We initially used Skype on our team to communicate with others. However, the software was horribly buggy on OSX. Slack has become part of our main toolchain. It works, has the basic features you need and doesn't get in our way. The integrations are great and we'll continue to use them.
Unless Microsoft rebuilds Skype for the ground up, I don't see us leaving Slack for it. They had their chance, and they dropped the ball.
"Unless Microsoft rebuilds Skype for the ground up"
This. This exactly. Is it really unbelievable to assume Microsoft wouldn't attempt to build their own IRC+ clone and save a few billion while they are at it?
I do agree with you, Slack is much better than Skype, but I would add that Lync is just as good. I went from Lync to Slack (after changing jobs) and I would say that Lync not only works just as well but has more features a team would find useful. For instance, multi-user video+voice chat w/ great screensharing/presentation functionality.
Edit: Should mention I was using Lync in a Windows shop and now Slack in OSX. In Windows it worked perfectly but I could be convinced it had issues in OSX.
When I was forced to use Lync (due to an acquisition) in 2014 it was absolutely fucking terrible. The OS X client failed to report online status correctly, couldn't participate in most group chats or video or audio calls, and crashed regularly. Also weirdly non-native UI. And, no linux client to speak of - for a startup like the one I worked for where many devs used linux, that was a nonstarter. Has the story improved since then? (Thankfully no longer have to deal with it since I quit that job a half year later)
1. The worst brand management this side of 1984. "Skype for Business" has nothing to do with Skype and the .exe is still called "lync.exe"
2. SDK: Trying to use the C# SDK for even simple tasks leaves your app deadlocking or spinning 100% CPU in threads you didn't create or throwing native exceptions that doesn't make any sense as they are referencing raw hex 0x12345678 pointers or COM objects you never even touched. And if you try to watchdog all that have fun with 5 orphaned lync.exe's claiming your USB audio/video device.
Microsoft products are filled with references left behind by what I can only assume to be developers who were just hoping to get on a different product team after their next review.
SharePoint's virtual path for its SOAP services is "_vti_bin". VTI = Vermeer Technologies Incorporated, the makers of FrontPage and the FrontPage Server Extensions.
Then there was Groove (brought in Ray Ozzie's luggage) that was renamed SharePoint Workspace (groove.exe).
SharePoint Designer (which didn't actually have a visual designer in the 2013, and final, release) crashes when performing some operations in source files ... With an exception in the FPEDITAX.DLL (FrontPage Editor ActiveX).
Those can all almost be forgiven - they are like vestigial organs after each product evolved into something else.
Until recently, the Sysinternals executables was signed with a Microsoft certificate but the drivers inside Process Explorer was still signed under the old pre-acquisition certificate (I think they actually even renewed it too)!
That SDK is just awful. The sample applications don't even compile, and the documentation is woeful. Tends to make the Lync client leak memory like a sieve, to boot - which is loads of fun, since there is no way to ensure that anything gets cleaned up properly, not an IDisposable in sight.
If it wasn't such a huge PITA to find a compatible SIP library, or write one from scratch, I'd have dumped it long ago. Sadly, I've had to do enough with it that I'm probably an "expert" at it now...
> Sadly, I've had to do enough with it that I'm probably an "expert" at it now...
I think this explains a lot of poorly designed but complex enterprise software (e.g. MS). People eventually learn to deal -> poor design becomes less of a pain point -> less incentive to fix issues.
Between the two I'd pick Slack, hands-down. Lync is awful, and I have to use it—so I use the Adium with the OCS plugin instead. It doesn't do audio calls or video, but it is stable and fast. (For video, hangouts are much better anyway.)
Slack? I use it, but I don't see the attraction. It's just another chat client with a couple of cute features. I'm really not clear on why the world seems so enamored with something that's really not much of an improvement on something we had in 1995.
It's a huge practical improvement over IRC. The integrations are turn-key for most things, very powerful, and deep search integration, so it can become your one-stop shop for things. It realistically has the possibility to replace Dropbox and email for internal collaboration. The channels, groups, and notifications preferences make it possible to structure your team for maximum signal to noise across both desktop and mobile.
Saying that Slack is "just another chat client" is sort of like all the old arguments about how much more powerful PCs were than Macs because they have more features—it's ignoring the value of design and conceptual elegance, and the real impact that has on UX and productivity.
Every feature you mention was available in the '90s. I'm not saying Slack is bad, just that it's nothing impressive or innovative. The only surprising thing about it is that someone didn't make it sooner.
Moreso that open source sprouts by necessity mostly. IRC buildbots and other integrations have been around forever. It's just that Slack paid for the integrations that really makes it shine. Money, and well the work->integrations it buys, really talks.
> Every feature you mention was available in the '90s.
The fact that you could log irc transcripts, index them, give them a web interface, and write bots to chain things together is not the same feature as Slack integrations. If that is your bar for a feature, then we might as well give up trying to write innovative software, because it all uses the same opcodes anyway.
> I'm not saying Slack is bad, just that it's nothing impressive or innovative.
The attitude that a new product is not innovative because its features resemble features from past products leads to no logical conclusion except that nothing is innovative. Everything is based on previous ideas.
If a product were merely the sum of its features, then Apple would not be alive today.
If you're using Lync, but can get by with just IM and presence, install Pidgin and use SIPE[1]. Even if you're on Windows, it's worth doing - Lync has some silly restrictions about running multiple instances, and no way to connect to more than one account at a time
I couldn't copy a line of text on Lync without it randomly grabbing other random lines from earlier in the conversation. Not the line above it, or the last thing I said. Just completely random things that either person had said, that may have been 2 or 3 messages ago, or maybe 2 or 3 hundred messages ago.
This was on Windows 7.
The problem seems to have been solved when we upgraded to Skype for Business a few months ago. There were a lot of other weird nonsensical bugs like this too, but that one was the one that caused me the most grief. Lync was been by far the worst piece of chat software I've ever used.
This is still a problem with the latest version! I am forced to use Lync every day and the copy & paste issues make it completely unusable. It is the worst-in-class IM client, worst-in-class screen sharing tool, and worst-in-class, well, everything.
Even basic stuff like keeping track of when you're actually in front of your computer or idle doesn't work properly in Lync. I'll be typing away for hours and it thinks I'm "Idle: 2 hours" to other people in my contact list.
Then there's the whole, "You can't add this person to your contacts because they have been added to too many other people's contact list" problem. W T F ? How is that even possible in this day and age? Sigh.
The automatic idle/away setting needs to go die in a fire. I write some bots that drive the Lync client through the trainwreck of a COM automation layer, and they are always going out to lunch because the client has silently overwritten the presence state that I'm explicitly publishing.
