It's amazing to me that Slack has been so successful, considering how so many other alternatives exist.
I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur.
It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
I finally realized that the web version works pretty well so now I just use that when I need to use Slack.
I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.
> I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client
IRC isn't a credible alternative for most users in 2017. It stagnated ages ago, which is obvious from problems like the fact that you can't even write a multi-line message.
My personal opinion is that Slack has been so successful primarily because nothing older than it (IRC, Campfire, HipChat) was a decently modern product by the time Slack launched and Slack was really good at marketing.
Personally, I'm trying to solve the problem of open source projects increasingly moving to Slack by working on Zulip, the leading open source alternative to Slack by contributor activity. Here's our story for why one should prefer Zulip to Slack for fellow open source projects (written a few days ago; feedback welcome!): https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/
> My personal opinion is that Slack has been so successful primarily because nothing older than it (IRC, Campfire, HipChat) was a decently modern product by the time Slack launched and Slack was really good at marketing.
I disagree about the decent competitors -- there is e.g. Flowdock which in many ways (such as proper threading) is still better than Slack, and was doubly so back then. I think it's more about access to VC money and network effects, and indeed the successful marketing you mentioned.
It's funny, we were early (?) adopters of Flowdock, back in about 2012, on one particular project. We used it fairly happily for a year or so, and then just sort of forgot all about it and drifted back to Skype (I think with a brief flirtation with Hipchat whilst we were doing something Atlassian-centric), probably because Skype was free and Flowdock wasn't. In around 2014 suddenly everybody started using Slack, and I found myself wondering how, really, it was much of an improvement over Flowdock and why it gained massive traction. (I suspect marketing and the fact that Slack is effectively free for many types of teams.)
Now that you mentioned it, Slack being free was probably a huge factor indeed. Flowdock should have adopted some kind of a free tier for tiny teams too to stay competitive.
Flowdock was a more opinionated service and that was IMO to it's detriment. It's primary usage wasn't internal communication but rather communication around social media.
Slack took the simplicity of IRC and gave it a modern interface with things like showing a preview when you link. easily share files etc.
> It's primary usage wasn't internal communication but rather communication around social media.
What makes you think that? I don't see any connection between Flowdock and social media. As far as I can see, it's purely an internal communication tool with easy file sharing, hooks for external services as GitHub, and so on.
As far as I remember it started as that. But maybe that's not accurate. I just remember them pushing how twitter could be monitored and then important tweets could be send around the organization to deal with them.
That feature is a flow (or channel) specific "inbox". You can add different sources such as e-mail, GitHub pushes, CI results, or the Twitter you mentioned. Basically looks like an in-channel RSS feed of different sources. Personally I love the feature.
A neat thing is that you can start a discussion thread from any of these items, so the context of the discussion is clear.
Oh I like FlowDock a lot was just trying to explain how I believe Slack won over it by being less opinionated about how it approaches conversation. It's IRC core functionality and then apps on top for specific needs.
Flowdock went a little further ahead when it came to how they constructed the base communication.
Flowdock has great ambitions, but it was hard to wrap your head around it. Slack came in with an unapologetic focus on chat, which helped anchor it in people's minds. They certainly want to be and do more than chat, but using that frame of reference really helped them.
This is interesting to me. I've used it at the last three companies ranging from 15 people to 1700 people. No issues really. Considering how often HipChat went down prior to Slack, Slack is a welcomed replacement.
As for alternatives, I don't really know if many do exist. Slack offers their free version, which allows teams to use it pretty much without any strings to see if they like it. It provides great functionality in a simple UI (you may disagree, that's totally fine), and solves a problem - Office Communication.
It has been a productivity increase for the teams I've been on as it is much, much better than email chains, easier to add code snippets, images, and the fairly rich ecosystem of plugins/bots is icing on the cake for me.
The other day it took me an hour to wire up a couple endpoints in Node, add them as slack slash commands and boom, I was able to add three commands for QA department that resolved some heartburn for them.
