[HN Gopher] The case for consolidation
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The case for consolidation
Author : bothra90
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-05-14 22:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (benn.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (benn.substack.com)
| civilized wrote:
| Contrarianism can be fun, but I draw the line at the idea that
| users don't care about product quality and therefore Slack is
| being bulldozed by Teams. Teams users are going up (nevermind
| this metric is probably heavily juiced and meaningless) but that
| hasn't caused Slack adoption to go down. There will always be a
| hard core of Slack users who will never use Teams because it
| would ruin their async collaboration culture.
| hibikir wrote:
| Their growth is being bulldozed, and they are losing/have lost
| more than a few big enterprise customers. This doesn't mean
| that their revenue will drop to zero, but it drastically
| changed the fortunes of the company: Without teams doing what
| it did, slack might not have to have gotten acquired.
|
| But really, this isn't really about users not caring about
| product quality: Users definitely do! The whole point of the
| Teams strategy is that enterprise sales is not about users at
| all.
|
| I'll use as an example a large multinational, with a market cap
| over 50 billion.Many divisions had been using slack since at
| least 2015: integrations all over the place, engagement
| throughout the day and night.. a wonderful example of slack
| being a strong incumbent. But this winter, Slack was completely
| ripped out, despite the fact that the only group that prefers
| teams are counting money. Teams is for all intents and
| purposes, free with everything else that they are paying
| Microsoft for, and from the perspective of the people making
| the decision, Slack and Microsoft are the same: But we already
| have slack at home! Executives weren't using Slack much at all,
| they will not use Teams either, and for them, it's a matter of
| dollars. Losses from having to adapt? Communication losses from
| a tool that works badly? Invisible, just like when you
| outsource your cloud team to big outsourcing.
|
| Some divisions wanted to just keep a slack that they'd be
| billed for directly. Hell, some teams would have paid for the
| monthly fee from their own pocket, given how much worse their
| work lives have become with teams... but this was a mandate
| from above, and with the head of IT behind it, you are going to
| have a lot of trouble connecting to any slack while on the VPN.
| Yes, I am told that their async collaboration culture, is
| severely damaged... but productivity losses are blamed on
| factors that have nothing to do with executive decisions.
|
| This really is the secret of enterprise sales: Users and
| decision makers are different in almost every case, and large
| conglomerates understand this very well. And when dealing with
| said decision makers, bundling is always an advantage. To
| compete against a bundled product, you need to have something
| that is far better than the competition, in a way that is very
| clear to the people that pay for the software. So it can work
| for, say, zoom, as remote meetings are still a part of the
| executive suite. But selling, say, a better Jira? It better
| cost zero, or be far better at executive reports. Being better
| for the teams themselves is just not going to be very valuable.
| civilized wrote:
| The charts don't suggest to me that Teams stole Slack's
| growth. Slack's trajectory looks about the same before and
| after Teams was introduced. I'm sure there was some negative
| impact but it's impossible to read off what it was from the
| graph.
|
| As for the rest, yes, this is an old story, but doesn't apply
| to all companies. Slack will always have its niche. I know of
| a much larger multinational that didn't ditch Slack, it just
| added Teams.
| sdoering wrote:
| You are telling a story I can relate to. I am part of an org
| that uses both. As an employee from an acquisition we are
| still using slack internally. And teams as mandated by
| mothership.
|
| It is okayish when talking to colleagues from different parts
| of the corporate. Or clients. But usage internally is near 0.
|
| We are not forbidden to use it, but will be forced (due to
| "security") move to the most expensive tier on order of HQ. I
| know that there are talks if it is feasible with this price
| tag attached.
|
| And I know the brain drain it would mean when loosing another
| symbol of not fully being the mothership.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > Yammer was collecting revenues in the low eight figures and
| burning through a bonfire of cash every quarter. Microsoft, by
| contract, practically ran a printing press in their basement.
|
| Funny typo (if it was indeed supposed to read "by contrast").
| bob1029 wrote:
| > They don't actually mind proprietary languages. They want
| products that work, and products that work together. Modularity
| and flexibility are useful to the extent that they're means to
| those ends.
|
| This is why we are a pure Microsoft shop today. Between Visual
| Studio, GitHub and .NET/C#, we have been able to construct a
| stable, long-term B2B product stack with a very small team. If we
| had selected a more diverse tech stack, it is almost certain that
| we would have failed. I know this because we tried microservices,
| simply on top of a pure Microsoft stack, and it almost killed us.
| I cannot imagine the depths of hell we would be in if we had
| tried to mix & match different tech on top of that horrible idea.
|
| Are we taking some risk that we are missing out on some amazing
| new tech that Microsoft would frown upon? Absolutely. But, we
| know what works for us, the roadmaps are clear, and our customers
| are happy (they love that we only have ~1 vendor). The things
| that Microsoft does not like, we just invent in-house.
| Fortunately, there isn't a lot of stuff we disagree on these
| days.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Look at stack overflow. They run a very popular site as a
| monolithic app on a small number of IIS and SQLServer boxes
| (and presumably some amount of CDN/cache)
| stickfigure wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with the Microsoft stack. There's also
| nothing wrong with any of a dozen other stacks. A small team
| that knows their stack well will perform well.
|
| Microservices, on the other hand, are an effective way to burn
| engineering resources on something that feels like productive
| work but delivers no business value. I wouldn't infer much
| about the merits of tech stacks based on that experience.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Yeah I was going to say the same. They likely failed at micro
| services because it isn't their wheelhouse and it's a skill
| set you need to master.
|
| I've seen lots of successful service oriented architectures
| api wrote:
| As usual it boils down to: open and modular is better except that
| people won't pay for it, so we get closed monoliths and SaaS even
| if they are often inferior.
|
| It really does seem that you have to make businesses pay.
| Otherwise they won't, and if they don't there will be no
| resources to actually build what people want.
|
| But as I always say: people will spend $300 in a month at
| Starbucks. No problem. But paying a quarter or less of that for
| software is a hard no. So we get what we pay for, or rather don't
| get what we won't pay for.
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