Subscriber limits are also a joke. Although I'd be happy to be able to add contacts to my list, or even at times, see the people that are already there. Turning off the integration with Outlook (because it does awful things, like locking your .pst/.ost files so you can't open Outlook and Lync at the same time...) seems to screw up all the contact list related stuff.
Lync? Oh, Skype for Business. I use Skype for Business on OS X (Oh wait, it's still called Lync on OS X, because they haven't bothered to update their client), and it's borderline unusable.
At the moment, Slack and Skype for Business have different feature sets. Skype for Business is geared towards voice and video conferencing, as you say. But now Slack is moving into Skype territory with video-conferencing services. Given their ability to deliver high-quality clients for multiple operating systems, they stand to make Lync (oops, Skype for Business) obsolete.
I've used and help maintain Lync and OCS, its predecessor. Both were significantly more bloated, difficult to navigate and laggy than Slack is. Additionally, you need SO MUCH infrastructure to support a proper Lync deployment, especially if you want video, voice and PBX. (Yes, Lync comes with its own PBX.)
Lync 2013 was even worse! The message window was laggy in typing words out of the box and every UI animation was choppy. This was on a really beefy Dell (I forgot the specs). I was stuck in this awkward position where I had to defend the implementation even though (a) many people hated it (myself included), and (b) I actually used Pidgin because it was so much lighter (even if user discovery and lookup wasn't as great).
Fuck Lync. I love Slack. I can see why Microsoft attempted to acquire them, and I am super glad that they didn't.
Just a guess, but probably the sunk cost fallacy. Lync licensing is not cheap, and once you've put in the time to buy it, provision the ridiculous amounts of hardware necessary to run it, deploy it, push the client to end-users, train up on how to use it, it represents a significant investment.
You want to really torture yourself? You want to stare into the abyss? Try making a Lync bot. Anyone who was tried will understand what I say when I say it's the worst thing you can possibly experience as a programmer.
My experience with Lync is different. My current employer is a windows shop and uses Lync for communication.
What I don't like with Lync
1. Screen sharing sucks. Its slow. Is it possible for them to use a technology similar to FreeNX?
2. Does not support multiple-client notification. I use multiple desktop and when you are logged on multiple Lync clients, messages will only go to a single client!
3. OSX client always crashes
What I don't like with Slack
1. Cool UX but sometimes the UI hangs and shows only a white, blank space
One of the things I like best about Hipchat is that a person who joins the team 5 years later can search back through the history of the chat room forever. Hipchat has acted as an accidental knowledge base for me so many times that eternally persistent chat is now a requirement for anything I recommend. It's possible Lync does this and the implementation I'm using today just isn't configured to be useful in this way. Also, the fact that you can't message Lync users who are not currently online is a big non-starter for me. I've never used Slack, so I can't compare it.
It may be relevant that I often work on remote teams. I can't just say aloud, "Hey, anybody know about foo?" In a Lync world I have to individually message one person at a time and await their response or open a chat with everyone which will go away almost immediately after the question is asked. And generally once people have said their no they close the window, the helpful response will not be viewed by most of the team.
As much as I do hate Lync, the only thing that I remember that is good on it is the message archive that you can find under the "Conversation History" folder in Outlook.
Still is. Huge bane in my personal existence... forces Mac users to do even goofier things like running Lync in a Windows VM on their Mac (super duper for voice quality).
Also, OSX doesn't let you tag packets, so we have to do it at the network layer.
MS is promising us Skype for Business on Mac will be great. We'll see.
Here's a good one: When my system upgraded to Skype for Business from Lync, it didn't overwrite the old Lync or turn off its 'start app on startup.' Then, when the computer starts up, Lync opens, complains that it's out of date, and then clicking the button to restart as Skype for Business actually just restarts the Lync client... which then complains and asks to restart again.
As far as I know most people use Skype for business calls. Maybe "team communication" was something that can be done with Skype, but I don't really think it's their core focus.
I think what them not buying Slack is implying is that they will start to try and actually compete with Slack directly. Instead of just internet telephony.
It's also used for video games a lot, but between leaking your IP and allowing esports players to get DDOSed, and just generally being not a great fit, Discord is getting more popular.
Microsoft wouldn't let me use the version of skype i had on win 8.1 anymore unless i upgraded it, then wouldn't let me upgrade it unless i upgraded to windows 10. I opted to try the skype web client and had to install some skype plugin. Chrome quite literally stopped working the next day, though I'm not sure if it's related to the skype plugin. At any rate, Slack's user experience has been head and shoulders above Skype.
Oh god, speaking of skype plugins, "Skype Click to Call" is a travesty. First of all it automatically installs itself into your browser whenever you install or update Skype, without prompting you. Second, it does some kind of horribly inefficient regex of every page you visit, looking for phone numbers, massively slowing everything down. With Click to Call enabled in Firefox, loading folders in gmail for me goes from sub-second to ~10 seconds.
I have a different experience. It was bad before MS came in and got way worst after - except the icon. The icon now is way more slick! But that won't cut it...
Plus, I would never use it professionally since Skype (and MS in general) are the extreme low in regards to privacy.
The one thing that really bugs me about Skype recently is that it refuses to remember my login. Every time I want to login to the Windows app after a restart or update it doesn't log me in automatically.
There isn't even a "remember me" option on the login page, which I swear used to be there. Since my password is a 1Password generated secure password, I have to go look it up every time.
Are you sure you're not mixing up Skype, which is just the traditional voip network, and "Skype for business" (aka Lync) which is part of Office but a very different product?
They only have to do one thing, and one thing only: OPEN. IT. UP. Andi don't mean federation or blablabla: just make it as simple to integrate with as Slack is. Simple API endpoint, basic security and off you go. Boom, victory.
Skype was actually quite decent years ago. It appears that with every new version it became more and more of a bloated buggy piece of shit. I use it mostly to talk to friends. Havent gone more than a couple days without it seg faulting. I LOVE that quirky sound buffer loop that repeats 'hey u still there' 10 times over as the piece of bloatware crashes. RIP skype.
> Unless Microsoft rebuilds Skype for the ground up, I don't see us leaving Slack for it. They had their chance, and they dropped the ball.
The funny thing is, they didn't just have a chance, they had a huge chance. My company can't currently use Slack because our regulatory environment (HIPAA) frowns on our data crossing other people's servers. An enterprise-focused Slack equivalent, hosted on client-owned hardware and with a focus on regulatory compliance, could have eaten a huge chunk of the market.