I think Slack did a good job with a base product, and they simply solved a pain point in a better way.
> I think Slack did a good job with a base product, and they simply solved a pain point in a better way.
I agree with this, but haven't found it to be preferable to hipchat. I definitely think it's a well designed product in many ways, I'm just surprised the valuation for such a thing is that high.
I look forward to seeing what new innovations and improvements are in the future.
One of the companies I used HipChat at before they switched to Slack and the only reason they ended up switching was there was a 4 week period where HipChat kept going down so one of the engineers setup a free slack room. It got used often in lieu of HipChat as it never went down.
I'd agree that they're both good, but if it's the main communication tool for your company the #1 priority is that it stays online.
I've used Mattermost in the past and found it worked quite well. I don't know if it has the same number of integrations Slack does, but as a chat-room/text-communication tool it works well enough. It's also open-source and self-hosted. Perhaps I don't understand enough about how Slack works, but it seems like a huge security risk to me to couple (potentially) sensitive content (chat, e-mails, etc) with a hosted service.
> I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.
I'd say you'd be far from the only one. The thing that Slack really brought was an improved onboarding experience, but I have a (probably somewhat vain) hope that protocols will win over corporate controlled walled gardens.
Matrix[1] / Riot[2] are really promising and I really hope we settle on something like that sometime down the road.
We recently did a test run for Mattermost to see if it's a better fit for us than Slack.
This is a note to others who may be considering the same. Specific needs will vary greatly across teams/companies.
We found Mattermost web client to be ok, however phone apps and integration coverage are both poor by comparison to Slack. We also found running, securing, and maintaining our own server to be roughly as or more expensive than using Slack.
I'm hopeful the Mattermost project keeps momentum to improve. Currently though it doesn't quite seem in the same league.
This will likely always be the case with open source chat solutions.
Developing clients is hard. Especially good UIx and complex feature sets across a zillion platforms like Slack does. A lot of their day I bet these days is simply tracking down obscure bugs on certain platform combinations and trying to keep feature parity between everything working properly. I think most of us can stipulate Slack does a decent job there - or at minimum is far better than the competing (open) solutions.
I really wish there was a Slack alternative where I could purchase a really nice unified frontend and simply connect to an open protocol backend such as IRC or Jabber or whatever. This was the original intent behind IRC as well - back in the 90's there were a number of shareware style IRC clients developed for Windows - and you saw some interesting protocol hackery to make some more graphical features work.
I have yet to see open source really truly compete in the "client" arena, save for an exceedingly few notable exceptions. However, it excels at the backend where you will have developer interest and competence - and the long tail of possible bugs (and user competence) is a much more sane problem to tackle.
No, I do not expect this to ever exist for obvious reasons :)
Our focus is helping increase productivity for companies who need total control of their infrastructure. Thousands of companies use Mattermost for that purpose and we're excited about bring them more and more value in each of our monthly releases.
Might still be a good alternative to companies that want Slack, but cannot afford to pay for it? (Assuming they're not finding what they need in the free version.)
We found Mattermost to be more expensive than a paid version of Slack for our team of 16 after factoring in the costs of hosting, maintaining, and securing our own servers. It shifts the engineering cost burden onto your team.
As others point out, Mattermost vs. Slack is more a discussion of self-hosted vs. 3rd party cloud-hosted.
Matrix is really wonderful and I hope it will continue to grow. It's federated, like IRC and unlike Slack. Also there's good support for bridges to other chat protocols / services, so matrix may be the solution to _reducing_ the number of chat clients you need to interact with.
"Just works" is a relative term - I use both slack and irc at work, and it took about 2 minutes to get slack running and start using it intuitively on day one. Getting into irc was a much longer process that involved researching different clients, trying to figure out why my server credentials weren't working, and realizing that they were correct the whole time after doing a reboot, then learning how to join and discover channels, filter out noise, etc etc and I still get very little use out of it. It's just for server alerts now, mostly. Every other conversation has moved to slack.
