slack
| is run for you.
| KronisLV wrote:
| That's a good thing, though. Get a VPS for 5$ per month,
| set up LetsEncrypt and launch the software in a Docker
| container - and you will have to do very little
| administration.
|
| Then no one can limit the messages that you can have in the
| chat or make you pay for many of the features or suddenly
| take the software away from you or make you have an outage
| due to external factors of any software vendor.
| lupire wrote:
| please do that and sell a hosting service.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Until you get spammed to hell, or the next vulnerability
| leaves your system broken, you're utterly owned. There's
| a lot more that goes into self administration then just
| "put a server up".
| KronisLV wrote:
| If updating a Docker tag every month or so after
| verifying that your backups are working is too hard, then
| it is probably indeed a better choice to rely on SaaS,
| however that line of thinking is dangerously close to
| falling into the trap of SaaSS:
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-
| really-s...
|
| And if you want automatic updates, then either use the
| :latest tag, use apt/yum/... packages with unattended
| upgrades or something like Snaps for Ubuntu. However, in
| my experience, updates should be done manually and only
| when you're ready to roll them back (unless there are
| non-breaking security updates which are only available
| for OSes most of the time).
|
| As for spam, if you can't moderate your Discord or Slack
| Space, then the same will apply here, of course.
|
| As for getting owned: if your passwords are simple enough
| to be guessed or you don't follow other best practices,
| then the same will apply both to SaaS offerings and the
| software you're hosting yourself. Basic common sense like
| not exposing DBs to the Internet and using your firewall
| to only expose the ports you want was assumed, but not
| explicitly pointed out in my post.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| That's a lot of stuff to worry about and get right vs.
| just paying $XX a month for someone else to deal with it.
| jasonblais wrote:
| Hey, Mattermost PM here.
|
| There is a hosted SaaS version of Mattermost as well. We
| don't have an established non-profit license for it yet,
| but you can contact community[at]mattermost.com and we'd be
| happy to discuss options.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| Please don't use Slack for open projects! It's a walled garden,
| search engines cannot index the content and registration is
| needed to even see the discussions.
|
| What you put in there is basically closed from the public,
| complete opposit of openness.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| In fairness discord has this same problem, but saying "don't
| create a discord or a slack for your community" is kind of...
| not really realistic.
|
| Does matrix / someone else solve it? How?
| keb_ wrote:
| I'm also curious about this. Gitter.im (which now is
| integrated with Matrix) is also an option, but not as user-
| friendly as Discord. With Discord at least you have
| unlimited searchable chat history (which is invaluable for
| OSS communities, and one of the top reasons you should
| avoid Slack). However, I can see Discord removing this free
| luxury in the future...
| calebkaiser wrote:
| Gitter seems to be indexable by search engines. My
| experience using it as part of open projects has been mixed
| --the UI isn't great and the notification system is, in my
| experience, unreliable--but if you're worried about your
| messages being discoverable, it might be up your alley.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Well, there are plenty of open solutions that you can self
| host.
|
| Personally, i find Rocket.Chat ( https://rocket.chat/ ) to
| be simple enough to set up in a Docker container and have
| running as a passable alternative to Slack/Discord. There
| are downloadable clients as well. The only real downside
| I've seen is somewhat bad support for calls because their
| WebRTC implementation is still new and integrating with Big
| blue button or whatever else they offered is hard.
| tabbott wrote:
| Zulip, which I lead, absolutely aims to solve this problem.
|
| We provide our full Zulip Cloud Standard paid plan for free
| to open source projects (and various other worthy causes!).
| We also prioritize and build features specifically because
| OSS projects asked for them:
|
| https://zulip.com/for/open-source/
|
| Hundreds of open source projects, including Rust, Julia,
| MariaDB, and Clojure, use Zulip as their team chat
| platform. We often hear from large open source projects
| that they substantially prefer Zulip's topic-based model to
| the user experience in Discord or Slack, or that they found
| it made their open source community work. See for example
| these tweets from the last few weeks:
|
| *
| https://twitter.com/mojavelinux/status/1409702273400201217
|
| * https://twitter.com/ornicar/status/1412672302601457664
|
| Also in contrast with open core products like Mattermost,
| Zulip is proudly 100% open source software. You can learn a
| bit more about Zulip's open source model here:
|
| https://blog.zulip.com/2021/04/28/why-zulip-is-on-github-
| spo...
| phdelightful wrote:
| Does Slack's terms of service allow for a plugin that can
| just export the contents of the Slack to a public site (like
| a mailing list archive)? Do Slack plugins have that kind of
| access?
| tabbott wrote:
| I lead the Zulip project.
|
| I'm not sure about this detail of Slack's ToS. At a
| technical level, you can certainly export your data from a
| Slack (which is we implement https://zulip.com/help/import-
| from-slack); I imagine it's easy to write a tool to format
| and publish it.
|
| FWIW Zulip maintains https://github.com/zulip/zulip-
| archive, which is a configurable API-based tool for
| creating a static HTML archive from a Zulip organization,
| with tooling to update it every few minutes. A lot of
| larger open projects use it. (We're also working on a
| native logged-out access feature with less janky
| formatting, which has a working PR that we need to
| integrate).
|
| I suppose you could export your data from Slack, import it
| into Zulip, and then publish that using zulip-archive if
| you didn't want to write any code, but I'm sure the
| formatting would be better preserved if one avoided the
| "convert Slack markup to Zulip markup" step.
| james_impliu wrote:
| Controversial take: We found that we get better
| responsiveness from our open source community on Slack at
| PostHog, probably as our users have it open for work already
| and are used to posting without too much thought, whereas
| making a post on a forum feels like a higher barrier to
| entry. This feedback helps us improve the product. Would love
| something that extracts all the content and pushes it
| somewhere indexable though, as we often end up manually
| taking conversations and converting into github issues etc.
| [deleted]
| ksec wrote:
| I remember the pitch from Render.com, they are doing it because
| Heroku stopped innovating since Salesforce acquired them.
|
| Although most of the time Salesforce just leave those acquisition
| alone and let them do their work. Which is sort of strange if
| there are no benefits and synergy, it is more like a long term
| asset investment.
|
| I sometimes wonder if these sort of acquisition has something to
| do with low interest rate, ease of capital, and tax reduction.