I think the have the opportunity, but they are very late to the game.
I used Skype for 6 years for work related stuff, and it wasn't great in terms of chat. Slack is WORLDS better. But Skype works GREAT for my interactions with family. The use cases are extremely different.
My preference would be to keep the current Skype as-is, or maybe even simplify it, and also add a new "Skype For Teams" product.
I wonder if the outcome would have been different if Slack was incorporated outside of the US where Microsoft could use some of its non domiciled cash on the acquisition?
Also interesting to think that Slack could be worth so much. Look at ICQ, Microsoft instant messenger, etc.
It seems as though slack like tools get eclipsed every 5-10 years as a new generation comes along with a new favorite tool.
I'd be interested in hearing from someone who would argue that slack will be a dominate communication tool in 5-8 years time and still exist in a meaningful way in 10 years time.
Frankly Slack's success is the utter failure of every alternative on the UX side. MSN messenger was perhaps wrong-footed by the shift to multi-device, but none of the other tools have such an excuse. It's not a generational thing, it's an incredible level of, there's no other word, incompetence on the part of the makers of major messaging software (Skype in particular).
MSN had big flashing ads. When I first saw that I assumed I was dealing with another windows install with malware on it. I've paid for the OS, why have I got this freemium crap?
Slack has no way of letting me know who's read the messages. Come on, it's 2016. I asked them about this and they told me the only solution is it get each contact to add a sunglasses icon as they read each message! What a joke.
What does 'read' in a Slack context mean, though? If you scroll past it quickly, is it read? If you accidentally open your Slack window, is it read? A 'read' notification would just be a misleading user experience.
Read in the way a Facebook messenger message or a hangout message is read; you've got the "channel" open and the message is visible or is above the visible one. Clearly it's impossible to know whether a message has actually been read by a human but there Facebook/hangouts solution is almost perfect.
It's not visibility, it's focus (at least on desktop). If you don't click a messenger box, it will display the message but not acknowledge it as read (on the desktop client, on mobile it works based on whether the message is displayed while the app is open).
Yeah I agree, I think people routinely underestimate the level of quality and amount of time you have to put into a consumer product.
A good example is Yahoo Mail... this product is used by so many people, and was supposedly overhauled a few years ago, yet it is mediocre in so many ways.
Gmail is good, but it got that good about 10 years ago, and hasn't gotten much better since. (Arguably it's worse in some respects.)
When Gmail came out it was a breath of fresh air... now it's just the bar you need to meet. It's sad that Yahoo hasn't been able to meet that bar in 10 years.
> It seems as though slack like tools get eclipsed every 5-10 years as a new generation comes along with a new favorite tool.
You've definitely got a point there. Although I do want to mention that part of the reason Slack eclipsed other tools was, in part, its Websocket based protocol. They have created a fairly complete unified messaging application because of it (IMO).
They were the first movers in the area. I don't know if I would provide much of a meaningful discussion regarding the longer term viability of Slack, but I think they have a chance to be meaningful, maybe even dominate in 10 years time.
They are already Websocket based and they are moving towards WebRTC support...if they take that direction and add P2P support to provide truly secure encrypted communications where certificates are negotiated P2P, then I think they will explode to even greater heights than they have already achieved. Of course, this is not a simple task, but the business implications of truly secure communications channels would be compelling for most corporate enterprises.
Now this is not the same as 100% secure endpoints, but it would be a massive step in the right direction.
I don't know why Slack is seen as a first mover; Hipchat, Flowdock, etc all existed beforehand. Slack seems to have raced ahead by ramping up marketing and not just focussing on B2B sales.
In terms of tech I actually see Slack as behind in the default product (no threaded conversations >_<), but maybe the ecosystem they're trying to foster will actually be useful or maybe the money they've spent on marketing will be irrelevant and they will collapse due to overfunding.
I don't think that IRC Cloud was originally based on websocket...I think it used 'keep-alive' but I could be wrong. Although it still has documentation on how to use HTTPS for stream end-points (https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud-tools/wiki/API-Overview).
Also can't find much information about WebRTC support for IRC Cloud.
> ICQ, Microsoft instant messenger ... slack like tools...
I think people too often overlook Slack's integrations. Yes, Slack is "just" chat or "just" a glorified IRC. Or is it?
I don't know how long it would take me to integrate my Stripe, Github, Trello, and Zendesk streams into IRC to the point where I could set it and forget it. I think for business users at least, using this type of setup _effectively_ could make it hard to move away.
Does a tool display clickable hyperlinks? That's all the integration I (and I suspect many other people) care about.
I can't even imagine what it might mean for " Stripe, Github, Trello, and Zendesk streams" to be integrated into Slack, or why I might want them to be.
Want to share a gist with somebody? Just send a link to the gist to the chat channel, and people can click it.
So a lot of times, on a project, maybe right after a production deploy, I'll just keep the production logs open on a spare monitor or a TV, and passively keep an eye on what's going on while working on other things. I'm not looking for anything specific: my intuition just kinda kicks in if something seems amiss. Suddenly jumped from a few errors a minute to a continual stream of backtraces? The logs stopped streaming entirely? I know it when I see it. Kinda like Cypher watching The Matrix.
Now, if I had to tab between panes across 2, 3, 6 app servers, background workers, and database instances, I just wouldn't bother. It's only useful as background noise. But that's fine, because there are tools that let me easily consolidate all of my logs into one stream.
And that's how I see Slack. Just like I can't get a notification every time I have one exception happen in production, because it would kill my workflow, I can't get a notification every time somebody updates a Trello card or resolves a Zendesk ticket. But what I /can/ do is passively watch the stream: Slack is the consolidated logfile, not for my production servers, but for my company.
Could I configure all that with IRC? Yes. Do I want to set it all up, when Slack lets me OAuth against every single service imaginable with one click? No, I really don't. My time is far more productively spent elsewhere.
For integrations, Github tells us when there's a PR. Yes, there's a clickable hyperlink, but I also get to know a bit more inline. It's additional context you don't get with only a hyperlink. There's less switching contexts when things are inlined ... it's a UX feature. I'd call it a feed of things happening across all of my apps, mixed with the ability to discuss those things in a standard place.
The integrations also give you shortcuts to actions without switching from your "command" line. Sure there are _some_ tools you can install on your local machine, but none make it this easy. Butterfield had the same success with Flickr (which yahoo subsequently destroyed) in making a killer user experience. That was for photos, Slack is for communication.
I'd say slack/hipchat has become the repository of alerts/notifications/etc that I would normally receive through e-mail. A lot of times these notifications aren't super mission critical and don't require immediate attention, but it's nice to have the history of them so I can investigate when necessary.