Its horribleness is the horribleness of IRC itself though. The gateway preserves all the parts of Slack that you can do on IRC - it just turns out that's not actually so much of it.
Slack (and clones) allows multiline messages with some light markdown formatting, bold, italic, monospace inline, monospace block, quote block. Technical and non technical people can use it. Some non technical people may even learn some basic formatting.
IRC doesn't do all that, especially multiline messages.
I don't understand how a multiline message in the Slack interface is any different from two single line messages. If the issue is you just want to type them at once and have them sent in one go, I agree with you, but clients for IRC definitely have had that feature. IRC also supports formatting like bold and italic: if you want the interface for that to be markdown, that sounds like a trivial addition to any standard IRC client.
But everyone in the team would have to set up their client. Not everyone would want to setup their client the same way (understandably). And not everyone is interested enough in setting up an IRC client, especially the "not technical enough people".
IRC –the protocol– isn't made for that.
IRC clients can, but don't.
IRC has never been very usable, and some combination of its userbase or its very nature resists all efforts to make it more usable. You can't get history in any kind of standardised way (the workaround, such as it is, is to run a bouncer program somewhere you have a unix shell account and hope that host stays up), the multi-client experience is dreadful, rich-text support is barely there and forget about links, embedded images, or file uploads, authentication is not at all standardised and differs a lot from server to server.
IRC offered a unique featureset for many years - nothing else offered the same global scale and large-group-oriented chats. People will put up with very poor usability if it's the only product with a feature they need.
Yes, large distributed groups where people can drop in/drop out is IRC's niche, and why it will never die. I prefer IRC for large open-source projects to Slack, but the usability is awful for a company environment. At my school, we use Slack for research groups, study groups, and student project teams, and it's excellent for that.
I'm not convinced IRC will never die; for a while it was the only thing that covered that use case, but these days there are other options (e.g. Discord).
I've been using the Linux client pretty much since its initial release and it's been nothing short of perfect for me. No problems with updates either. What problems do you have?
My two specific problems: I have an unresolved bug report open with them regarding failing to clear notifications, and the Linux client is the only of the 3 desktop clients that doesn't allow you to switch off the notifications dot, which is a super basic feature.
Unfortunately they haven't. We recently moved away from slack because it's just too buggy using the desktop clients and nobody wants to have to keep it open in a browser the whole time.
> I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client
Yep, and IRC and its plethora of clients are totally bug-free /s
IRC netsplits alone are far more annoying than any slack bug I've encountered.
> It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created.
You definitely can log out of a team in the OS X app (e.g. right click the team icon, click "remove" or go to the team dropdown and sign out). Or if you want to actually deactivate your account, there's a link (somewhere) in the app that opens your browser where you deactivate your account.
> the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
Not in my experience. You don't even have to reset your password. You can have slack email you a magic link as a method of logging in. Open your email, click the magic link, and you're logged in.
> Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC
How? Slack has an IRC gateway, but IRC doesn't have standardized ways of even sharing files (everything I'm aware of is client based). So how do you implement Slack's feature-set (even ignoring video/voice calls) over IRC without requiring everyone to use a special client?
The thing is though is that it would be quite difficult to run Slack over IRC with feature parity. The basics are easy like channels and users, but venturing into private channels, group-DMs, custom emojis, (video) calling/screen sharing, status emoji/message, would all require so much custom work on top that the service wouldn't be fully usable over an IRC client apart from Slack's.
IRC had a lot of these but they required clients to agree on the direct connect protocol. But the core statements you're making still hold. It's a lot of work and Slack had done a solid job. It also acts as a repository in the way no IRC server ever did. The closest that irc came was irc bouncers that maintained persistence and logging.
