> assuming that you know the market better than the market leader.
I never made that claim.
> They're killing it for a reason
Sure, but who knows what that reason really is. I've gone through numerous cycles of "best chat app ever", and they're pretty much all in the dustbin now. I just don't see anything about Slack that makes it any better than several alternatives other than the number of users. In fact it's objectively worse than alternatives in several ways. The video and regular calling for example is pretty terrible on anything less than a high speed internet connection. In general the app often fails to load on weak WIFI. I can still use Skype, Discord, Gittr, Facebook Messenger, Signal, et.al. on coffeeshop wifi, but not Slack. You don't need to be a genius to see that this is a problem.
I used to think maybe it could have been before I was required to use it last year, but no, it's not. It is the worst chat application I have ever used (maybe tinder is worse heh, but at least the keyboard latency is below a second.) It's almost comical how bad it is.
> I can't speak for the other applications, but have you used Hipchat? It's really poor in comparison to Slack.
You're splitting hairs. They are both chat apps for crying out loud.
Slack grew as fast as it did because it got pimped to us by VCs and thought leaders and then wannabe thought leaders and down all the way to the bottom rung of the societal ladder. Great strategy by Slack but there is nothing special about it (the product).
>They did corner the market so clearly they must be doing something, but really I just can't see it. I'm completely stumped.
I've been wondering about this for a while now. Slack feels more like "just good enough" in terms of UX than anything special. It's just a chat application with terribly slow clients but somehow everyone is using it.
> The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty
But this is kind of an absurd critism. Who wants a real-time business-oriented operations chat system where you don't know about incoming messages by default? Can you imagine people complaining about not knowing about new messages for minutes and support staff having to inform people that you have to turn those on manually? Slack wasn't engineered to suck you in, it's acting in the only rational and useful default for what it is, a standard established by every chat client I've ever heard of before it. It would have been a product that didn't work by default. If slack was missing a seeing you wanted, I could understand, but at some point you're just blaming a chat tool for being optimal for chats because your organization wants you to respond unreasonably quickly or because you're not muting channels or snoozing or not using the settings to the fullest.
> It's easy to replace Slack the tech, it's hard to replace Slack the app that people are used to when they say they want a chat app for their company.
Well, that's not true. That is easily refuted by it having been replaced at least once.
> It's like saying Windows is not difficult to replace. Technicaly true but practically false.
While you may believe that Slack offers something that other solutions lack, that simply isn't true. I know of two companies which have replaced Slack, one with a commercial offering, and the other with an in-house solution. Rewriting most of Slack is a week-end project.
Slack, over time, actually locks a company more and more into their ecosystem, since to have history you must pay them. With many other solutions, including 50 year old email, messages can be stored locally and filtered as is beleived to be appropriate by each user. If all you want is a chat bot with channels, then use Slack, and throw it away when you're finished.
> FWIW, I've used IRC, AIM, MSN messenger, and other proprietary messaging clients and platforms and none have been as sluggish and unintuative to use as Slack.
You think slack is bad, wait until they force you to switch to teams.
> I wonder how much longer Slack’s web client is going to remain a first class product?
It never was? The Android client takes 10 seconds to start, runs my device hot and the UI is so bad that the first time I tried to respond to a thread I couldn't figure out how to get out of the thread view.
The desktop client uses 1GB of memory gobbles my CPU and takes 20 seconds to start.
The "least bad client", the web client still takes 10 seconds to start, for no obvious reason. Last week I looked into it, it turns out that every time the client makes a request to the server it the TTFB is 300 to 500ms, on a connection with 40ms ping. So their backend is just as fucked as all their clients.
Even their email notifications don't work: every time I click on the link they send me it doesn't take me to the mention!!!
They did corner the market so clearly they must be doing something, but really I just can't see it. I'm completely stumped.
> they make their products highly interoperable and integrated.
This does not reflect my experience - I can't make a video call from teams to someone on Zoom; I can't chat with someone on Slack. My iMessage client loses all kinds of functionality when I send a text to someone using Android. I could go on.
I worked at a place that dropped Slack for Teams. Everyone believed that Slack was the better product, but the company already bought Office which bundled Teams while Slack cost money. It's the most obvious anti-competitive practice I've experienced.
> Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it's hard for people to understand why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying it for themselves.
It isn't.
I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people, but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their business is hoarding users to the point that it's the "default" app in their given context.
I'm not saying it's bad. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it anyway.
> I was making the argument that you made an assumption that didnt hold any weight.
I claimed multiple things. Unless you think the single assumption being wrong in magnitude (I still maintain the majority of their customers were American) completely upends the entire thesis, then you're trying to treat this as some counterexample which... doesn't work here.
> Slack does a lot of things, but its UX is actually pretty piss poor due to the bolt-ons (threads is just about the worst implementation I have ever seen), walled garden, weird account things (magic links~ if you want to see your other workspaces make sure you use the same email everywhere!), security (goodbye decent realtime bot api) and the client which feels slow despite using more resources than it should given its status as a program that needs to always be running.
I'm not discussing the UX here I'm trying to talk about what Slack is doing differently than AIM.
> It doesn't bother me at all that the Slack app is an over glorified web browser running the Slack web client.
It kinda should, though, because if the browser component isn't up to date on the regular then it's possible you're looking at (what should be) a simple chat app with a potential RCE.
> I did try both and picked HipChat (though I now have a few regrets). Slack's lack of native Windows client was a real bummer and, frankly, I found the Slack interface unnecessarily confusing. I think they need a "simple" mode or the ability to turn some features off by default.
I think its personal preference, but I can see that.
> That said, Slack's integration with 3rd party services like Github is just straight up better than HipChat. And after using it for a while there are a couple of small (fixable!) things about HipChat that are really irritating.
> I have... never met anyone in real life who doesn't like slack. I only hear negative opinions about it here.
While I have literal never discussed Slack with someone who likes it. Actually not completely true: at my last company one developer thought it was great but after a few months I heard her curse it as a "place information goes to die". In my experience it doesn't scale beyond a very small number of people who know each other well. Sending commands from its command line is not as easy as simply sending them from, you know, the command line (which is scriptable).
As a side point it astonishes me that after all the money they raised and people they hired they can't get video working on mobile, just laptop/desktop.
> I love Slack and have no plans to stop using it to communicate with my team at Ably.
As long as your willing to tolerate it don't expect anything to change. If people stopped using slack then the bean counters would sit up and take notice. If slack died it might even serve as a warning to others.
It's easy to blame slack, but everyone that continues to use this and other bloated apps are also part of the problem.
>Mac Slack app feels like a web page inside a chromeless browser window
That's because it actually is just a web page inside a chromeless browser window. Right click and you can inspect and edit the markup.
We switched from Hipchat to Slack for reasons that seemed to amount to little more than hype about it in the tech world. It's fine. I don't think it has had any real effect on productivity or collaboration, and I really don't see the 'amazing' benefits that Slack fans tout.
In my opinion all of the various integrations that people get so excited about in Slack basically amount to constant noise that I can't filter out or defer the way I can with email notifications.
I never made that claim.
> They're killing it for a reason
Sure, but who knows what that reason really is. I've gone through numerous cycles of "best chat app ever", and they're pretty much all in the dustbin now. I just don't see anything about Slack that makes it any better than several alternatives other than the number of users. In fact it's objectively worse than alternatives in several ways. The video and regular calling for example is pretty terrible on anything less than a high speed internet connection. In general the app often fails to load on weak WIFI. I can still use Skype, Discord, Gittr, Facebook Messenger, Signal, et.al. on coffeeshop wifi, but not Slack. You don't need to be a genius to see that this is a problem.
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