Having this outside of e-mail keeps my e-mail inbox less cluttered. That's my reason anyways.
Same, except the only issue (similar to email) is that when I initially check something, the little alert thing disappears. So it can easily fall off my radar if I get distracted. Hence my need to keep my Trello todo list current.
I can't speak for the rest, but I personally use the GitHub integration to be notified in chat when builds have failed, pull requests are submitted and commented on, etc. Otherwise I end up having to keep GitHub open in a tab and refresh every minute.
I don't understand. Why would you have to have a github tab open and refresh? There have always been email notifications for all these events. Also, why is getting these notifications in chat preferred over email?
Emails are in their own isolated packages. If i get an email saying the build broke, there is no easy way to check the last time it happened. I wouldn't be able to glance at the last few messages and see that the build breaks every time "X" commits or the tests fail every monday. I can't easily get context on what someone was doing when it broke.
With something like slack it's all right there. The last 3 alerts, maybe a few messages from devs quickly explaining what happened (or preemptively saying that the build is going to break, and it's okay), someone taking responsibility and saying that they will handle the fix, etc...
I would just create a folder and a mail rule that moves the mail automatically. You would actually be able to filter your mail with more granularity than what a simple Slack channel can provide
When the notification comes into Slack that the build broke, I can immediately type in the chat "I'm looking into that one" and everyone knows what I'm referring to and knows instantly that they don't need to waste time on it.
At my workplace, everyone is usually always active in chat working out problems and having discussions, so a notification is more likely to be seen by more people sooner in the chat than in an email.
Fwiw this is pretty common on IRC too (and has been for a long time). Dev channels pretty often have a bot that's periodically messaging some info on new bugs, build failures, etc. So I think does reflect a common developer desire that even predates Slack.
I prefer having everything in one place possible. Clicking a link means a new tab, and if you have multiple systems, that's a new tab for each system and its links. Gets out of hand quickly.
Slack's core killer feature is a reasonably well executed omni-channel experience. I'm not talking about it as a central hub for comms via integrations (although that flows from this idea), but about seamless handoff creating a unified experience between desktop and mobile (and email/app/desktop notifications). That's interesting because it isn't chat related and could be applied to most applications
Slack seems to have mostly eclipsed Hipchat, at least among Silicon Valley startups, but integrations probably weren't a huge factor in that. Slack does have a nicer flow for integrations, but Hipchat worked quite well (and actually had much-missed features like customizing the background color of messages; it's unfathomable how Slack could still not have this feature).
>it's unfathomable how Slack could still not have this feature
I hear this saying a lot, and every time I just can't take it seriously.
This is the first time I've ever heard of someone wanting customizable background colors for messages on a messaging platform. It's just not something I or anyone I know about cares about.
I just can't see how that would be considered a high importance feature by anyone.
It's all about integrations. We have all sorts of server messages and errors in a couple of our Slack engineering channels. Slack provides almost no way to visually distinguish these messages based on importance. In Hipchat, we had red/yellow/green background colors that worked great.
To be clear, I'm not dead set on having background colors. I just really miss having a good visual distinction between messages.
We do it with icons. It's still nowhere near as immediately recognizable at a glance, but I suppose it's fine. I just had a thought: you could embed an image preview that's just a solid red square. That would be very noticeable for important errors.
HipChat's colored messages made it easy to see the error messages in a stream of mostly unimportant notifications. Slack kinda lets you do the same thing with a vertical colored bar to the left of the message, but important/error messages are much less visually distinct.
The reason IRC is still king is because it is so damn simple. You can plug literally anything into it as a bot. When I was at Facebook we used IRC extensively for builds, deployments, testing, etc. It is just ridiculously simple to plug any part of your infrastructure into it that using anything else just feels like a waste of time.
Many new FOSS projects are now using Slack instead of IRC, with a variety of methods for auto-inviting members of the public instead of Slack's intent of manually managing users.
Another popular one now is Discord, which is Slack-like but anecdotally better for large sets of users because of a more robust admin/permissions scheme.
I use Discord for gaming (which seems to be their main market?) and it is amazing how nice it is. I wonder if Slack could just buy them and integrate the voice features into Slack, or introduce their own similar functionality. The voice stuff is seriously very nice and something that Slack doesn't do at all.
That's good to hear, I hope it is as streamlined as Discord because it really just works there. It's also free in Discord (although I don't know what their business plan is) and according to that page it'll be part of the Standard plan and above. (group calls, that is) But I understand if they're targeting different audiences (business vs gamers).
IRC is my favorite, but IRC is bad for company, because you have to manage your own IRC server (you don't want to host your company stuff on freenode, do you). Also, IRC doesn't come with any integration with third party tools. Unless you have a very willing hacker willing to build the integration from scratch, IRC is bad. Not that you would never find a use case to write custom bot on Slack for your need, but I imagine tools like Jira, Jenkins are already created and are well maintained.
In an enterprise environment, Slack is sometimes considered bad because all of the company data is not under the company's control. I seriously doubt that the company I work for ever would go all in on Slack, precisely for that reason.
A lot of enterprise claim to run their own services, but in reality, they outsource to third party to host them, for example, centurylink for active directory or some vendor for managed exchange servers. Heck, a lot of companies bought 365 and Box. People use Skype for communication, passwords are being thrown all over emails and chats. Code are on GitHub. While there is auditing in place, the reality is, a lot of enterprise data aren't really controlled and stored on-premise servers, and auditor cares mostly whether access are limited, logs are available for tractability, and whether there is enough risk assessment done prior to signing the contract.
Yep, I'm well aware of all of that because I sit on our "Cloud Technology Advisory Committee," which feels like a scene from Brazil. However, many here work with sensitive PHI and various types of classified data, so the concerns are bound to contractual agreements with clients and our ability to win work is contingent upon standing up to audits that verify our claims regarding data ownership, security, etc. I wouldn't argue that makes it more secure, but it's the reality of the business.
Certainly. Another option is HipChat, which you can host on-premise. I actually prefer HipChat because of the simplistic UI. Now both Slack and HipChat support video call is a great plus because I don't have to switch between tools. Slack UI is noisy to me, but the growing ecosystem is fantastic. Ugh.
IRC is also bad because it is too client-side. There is no history: if you're not connected or not in the room, you miss all the messages there. IRC Cloud and similar things half-solve this problem in the ideal situation (eg: nothing fails, such as IRC Cloud connecting to the IRC server), but they are a kludge on top of what is really an inadequate protocol if you want to compare to Slack/Hipchat/etc.