It also acts as a repository in the way no IRC server ever did. The closest that irc came was irc bouncers that maintained persistence and logging.
Yep. Some people at work are super resistant to using slack and prefer IRC, even though slack will make their lives easier. And I get that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude, but I can't help but shake my head at the people managing these IRC bouncers at work. Like they'd rather die managing these cloud VMs running ZNC than ever use slack. Those bouncers are likely to be poorly-secured. They can see nothing when ZNC dies and the external servers don't play well with the corporate firewall (literally, people send IRC traffic through ports 80 or 443 because they can't get through the firewall otherwise).
And don't get me started on teams running bots in order to get github/jira/ci/etc integration with IRC. It's just insanity. Just use slack and its dead simple, no-bots-required webhooks/apps. Quit wasting the company's time standing up all this additional infrastructure because you're too stubborn to switch to a better chat client.
>but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC
I wish popular Slack alternatives would support each others protocols, even if the support was not perfect.
It feels that alternatives like Rocket.chat and Mattermost are still way too closed. I'm not sure if the dev teams are interested in supporting multiple protocols though, as it might be too much work for something that will keep breaking.
Sorry you had so many problems with the OSX app. I can't really say the same. We've been mainly working with slack in our company and most of us use it on a MacBook Air, everything working absolutely fine.
IRC doesn't have a user interface, it's a protocol. The interface varies based on which client you are using. One can make an IRC client that looks like slack.
Image embedding depends on the client you use really. For example The Lounge [1] can display information about links and show image previews like Slack does.
That's very different. In Slack, I, as the poster, can decide whether to show a preview (it might be pointless and take up space), and add metadata to it. It's also searchable by _anyone_ in the chat history. The uniformity of these features matters, and you need protocol support for that.
>I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur.
That's strange, cause we have been heavily using it for 2 years at a team of 100+ and have yet to find any bug to write home about, and basically nothing affecting day to day use (mostly OS X clients).
>It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
While no doubt there are bugs, those all seem like corner cases.
"un-join" a team works fine when the admins un-join you, for example, which is more likely in a business use case.
I also don't think "updates frequently force a logout" even qualifies as a bug. Heck, OS X and Windows updates force a full reboot.
And how often does one "partially creates" a team they have to remove? Even if that's a bona fide bug, it's still quite a corner case. I've seen worse bugs in XCode or Photoshop, and those are on their nth decade of existence...
We've been paying customers of Slack since the beta. In general the experience has been great. Although I do worry that with a huge funding round it will bring more employees and those employees will need stuff to do. There's only so much you can do with a chat platform, and Slack eeked out a ton of value out of it early on. What I'm seeing now is features being added or reworked seemingly just so someone has something to do. I see Apple falling into this pattern too (mDNSresponder being replaced by DiscoveryD for example).
For example, IMHO one of Slack's best features from the beginning was on the iOS app when you clicked the button to upload a photo you were presented with "Last Photo Taken", "Camera Roll", or "Take a photo". That "Last Photo Taken" button was genius. Simple and I found 90% of the time was what I wanted to do, and it just worked. In one of the last revisions of the iOS app, they removed that feature and replaced it with a newer redesigned photo picker. The new photo picker is riddled with bugs and a good percentage of the time fails to upload the photo at all for most of our paid team members. Some have resorted to using the desktop app to send a photo after transferring it over from their phone. When Slack was a small scrappy startup I'd open tickets and spend the time w/them to get them the information they needed to debug various issues, but now that they are at this scale and size I can't be bothered.
When a company like Slack gets all this money, can they decide to not spend the money? Like you said, what else could you really add? Why do companies find the need to expand?
>When a company like Slack gets all this money, can they decide to not spend the money?
Not really.
E.g. The firms investing $250 million basically would like to see ~3x return or more on their money. The want their $250 million to turn into ~$750 million. That's the whole point of investing.
