It’s a valid point. We might discover FTL and suddenly slack has to work at the federation level and serve trillions of people. This is such a poor design and won’t scale at that point.
I think disrupting slack is a mistake. They are still in their infancy and have clearly built a solid product. Disrupt spaces and industries that don't have that :)
I think disrupting slack is a mistake. They are still in their infancy and have clearly built a solid product. Disrupt spaces and industries that don't have that :)
Do you think that's what's led to Slack's success though, that enterprises don't want federation?
I don't really think so. If Slack had exactly the same UX as it has but federated, I don't think that would have deterred very many customers. Maybe a few that have come on only after Slack already got so big.
it's not based on only that. Slack costs a lot of money and moving off of it is something that has continually come up over the last year or two. We even had a Rocketchat server up and running for awhile.
Right on, I approve of this. I wish people would give up on slack already - it's a proprietary hype machine that's made it's way to the core of too many complex systems.
I either wildly underestimate the cost or the scale of building slack, am I reading that right that they've spent well in excess of a billion dollars in the last few years?
The problem with that is Slack no longer needs a small segment of vocal users. They used to, but now they're a huge established company with plenty of service contracts across tons of industries.
Their base product is bringing in $5/month/user, and they'll often get dozens to hundreds to thousands of users for each company that joins, whose employees are usually already using the free version of slack, as a sort of grassroots movement within companies. It's been the primary means of asynchronous communication for the last ~5 customers I've worked at, and I've been in slack channels of 30 to 300 users - in total, an easy 500 paid accounts, and that's just from my network.
Anyway yeah it's a risky investment and a precarious valuation, there is plenty of competition out there right now, yet somehow nothing seems to be able to come out as better than Slack. Maybe if a party actually spent those millions in investment funds to create good non-Electron apps.
I really like Slack but I think it will be troubled in the short/long term in the same way Dropbox is now. It is innovative but many others will catch up it soon.
That isn't true. My office slack has a few thousand users and it works just fine. I'm not saying it can scale to infinity, but it does handle a few thousand users without any issues.
The point is that it's meaningless to compare the valuation (or weight) of two companies (or organs) that serve very important but completely different functions.
And as others have pointed out, there are most likely teams working on putting stuff in space who use Slack, and Slack or its employees couldn't function without the services like communications and weather data that satellites provide. So just like vital organs in a human body, one can't really function without the other.
But their relative valuation or weight is unrelated to how important one is to the other or to the rest of the world or body.
Each company or organ's valuation or weight is entirely determined by what it needs to be to carry out its function.
> If you had literally dozens of dozens of paid-for, or hundreds of free, brains at your disposal, any of which could be dropped into place and be fit for the purpose of letting your body bits talk to each other
It's a common trope to argue that Slack is easily replaceable by a competitive product or open-source protocol like IRC.
When people say things like "any of which could be dropped into place" or "Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware" [1], we're entitled to ask "so why don't they"?
The reasons are to do with network effects, cost-of-ownership, security, scalability, easy-of-use, and countless other factors - but all those factors add up to the reason why Slack is valued at its current valuation.
But a nature metaphor applies here too: the evolutionary forces of creation and destruction have meant that a player that may only have been slightly fitter than what was there before has become completely dominant, and made it extremely difficult for another player to challenge it.
We can all sit back in our chairs and scoff at how easily another player could replace Slack's function in any individual context, but that tells us nothing about just how the alternatives will usurp Slack's present market dominance in reality.
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.
I think you are really underestimating the bureaucratic overheads in a large company. It is not the same as a 3-person startup serving 5000 customers. Of course I pulled that number out of the air, but the point is that it can make sense. I think I am right around the ballpark of needing a 5 people team to serve 500 users - you'd need a minimum of 3 people just to make sure there is enough redundancy if one person is sick or goes on vacation. You'd need 24x7 on-calls. The scaling factor probably changes after that - may be it is 10 people for 5000 users instead of 50.
Adding to other large company problems, these people will need management layers, the team will need a charter for growth. Who wants to be the maintainer of the Mattermost servers in a large company? Add all of this up and then the slack deal starts to look reasonable.
Edit: Just to add some real numbers, slack costs $12.50 per user per month [1] - that is ~$750k per year for 5000 users = 5 engineers. (More like 3 really in the Bay area)
Slack is pretty much just IRC with an indexer, a pretty web interface, a mobile interface and a bunch of of cool datafeeds/bots. These things aren't hard to build, and many people build them internally in companies all the time.
Their value proposition isn't the technology, their value proposition is the packaging. It all just works. People actively maintain the interfaces and the GUI. They have ops teams that keep it up. The integrations are maintained and are literally plug and play. You can pretty much just sign up and within an hour its all done for not much money.
For these reasons, I have doubts as to whether or not they'd mind, regardless of IP concerns.
reply