Frequently we will @mention someone in a room that the are not currently in, saying something like "Hm, maybe @person can help with this?" and then they'll get the notification, join the room, read the last bit of conversation, and often provide a solution or something useful. That workflow simply doesn't exist on IRC.
There are a handful of other features that range from really-freaking-nice-to-have to essential, such as user avatars, away status, formatted code blocks, inline image display (upon seeing url), @mentions, @mentions that go to e-mail when you're away, synchronized notifications across multiple platforms, file/image upload (via copy/paste).. Some of these CAN be done with the right IRC client, but they're not universal or standardized.
Unless you have a very willing hacker willing to build the integration from scratch, IRC is bad.
There is a hurdle here, but it's not so bad if you're already willing to run your own IRC server. I wrote nodebot[0] to allow machines and scripts to send messages to IRC, it would be a day or so to put an HTTP request handler (apache with a CGI even) in front of this, slap some TLS and http auth on that URL, and expose a webhook that these external services could hit.
One of the great things about slack is that many integrations already exist, so it's often just a matter of sharing an API key or some other credentials between the services, and anyone can do that. I do, however, run into issues with things like github which has many outgoing integrations with services that also use github's incoming API. It can quickly become a mess -- where should the authority lie for doing integrations: with the chat app or with the individual services?
> Look at ICQ, Microsoft instant messenger, etc. It seems as though slack like tools get eclipsed every 5-10 years as a new generation comes along with a new favorite tool.
Unlike ICQ, MSN, AIM, YIM, etc., Slack is explicitly intended for companies and businesses to use as a work tool. There are some OSS communities that use it as well, but Slack very clearly discourages that use case.
The "stickiness" of work tools is higher than consumer-oriented applications in general, but especially for something like Slack, which is focusing on integrating other productivity features or products[0], I don't think ICQ is a great pattern of what we should expect.
[0] as we've seen by their announcement just this week
AIM/ICQ is still alive. Yahoo! Messenger is still alive. MSN Messenger has a migration path to Skype. Doesn't seem like that distinction makes a lot of difference.
This is a very interesting point. Is there any IP in Slack? Or can Microsoft build it in Office / Skype / etc etc and basically block Slack off of the enterprise?
Building the ecosystem would be tough, but the capability seems doable by Microsoft or any other company with resources (Google?).
> Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella were among those unconvinced by the idea, with Gates pushing instead to add more features into Skype to make it more competitive with Slack in the business market, our source says.
I'd say fix it first.
Somehow the Skype name has gone from being an asset to being a liability to the point where I cannot understand why they renamed Lync to "Skype for business".
They've finally fixed this with the last update to the Skype for Business client.
It's still a huge clusterfuck of a rebranding. The two clients are just barely compatible, and it's a huge mess when you're building a Skype for Business tool, and the users think they can use regular Skype to do anything with it.
Hopefully "investing in Skype" is a code word for building out an API for Office 365 Skype integrations that actually works. They've only been promising it for two or three years.
They have regularly bought out companies in that space (last one was Ray Ozzie's Talko, in December, and they specifically said "Talko was acquired to help fuel future innovation in Skype and Skype for Business. As part of the Skype team, we’ll leverage Talko’s technology and the many things we’ve learned during its design and development.").
I think the meaning got lost here :( . I was genuinely hoping for Skype & Microsoft to benefit, it was not sarcastic or anything, and I thought it was relevant information.
Don't fix it, just rewrite it. Honestly. If they're focusing on Skype I think that would be great. The feats of that program are innumerable, including breaking system-wide sound settings. I simply can not fathom why it would want to change them.
As for "Skype for Business," it's significantly less stable than Skype. If Lync fails we switch to Skype.
For me, system-wide sounds aren't changed, but I can specify non-system sounds, so that I have my headset plugged in, am listening to music from speakers, if a Skype call rings it rings on the speakers, and I answer and take the call using the headset. I've not seen it change system settings.
Skype is horrible. I'm sorry but it is such an awful tool. It crashes, it loses my old conversations, group calls never work. It is truly horrible, the codebase is a rotting pile of garbage that will never be fixed.
I am glad that Slack will not be eaten by Microsoft. I hope they really do implement voice soon.
They have! It's in beta, but we've been using it at my workplace for 2 days now. Audio only so far. Better audio quality than anything else we use (appear.in, lync, hangouts, among others).
Integrated into slack, so you click a button in a channel to start a call anyone in the channel can join. Nice.
And the constant forced password resets -- and then you can't reuse passwords, so there are even more password resets. Of course you sign in after a password reset, you're greeted with another password reset.
Most recently, Skype told me I've lost control of my gmail account an invited me to create a hotmail account to link with my Skype account instead. Wtf?
Sad thing is that Slack would be a far better fit for Microsoft, given that it's primarily business-focused. I've used Skype for work but only because it's the only option we've had, not because anyone actually wants to use it. Hangouts and Slack are so much more business-friendly.
That said, I think MS made the right call given that they already own Skype. It could be good - great, even - if they actually tried. They don't need a Slack acquisition for that, but they probably could do with rebuilding every native app they have from the ground up, every single one is awful.
I don't understand why Skype is so crappy. Most Microsoft software is at the very least average, with several products being industry standards. Why is Skype so different?
I've always assumed that the acquisition failed horribly. The apps are still the same code as pre-acquisition, and I'll bet a lot of the original developers left pretty sharpish. It's quite possible that the original codebase is an absolute train wreck, it's not as if it was ever an amazing app, after all.
I wonder if MS acquired Skype today (i.e. "The New Microsoft") whether they'd have been more successful.
On the consumer (not "for Business") side of things, I think some of it is the long running experiment to make Skype a platform and merge said platform deeper into the broader ecosystem of apps. With Windows 10 I think we're finally starting to see some of that shake out and some of that improve.
It's very interesting seeing the seamless merger of Skype into the Messaging, People, and Phone apps in Windows 10. Having finally figured out the new Windows 10 Skype Video app I realized that I could uninstall the classic desktop app and the Windows 8 version of Skype mobile that is (weirdly) still in the Windows Store on mobile as if it is still a useful app (and in which case it is not), unlike its short-lived tablet/desktop counterpart.
You can still see some of the uneven edges: the reason I had to figure out the Skype Video app was that it is the only one that currently supports accepting or making Skype contact requests, before you can link them in People. (I presume that sort of functionality should eventually merge in the People app more directly?) Also, there's still that slight friction between traditional Skype accounts and using Microsoft accounts for Skype that I'm unsure if there will ever be a clean fix.