If Slack simply parked $250 million in the bank for 1% interest rates, that's something Softbank could simply do themselves. If Softbank can buy $250 million treasury bills for 1% return, there's no need to give Slack $250 million to do it for them. Besides, VCs like Softbank can't survive on 1% returns; they're hoping for ~20%+ returns.
Instead, Slack is supposed to put that $250m to productive use and make the company more valuable. This makes more money for everyone including investors. (This doesn't mean Slack spends the $250m all at once though. Softbank and CEO Stewart Butterfield probably had long discussions on the strategic uses of the potential capital. Presumably, Softbank agreed with Butterfield's vision which is why they invested.)
Well, a loan would have set terms and schedules of repayment and default.
For investors, the 3x & 20% figures I gave are not formalized terms of payback. Instead, they are desirable financial targets for the investor so they can be considered a prestigious firm that attracts capital from more limited partners. Slack won't be in "default" if they provide 0% return to Softbank. However, future limited partners like university endowments or police/firemen pensions will avoid underperforming VCs that deliver low or negative returns. (If VCs don't perform to expecations, the market will punish them and they will shut down.[1])
To trace the causal chain, VCs want 20%+ because your grandmother and her pension plan investing in the VCs want 20%.
It's less about whether they can technically handle the scale (they clearly can), but more about enterprises that are going to have typical enterprise demands - security policies, encryption at rest, whitelabeling, maybe even on-premise installs. On top of that, enterprises typically aren't self service, you need to have a pretty large sales team to effectively sell to the enterprise.
obviously, but part of that investment is increasing sales velocity to enterprises. It would behoove slack to grow and get more bigCos entrenched onto the platform - switching costs and employee preference can help them get a foothold on the market to beat back competition.
I agree with what you're saying about features, however, you're assuming that taking the $250m will muddy the product.
I expect Slack has a plan for these funds, which was probably pitched to the investors. The plan was good enough to get the investment.
Until I see otherwise, I'm going to give Slack the benefit of the doubt and assume these funds will go to expand their business in a positive way which may have little to do with existing features.
Even at its previous level of funding, Slack had so much extra money they were giving it away as a private VC fund. I'm baffled as to why they need to raise more instead of just reining that one.
I think there are still interesting things Slack can do. With all that chat data, leveraging NLP and other AI to try and improve productivity and communication seems like a wonderful goal to me, but not sure if that's something on their road map.
OT: I am the only one who thinks Slack is overrated?
There are use cases where a group chat is important and crucial but almost every chat product out there has a proper group chat. Even with weaker APIs than Slack they are still ok to use. Moreover:
- Slack is the huge distraction and greatly improves ADD
- The admin UI is like a forest full of trees, slow, crowded, littered with settings and options, has more pages than Wikipedia, finding the right setting is a ten minutes task if you are not used to Slack; this is my major gripe with Slack which drives me nuts every time
- Why do I have to create new accounts with email verification with every new Slack channel?
- While people post a lot of crap on Slack (memes, gifs, jokes) important stuff is still handled over email or respective ticketing systems; so now I have many topics in Slack, email and Trello
- Slack is def. good for socializing but again--every other group chat is good enough for socializing
- Ok there is second use case: echo chambers for token ICOs and obviously there are many at the moment
- As a side note: 95% of startups and SMBs use G Suite/G Mail as their mail server which includes Google Chat which has group chat and all the features 95% of us need, which is integrated in everything (such as the address book or search works seamlessly with chat and email messages); why aren't folks just using this? Why the hassle of setting up another tool, setting up roles, team members in the horrible admin pages of Slack? Just to have an ADD powerhouse called Slack in the company? I really don't get it and if I miss something please enlighten me, I want to understand why I need Slack
With their market share and their API they have reached a nice network effect without a doubt. But the question is, is it a winner-takes-it-all market and will they ever find somebody who will buy them at that valuation.
No, I also think it's massively overrated. I hate the interface, how I have to login and create accounts for each channel and so on. I'd rather just use discord tbh, but IRC is simplest.