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| Heroku decided to sail against the Docker wave rather than sail
| with it.
|
| They still have a "buildpack" OSS project that sort of competes
| with OCI image
| aasasd wrote:
| > _leave those acquisition alone and let them do their work_
|
| Exactly the fate every casual commenter is hoping for with
| every acquisition of a decent company. Specifically in gaming.
| The companies keep calming the public down by promising they'll
| let the bought company work as before, which of course never
| happens--otherwise there'd be no reason for the acquisition.
|
| (Waiting for Codemasters to turn into regular EA trash, here.)
|
| If Salesforce found a way to make this very model work, that's
| great. Personally I've become too jaded to expect anything good
| from any acquisition.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| Probably the worst thing that could happen to Slack. The second
| least hip company in the world (#1 is IBM) buying a hip ChatOps
| platform. Time to move back to IRC or go to discord.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Slack still limits searches for free accounts, and charges per
| user. This basically excludes most community-based use cases.
| Not very "hip" if you ask me.
| rchaud wrote:
| The un-hip companies tend to have the most money.
|
| In any case, I never saw Slack as a 'cool' app, despite needing
| to use it at work for several years. I have only ever heard
| breathless hype about it, and often wonder if I'm using the
| same Slack as everyone else. Do people really get that excited
| about having a channel that updates with the status of your
| Jira tickets?
| dylan604 wrote:
| How could you possibly think that with amazing PR jibberish
| quotes like how they are going to "define the future of
| enterprise software, creating the digital HQ that enables every
| organization to deliver customer and employee success from
| anywhere." Or how they "have a once-in-a-generation
| opportunity" to "give every company in the world a single
| source of truth"? /s
|
| These types of messages make me want to hurl at the self
| aggrandizing PR speak. I get positive self image and promotion,
| but good grief this is so over the top. I want a press release
| that says something closer to the truth, "we have no idea how
| to gain more users and the money from their wallets, so we're
| buying another company so we don't have to worry about
| developing anything on our own. This was the best idea we could
| come up with"
|
| Not a single quote from anyone from Slack on how they felt it
| was a good idea and what made it so exciting for them to sell
| at this time to this buyer. I honestly feel like I need a
| shower after reading this nonsense.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| Agreed. Corporate speak like this can't come across as
| anything but disingenuous, especially when they didn't even
| make the product they think they're going to "change the
| world" with.
|
| My sister's company recently got acquired, and it's reminded
| me how bad it feels to be a regular worker suddenly finding
| out a company you really love is selling out. Of course, the
| execs get big bonuses while the regular workers get no say in
| changes to the business including cuts to their bonuses and
| perks...
| serverholic wrote:
| I don't understand how anyone can stand that crap. Like what
| kind of person sees statements like the ones you quoted and
| thinks it's a good thing?
| sidlls wrote:
| People who are paid to write it and their managers.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| I thought op made those quotes up and found it hillarious.
| Then saw they were actual quotes.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I almost wish I was "clever" or "creative" enough to make
| up quotes like these, but then I realized in order to do
| that I'd just be another one of those PR asshole types.
| I'd rather just not exist than be that.
|
| I mean, seriously, WTF is a "single source of truth"?
| duped wrote:
| "Single source of truth" is pretty standard jargon in
| enterprises, at least ime. It refers to the fact that as
| an organization grows, the same information might be
| stored in different places in mutually incompatible ways.
| Ideally you want information to flow from one place that
| is your "single source of truth" so all systems agree on
| what data is correct. Otherwise you'll get systems that
| disagree, which is expensive to mitigate.
|
| Salesforce is powerful because they centralize data
| collected from customer interactions like sales, they're
| the single source of truth for everything you want to
| know about your customers (which if you think about it is
| the most important thing to any business). Integrating
| chat with slack is an obvious move in that direction,
| since many people use slack as their primary customer
| interaction channel these days.
| WJW wrote:
| Salesforce is ahead of Oracle and SAP in non-hipness? How times
| change. :O (EDIT: Atlassian has got to be up there as well)
|
| In any case, most of the world is not very hip but Salesforce
| does have a very trustworthy aura to most people not in tech. I
| think Slack being acquired by Salesforce will probably lead to
| more Slack customers overall, not less.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| IBM is definitely more hip. Their CPU arch is called 'POWER',
| they beat Ken Jennings with a computer, and their CPUs powered
| game consoles. Salesforce is the worst with Atlassian being a
| close second.
| ProAm wrote:
| To be fair Slack is terrible to use and it probably at it's
| peak anyhow. Why not exit and let someone else deal with the
| downhill portion of it's existence?
| pipingdog wrote:
| Perhaps Stewart, Cal, and co will start work on a game next.
| m12k wrote:
| Yes, I'm excited to see what web service they will pivot into
| this time!
| indigochill wrote:
| This hurts in the Glitch-shaped hole in my heart.
|
| But also, if they did start work on a new game, I'd immediately
| start following it.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| Great! I can't wait for Slack to perish.
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