I think that the "Skype Video" should be named something like Videophone to better align with brand-less Messaging, Phone app names, but that's a marketing quibble.
I do like the way that SMS messaging and Skype messaging interleave in the Messaging app now. It's nice having only one app for that. I wish it supported merging in Facebook's Messenger as well, but I realize that won't happen for many, many reasons.
As for Skype for Business, I think it's been solid since its Lync-branded days. I'm curious if they can get the sort of "platform leverage" we are seeing on the consumer side of things, but it doesn't necessarily need it. If they make it more Slack-like, that could be interesting.
For me Skype has been great for years. Sure the Windows Store version was unusable but switching back to the regular version fixed issues for me. I saw it used at my last workplace to great savings - they used it to speak to their offshore person for free. We switched to Slack there but Skype continued to be used for voice communications.
Microsoft also owns GroupMe (www.groupme.com) and that solution has been pretty cool as well. I was surprised to find how focused Microsoft has quietly become on messaging products.
That doesn't sound so much as Skype being good as VOIP being good too you. Skype itself in my experience, and all those I know, has been abhorrent. Chat messages appearing out of order and once literally months later, incorrect status indicators, automatic noise cancelling messes up the volume sometimes (it seems to happen when the signal/noise plummets for a bit) forcing you to recall to get usable audio levels again, multi-platform support is a joke, having to delete %appdata% every other update in order to be able to log in, intrusive ads, a lack of audio device at startup seems to freeze up any windows audio afterwards until Skype is killed (This could be Windows itself ofc, but it's both Microsoft)...
As an aside, this is regular old Skype, I've heard it being said that "Skype for Business" is a completely different program.
I remember performing the periodic AppData cleanup in 2009/2010 but haven't had to do that in the last few years. It was during that time that the chat delay issues were very common as well. From my point of view, while the Microsoft takeover and remake initially brought difficulties with login, the recent versions were not too bad apart from the Windows 8 Store version mess. But that is just my experience.
While I personally don't use the chat functionality that often anymore, the few times I have used it (say when an interview was being done over Skype), it worked ok but I realize that is hardly a high-use model. I agree that other messaging solutions such as Hangouts, HipChat, Slack, GroupMe, and etc. appear to perform much more seamlessly without needing to be aware of idiosyncrasies.
Unfortunately, I can't say - I use it on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, along with Android without issues. One thing I do that Skype appears to discourage is restart the application. This means don't allow it to launch on startup, I don't save my password (this is my practice with most apps), and I kill it if I know I won't need it; the latter is not practical if you need to be in constant touch with teams. I am not sure if any of this is a factor in my experience.
Every software project is maintained by different teams, sometimes different departments. For example the Office team is managed differently from the Bing team. Just like the Visual Studio team will have a different management from the Skype one.
It is possible that the skype team has a different standard, different priorities imposed by the managers.
Agreed that it's weird. IME, Microsoft is always best when they have healthy competition. They only get crappy when they are the monopoly, so why is it different for skype?
I really hate Skype, but unfortunately Skype has no alternative for group audio / video calls, with the occasional screen sharing. Hangouts seemed promising, but it's worse. But I can tell you that at our company we are giving up on Slack, but not on Skype.
> rebuilding every native app they have from the ground up, every single one is awful
On Mac OS X, which is what I use, it's acceptable. I found it to be fairly acceptable on iOS as well, though you can't rely on receiving group chat messages in time (in all honesty, I think that's a feature :)). I don't use Windows, I imagine it's fine there.
On Linux it's super awful. I have hope for the new web interface to replace my needs for a Linux client, but the web interface is awful as well. On Android last year it leaked my battery like crazy. Nowadays it's maybe better in battery usage, but I had problems with my microphone - if I mute and then un-mute, then it can happen for the mic to not recover and I have to reinitiate the call. It's super annoying.
My personal feeling is that Microsoft does not invest enough resources in these clients. On the primary platforms they always seem to be one or two bugs away from being OK. On Linux it's like the same client from 5 years ago and it still works, but it never got any love from Microsoft. So I think they simply didn't give a crap, hoping to lure people into Lync or something. Which is too bad, because Skype always had great potential, it still has.
Hangouts works far better for me than Skype. It just works. With skype, I struggle to even create video conversation. I remember one fateful day when I tried 4 different devices with skype installed, and had a complete failure to get any of them to work.
It depends on your location I guess. I'm from Romania and travel and speak with people mostly in Europe. I've had the same failure you mention with Hangouts. And video quality was never OK whenever I tried, with frames being dropped and so on. Whereas Skype has been OK even on my mobile 3G/4G connection and I'm a heavy user.
In fairness, Skype had a couple of major network outages. Maybe you hit one of those.
My group switched from Skype to Zoom (.us) a year or so back. We did try using Hangouts for a few months, but we found the browser plugin pretty terrible for pegging the CPU at 100%, even when not in use. In comparison, Zoom has vastly better video and audio quality, allows group chats with very large numbers of participants, and allows screen sharing and chat on the side.
Shame really, we used to be pretty heavy cross-platform users of Skype. But it had annoying problems with group limits and audio quality before the Microsoft acquisition, and that quality seemed to take a nosedive shortly afterward. On the positive side, there are at least better alternatives cropping up.
Really glad MS didn't buy Slack. I think they're going to be an amazing big business that will generate a lot of cash and opportunity.
Most acquisitions by big businesses, either early or late stage, destroy value. Big biz thinks they can innovate by buying. Smaller biz wants an exit. The innovation exits on acquisition and after earn-out. Both suffer and we all lose what could have been the next Google.
Same. Being sold to a big company would (probably) be death to Slack as a product. I like it the way it is now - lean, small, simple. Integration is possible but only if you install specific extensions. Let it be its own niche, nothing wrong with it. Not every app needs to conquer the world.
And as much as I like the "new" Microsoft, I certainly would hate to see Outlook, Office, and other corporatey scrap spilling into Slack.
I think it depends on the level where the business acts on.
If you have a real low level technology, an acquisition can be a good thing, because the big corp could integrate it some of their products and increase the spreading.
But yeah, if we look at Skype and WhatsApp, it's probably good that Slack didn't get acquired.
Weren't both of these somewhat successful acquisitions? i.e. Would Skype have been better today without the acquisions, and did WhatsApp suffer product-wise as a result of being part of FB?
Even more focus on Skype? Great, maybe they can break it even more. Every chat client, developed by 2 guys in their free time works far better the skype chat. Message not delivered, hundrets of new messages when a new client logs in, annyoing link replacment with pictures, group chats not working, adding people to calls not working and so much more.