What in earth is some glorified chat room software going to do with enough money to have an impact on a small country's economy? It's insane.
Someone argued elsewhere in the comments that IRC and such is inaccessible for normal users. Sure, but who are the people that are using slack? Definitely not normal users. I don't think slack will last only catering to developers and such, because for example discord has a massive user base of average janes and joes and I honestly can't see what slack offers that's better.
> I have to login and create accounts for each channel
No you don't. It's per "team". Assuming that's what you meant: how many teams do you honestly use? Sure, it's not ideal for a bunch of little communities. As you said, Discord is good for that.
For a business, I haven't seen anything that even compares with Slack. I'm not sure what you consider a "normal user" (I'd argue that there is no such thing). If you mean non-technical users, then there are plenty of non-technical users in a business that need to communicate. For most businesses, they outnumber the technical people and rely on good communication tools more.
For work, Discord would be terrible for me since I can't have more than one username (to my knowledge). I want to keep my personal chats/username/status separate from my work ones.
Different people need different solutions.
BTW I'm focusing in on the business use case as that seems to be who Slack targets. They are trying to sell to people that have used Skype and Lync (or whatever they are calling it this week) and hated it.
EDIT: also, building a decent chat app is a very difficult problem. I imagine they will use that money to maintain the various clients they have and try to keep adding communication features (as they have been doing).
>What in earth is some glorified chat room software going to do with enough money to have an impact on a small country's economy? It's insane.
Not when you consider who they are going to be competing with. Microsoft and Google will make their products essentially free as part of their Office Suites.
I don't use MSFT teams, but I've seen a demo and it looks far superior to Slack. I imagine they'll be using some of those funds to shore up feature parity with MSFT.
I wouldn't be too worried about Google. Hangouts and Chat are by far the worst products I've ever used. I can't think of a single piece of software I loathe more than Hangouts.
They're supposed to be significantly improving them both - we'll see. I think it would be hard for them to justify spending something like $10b for Slack when it doesn't help move the needle on competing with Facebook.
The fact that your teammates post crap or are not great at communicating is not the fault of Slack.
> - Why do I have to create new accounts with email verification with every new Slack channel?
I think you are misunderstanding the difference between a Slack instance and a channel, but it does seem silly that it treats your login as a distinct thing on every instance. I get the impression they never thought the free version would be used so widely or that people would join and use 12 different "teams".
I think that any kind of chat is as distracting as you let it be, I would not blame that to Slack. However, I totally agree your UI points however for me it applies to Slack overall. Having a thread open on one side, middle being a war between people who use threads to reply and the others using mentions to reply and the left sidebar with bots/apps/direct messages/channels/starred things/all unreads is getting a bit populated too.
Can you suggest a pre-Slack groupchat, free-to-use, whose (cross-platform) UX doesn't suck? It seems like a pretty low bar but somehow no-one ever managed it until Slack (Skype was almost there for a while but their UX was never great and it declined over time especially on *nix ; AIM actually got it right but only after everyone had already left). Just basic stuff like: notification when mentioned specifically but not on every message, working history, doing the right thing when logged in on multiple devices.
(Discord has replaced Slack for me and my friends now, but it only came along afterwards).
> Can you suggest a pre-Slack groupchat, free-to-use, whose (cross-platform) UX doesn't suck?
There were many before Slack, e.g. HipChat but as said the in G-Mail integrated chat has an excellent group chat (assuming your organization uses the GSuite).
Nowadays, a group chat is just a commodity which many other products include.
HipChat always cost money. GChat had no native client on the desktop, and broke its userbase by initially supporting federation and then taking it away.
Ok technically you're right, but the free tier (which only predates Slack by a couple of months) was limited to 5 users, so it cost money for most use cases.