From their results from previous acquisitions, I don't understand what they think they would get by purchasing Slack (unless it is a purely defensive move against Slack developing an in-house document collaboration service, Office 365/Google Docs style).
Bringing document collaboration side-by-side with team communication could have a positive effect on productivity, and Slack could roll it into the per user pricing they already have.
What amazes me is just how bad the politics in MS must be to not swat Slack aside like a fly.
Slack is basically an IRC server with bots. Office communicator / Msn messenger/ whatever it is now / is installed on every Windows / office machine and ties into the moat used apps in the world.
MS-Slack ought to have "Mary just updated the Walmart contract" messages flinging around every marketing department in the world.
The fact it does not is testament to how far Giants can fall (in the 80s and 90s Microsoft would have already danced on Slacks grave).
Larry And Sergey need to study Microsoft a lot more carefully than "it was Ballmers fault" to try and avoid the same fate.
edit: to expand. Slack has 0 technology moat. The reason Github has been so successful and has gone many years without significant competition, is that it is an open platform in the sense that I have my personal, work, and private repos there. Many open source stuff is up there, and the platform allows me to contribute to my private repos, public repos and quickly download software.
To some extent slack has this idea where you can have 3 or 4 organizations in the app, but user to user seems to not be implemented, or at least non-obvious. Everything is siloed in an org.
lots of companies and apps are working on chat and are substitutes for pieces. It was not obvioius Github could make money or was significant for a long time. Professional chat is the opposite.
* Low barrier to entry
* high competition
* limited revenue/margin
* open source alternatives
* largely based on users/social proof. e.g. could get myspaced.
* competing in a space that is "hot" and many larger companies are moving in, already poised to take this.
I'm not really bullish on Slack as a product, but I don't think Slack as a business is so bad. I think Slack is trying to be the Yammer of IRC: you get it in through a couple of people using it, and all of a sudden you convert the entire enterprise, hence the focus on marketing.
Hipchat/Flowdock/probably others existed before Slack, and are still largely interchangeable at this point, but they're not investing so heavily in marketing.
I think a direct comparison to MySpace is inaccurate since neither they nor their competitors are directly viral (yet?), but they could certainly be replaced.
The question is: who would want to spend a pile of money trying to outmarket Slack? It's hard to tell what their sales figures are, but if they get lodged in the public's view as the company that does this, it will take concerted, capital-intensive effort to dislodge them, and why would you go to that effort for a low margin space?
Open Source is really not relevant in this space since the price is cheap and you're paying for convenience.
Skype reliability has deteriorated considerably over the years. We have switched over to Google Hangouts which is more reliable and has better video quality.
Has it even recovered $1 billion in profit from the $8.5 billion it paid for Skype itself 5 years ago? And Skype's best days may be behind it. I wonder if they'll do another big write-off in 3 years like they did for aQuantive and Nokia.
Yammer does seem like a better fit, branding and technology wise, for a Slack-like service than Skype. Microsoft has overextended the Skype brand. The new Skype services are so notoriously crappy that they are a liability to the name. Let the Skype brand focus exclusively on real-time video/multimedia communication. Let the Yammer brand focus on asynchronous, web-based communication for enterprises.
How about they start by focusing on better linux and OSX compatibility. Skype is horribly broken right now. Linux client hasn't been updated in 3 years:
Also, I added $10 skype credit a while back when I needed to make few international phone calls. I used about $3 of it. The rest $7 was in my account for a while and then it disappeared. What's the reasoning behind that? It's totally unacceptable to have credits disappear like that. In that same period I added $10 to Viber as well and I still have $8 remaining on it even after 1.5 years.
Small anecdote about Skype specifically as an instant messenger.
When eBay acquired Skype there was little willing adoption of it for IMs at eBay corporate. AIM (through whatever client) was the de facto standard. Management didn't like this but also didn't have the courage to say, "Skype is what you're using now."
So there was an embarrassingly transparent mandate from "IT" that AIM was disallowed due to a vague (but critical) "security" concern. That somehow persisted across versions and years.
This was sort of my experience of working at eBay and my impression of its management in a nutshell.
Skype may be good for voice/video, I don't know. It's a terrible instant messenger. The only one I ever used where I had to worry about it swallowing messages and couldn't just assume the recipient got them.
All my enterprise clients are MSFT shops. They will make due with whatever collaboration tools that MSFT provides. Also, they would never use a product from a company named "Slack".
Exactly. To some extent, all Microsoft has to do is make their product offering good enough to prevent folks from leaving for products like Slack or Hipchat. Skype for business allows you to send ims, files, share your screen and clumsily do group chats. It does most everything people need to do well enough and it comes pre-installed with Office.
"route everything through government surveillance" is perhaps a bit too blunt, but let's not forget that Microsoft was the founding member of the PRISM program.
And Prism or no Prism-- Skype was a $1bn present from Microsoft to the intelligence community. Even if they never snooped on anything (we know they have) they did re-engineer skype in a manner that allows it to be subject to more traditional CALEA trap and trace techniques, as well a numerous side channel attacks and traffic interception. The "secret sauce" of Skype in the very beginning was P2P connections, which MSFT immediately removed.
I don't know if I would characterize what they were doing as snooping. Is Google snooping when GMail does a keyword scan of your email? IIRC, Microsoft was loading the URL to look for malware.
Woah woah woah. Comparing Slack to Skype... it's not just apples to oranges... it's comparing Iron Man's Jarvis to a rotary telephone.
Slack is how we bring together all of our project data -- from all of our tools -- in one place, and how we automate tasks like daily Scrum and contract creation. Slack asks us, "Hey what are you working on today? What are your blockers?" and builds an automated list. We can ask Slack to do work for us, like, "Slack, create an MSA from our template and send it Joe at Clientcorp." A million other uses. Slack is great and saving SO much time.
Skype sits unused and spams me every month asking me to put in more quarters for some bizarre concept of "long-distance" phone calls. And honestly the UX is so horrible, it's going to take a total re-launch to make it something I'd even consider installing again.
Keep in mind that the acquisition value is not just the code. There's also the brand, the userbase, the engineers, and not having to actually do it themselves.
I wonder why Discord isn't more popular, it's basically Slack with voice chat baked in that works really well. All of your favorite Slack shortcuts work exactly the same. Even pressing the Up arrow key to edit your last message.
I guess the 'gamer' branding hurts it's potential use in the workplace.
It's far more than web-based IRC and has a substantial userbase, a significant number of whom are paying for the service. Given the failures MS has had with communication tools in the past, I'm not surprised at all they mulled an $8B acquisition of Slack
Mobile clients, persistent chat history when switching clients/devices, search, @mentions notify you when you're away from your desk, and easy integrations with lots of services.