>- While people post a lot of crap on Slack (memes, gifs, jokes) important stuff is still handled over email or respective ticketing systems; so now I have many topics in Slack, email and Trello
This isn't a Slack problem it's a culture problem in your company.
I don't like how some open source and general interest communities use it for communication, as you have to go through this awkward sign up process that describes language like "welcome to the team!" and you have to set individual passwords for each team you join.
Slack seems to me like it's designed for businesses and teams to communicate, not as a public forum.
Agreed. It's missing /ignore functionality - which is typically not necessary on a team, but absolutely necessary on any sort of public communication platform.
I was recently pissed off at seeing how many open source projects use Slack despite so many issues with it.[1]
Like others have mentioned, I tried several chat clients (open source and non-open source) and realized none of them fit the bill/don't have the customizability that I wanted.
So, as stupid/crazy as this sounds, I sat down over a weekend, wrote a simple chat app on Phoenix/Elixir, hosted it on Google Cloud AppEngine, and Bingo! We were done.
I know many people will advise against this, but:
1) I'm not into devops, so this setup works really well for me since AppEngine is precisely meant for this.
2) AppEngine allows you to setup firewall rules within their interface, so I restricted access to the outside world and whitelisted only my company's IP. So, I don't really need to worry about security much.
3) Because, this is a custom solution, I was able to integrate stuff such as time tracking, verifying that confidential docs aren't shared between teams, etc.
Also, our own custom branding, client support integration within the chat (you can answer to support tickets right from within the interface).
4) I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and it integrates with my entire Saas I've developed[2] very, very nicely.
Ironically the Phoenix open source project (and similar others) themselves use Slack (why god, why?) and it's really terrible because Slack doesn't allow you to search for more than 10,000 messages. That's the last thing you want in an open source project - the inability to search for solutions / snippets of code.
That's an interesting use-case. I'm curious if Slack would find open-source work compelling enough to grant a free license for searching messages. I do know for non-profits they offer free standard plan for up to 250 people and 85% off their pricing for those above the 250 person limit.
Any chance you mind sharing that code on GitHub? I've been curious about Elixir/Phoenix lately :)
$250m for about 5% of the company, reminds me of when microsoft got 5% of facebook in an investment. Somehow I don't think this will end as well for softbank as it did for microsoft.
I think what Slack got right was the on-boarding/time to wow. In a sea of vanilla, sterile enterprise products was this tool that just seemed to be having fun with it. For small companies, particularly in the SF area, it felt like it understood their vibe. For larger companies, it felt like they were joining the cool kids. My team uses Slack now and honestly, it's nothing _that_ special. It's a chat room. It's done well and has nice integrations (that's their product moat), but adoption is so key and they nailed that.
I think Slack is that kind of product that would never happen outside of the SF. A well know founder with an access to the capital, marketing machinery machinery and critical mass of early adopters.
I like Slack and I use it but it's just because others also do. Otherwise I don't find it as amazing shift for the quality of my life or work.
Just let me block people and bots. Absurd that you can't. I emailed their support and got the most weak, SV response possible: 'If you need to block people then that shows you have a communication problem'. F-the-F-off. If we want to block people or bots who are annoying or irrelevant to us, let us!
Slack channels are hard to get into; if you've made it open via e.g. one of those auto inviter bots, you've done it to yourself. Slack is not built for big / open communities.
Who said I was talking about open communities? I don't care if someone moves a Trello ticket, e.g. on some projects, but I do want to still be able to talk about the project in the channel.
That's a communication problem, or an organizational problem. We use Slack at my company and we have a policy--developed by communication with one another--that "notification" type things of that sort go into their own channel specifically for the purpose so that anybody who is interested enough can be invited or join (if it's public).
"Bad UX" gets thrown around like "bad customer service" in retail: usually, it really means "fix my problem before I've even tried to solve it myself" and then throwing a tantrum when that doesn't happen.
I understand your frustration. Messages should come with a priority level so you can decide to filter out automated messages or gif bots, while still seeing important messages from your team.
Refreshing to see someone talk openly about that sort of thing - I've never really seen the appeal of Slack as a product, but their strategy, execution and direction has been stellar.
Raise money now on much more preferable terms when you don't need the money, store it in a war chest, improve morale/buy-in with "money on the table" for your employees/early investors.
When I first heard of slack, I signed up right away and pitched the idea to my supervisor to move to slack. It has all we need. The idea was turned down. But I still wanted to try it out. So, I setup a slack for my family. It has been a great experience. I have multiple channels, trips, events and all. My parents enjoy it. I get asked why not use "Whatsapp Groups". I did tried it, but I felt Slack was a better and I really dont like to get added to random groups without having my consent. So, I stopped using whatsapp.
I integrated Dropbox and kayak and ton of others app. My parents are not tech savvy and they can still use it.
It seems to me the only justification for them taking half a billion dollars in VC money[0] -- besides of course "because we can" -- is that Slack must have plans to grow into much, much more than the "enterprise group-chat app."
As annoying as Slack's UI can be, it's not as annoying as Jira's, and Atlassian has a market cap over $8B. Salesforce has a market cap over $64B and also has a lot to do with people in big businesses communicating about stuff.
My hunch has long been that Butterfield, having sold Flickr too early back in the day, badly wants to join the Three Comma Club. That annoying knock-knock-knock sound is just the beginning.
The Slack client is a mind boggling exercise in excess. It often requires 500MB+ RAM when I am connected to two different Slack "networks" and it's an IRC client!? Honestly with so much money and theoretical engineering talent what went wrong here?
Yep. I'm sitting in two teams, about 15 channels between them. One of those teams has >5000 users and >3000 channels. The channels I'm in (excluding #general) each have between 20 and 80 users.
Between the "Slack" and "Slack Helper" processes, the OS X slack client is using about 766MB of ram.
This is fantastic news. Congrats to Slack and the team.
Slack recently ran a Slack Developer Workshop (conference with 100+ attendees) to a small group of developers in SF. I was lucky enough to be a part of it. They made it abundantly clear that Slack has a strong interest in being an application distribution platform and they are focused on creating a superior developer experience for their ecosystem. It was amazing to hear.
As somebody who grew up on IRC, the power, to me, was in how robust and easy IRC was to build for and around. Bots and commands were very easy to script and get the hang of. In my mind, Slack has actually built something more valuable than IRC. They have built a new model and ecosystem for application distribution, and they've added the right product features to do the job. The next step is to make it insanely easy to develop for and truly surpass the "ease" of the IRC experience for devs. It's inspiring to hear stories about how companies are building entire workflows with Slack being the center of their business; Mike Brevoort of Missions for Slack [1] spoke of a use case they're dealing with where Slack is powering the entire operations of a Canadian craft brewery using Slack + Google Sheets.
What Slack really has the potential to do here, in my mind, is be the application layer for business. Think about companies like Envoy (check-in, etc.) with Slack integration; somebody shows up at your office, you get pinged on Slack. You open Slack on your phone to check the notification, there's Slack Actions available for you to unlock the door (or what-have-you). The time-to-delivery on similar applications without Slack... well, it oftentimes just straight up wouldn't happen. We'll see more of these.
This is what Slack is getting insanely right. They didn't stop at massive growth + having a "good chat app." They're innovating and enabling new and veteran businesses to grow in novel ways.
Disclosure: Slack is an investor of ours [2] and we're also pretty passionate about developer experience. Through that, I've had a chance to interface with a number of their team members and I truly believe it's a fantastic organization. I can't help but root for good people.
Thanks for your comment. I'm a big fan of slack myself and have developed a product on their platform. I'm curious about the Slack fund and their investment process? Do you see a large contingent of companies building standalone products on slack?
I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur.
It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
I finally realized that the web version works pretty well so now I just use that when I need to use Slack.
I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.