I tried to use Dropbox but it just didn't have what I wanted it to have. So, I find it to be not only replaceable, but awfully inferior to the x+y+z-style solutions.
They should just ditch all of their efforts to try to make Skype or Lync working and either start it over or acquire a company that can do voice/video calls and text chat reliably like WeChat for example. Skype is such a tragic product that I can hardly believe that anybody would using it in a corporate environment if it wasn't MS who were pushing for it. One interesting question that comes up in my mind: is group voice calling a really hard problem to solve? At this stage I am much more likely to use a simple phone conference than Skype because it works just so much better. Curious what others think.
Before I started to use Slack more frequently I was in a Skype chat group with some ex colleagues of mine. We simply started a group chat and just kept it consistent.
It was actually a pretty easy and great way to share links and discuss things. We even toyed with some ideas around a link grabber for alle the stuff we shared there. We only moved to Slack because of better support for link sharing and some other things.
If Microsoft can't figure out how to turn Skype into a Slack competitor they are more than welcome to contact me. I have plenty of ideas on how to to do that :)
Slack works on Linux, which is a big deal for some teams. Before people jump on me, stating, "Linux market share for dev machines is too small to matter." Consider that there are some members of organizations who need to use it. Is an org going to leave those users out in the dark? Slack working on Linux is quite convenient for my team, which has some Linux and OSX users. Lync and Skype on Linux just don't work (at least, I couldn't get them working).
Microsoft should have been the most natural choice of in-team communication. While their sales team was busy selling crappy software to large companies and ignoring small ones someone built a kick-ass product called Slack.
It does not make sense for Microsoft to buy slack. Microsoft already has the sales muscle to reach millions. What Microsoft does not have is a product that can compete with Slack. They should build it ASAP as part of their Office suite. Skype is not that solution.
This situation strangely reminds me of MSN Messenger for anyone old enough to remember that. It ended in failure. Most blamed Microsoft's management for it.
I keep hearing over and over about how horrible Skype is. I've been using it for over 5 years (on OS X) now and I have not noticed any issues, and the improvements to UI over the years made it really nice and user friendly. So I don't really know if people who complain about it actually used it in the recent years or not.
I've been recently (eg, had a meeting yesterday) interacting with a company that uses Skype for meetings, and I think by far, it's the worst meeting software I've used (vs Webex, joinme, Gotomeeting, etc).
It takes several minutes to get things connected and working -- especially the first time, when you have to install something (not sure if it's the full skype client?) to even view the meeting. Screen sharing has some really stupid flaws, like not being able to go full screen on the client-side. Phone integration usually works, once you find the right number in a list of several dozen phone numbers (not sure if this is Skype or the business using it), though it shows you in the meeting as a separate "unknown" user (even if you've also joined via PC).
I think the problem is that they are using a wrong tool for the job, because of that you are comparing Skype to a meeting software, but Skype is not focused on being a meeting software, it is focused on friends and family video calls by proving a simple interface and basic functions.
I still really like HipChat but the latest versions have been unbelievably bad. Connection issues, message delivery issues, users showing up as offline who are actually online, etc... If they don't fix things soon we're going to have switch to Slack.
I kept getting logged out a couple of times a day, HipChat support recommended reverting to 3.X and "ignoring the upgrade popups". That didn't really help. It times out over night so the first thing you have to do in the morning is remember to "refresh" your HipChat connection. It doesn't flag conversations as having new content while you are away so catching up means visiting every room. It flushed my configuration a few times, so I had to reopen all the rooms I'm in and reconfigure all my settings.
Basically it became I tool I maintained instead of a tool that made my life easier.
What a disaster that would have been. The people that use Slack are much younger than the enterprise customers that Microsoft has. It would have been another failed acquisition.
Plus we used Slack and moved aggressively back to HipChat. I thought it was fine but there's no real difference between Slack and Hipchat.
Slack might of made a great addition to Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code... I really don't want to see it happen though, they need to fix up some odd security problems with Skype and the sluggishness of Skype is really bad, used to be somewhat bad, but lately it's gotten worse.
I've always thought of Skype as a personal product that was also used for business, and Slack as a primarily business oriented product. I'm afraid if Skype gets more features rammed into it for groupware, then it'll be even more bloated.
That's Microsoft's issue with Skype: they fail to realize that the marketplace determines what a product is.*
If you took a well-known, purpose-built apartment building and converted it in to offices, you know what people would say? "Why would I set up my office in an apartment building?"
Regardless of how good they could make Skype, it's always going to be Skype: the cool thing you use to talk to your brother who's living in Costa Rica for the year.
—
*That being said, if you've done your due diligence and really understand your audience, you can do a better job at creating a product that directs the attention of the user toward the thing you'd prefer.
This is just sad. Slack and Github fit into their strategy perfectly as they both tie into productivity. This must be another one of those bad moves from Bill Gates.
First Microsoft destroyed Skype, now they want to destroy Slack? Hopefully not gonna happen.
We're in the process of moving away from Skype, which we used for 10 years in the company, to Slack. Partners went away from Skype to Flowdock and Hipchat.
Instead of buying Slack, Microsoft should invest to make Skype great again. Yet I'm not sure if this is still possible after they broke all features Skype excelled at.
Or use the money to found a new competitor.
But please don't buy Slack. This can only fail.
The real question is, would Stewart B. take the offer?
Anyone who cares about their product knows a sale to MS is a death knell for innovation. Becoming a hit like Slack is such a rare opportunity. I mean, why are you in this business if not for a chance to build a transformative platform? Which is what Slack has right now, a chance.
remember that Stewart is a Canadian and that 8 Billion US dollars is approximately 2.6 Trillion Canadian loonies, that's just about enough to get him a nice 2 bedroom condo somewhere near downtown Vancouver ;)
It also raises the question of how much ownership he retains of the company and how much of this would actually be his decision (vs. his investors looking for an exit) given that they've raised a Series E round and have taken ~$340M in funding [1].
Remember that the Series E round was on a very large valuation. He surely gave up a much greater % in the early days when the company was still working on a game.
And Skype will continue to be terrible. Just installed Office 2013 with its included 'Skype for Business' and boy does it look terrible. Its got a distinct MSN Messenger from the early 2000's vibe going on. Lots of buttons, very bright color choices (lots of white and bright blue).
Unless Microsoft rebuilds Skype for the ground up, I don't see us leaving Slack for it. They had their chance, and they dropped the ball.