Something slower, more purpose built, with a much richer set of controls around notification processing (read/unread isn’t enough when it’s a work ask) would serve us all much better.
That is the flawed assumption. Consumers never had a choice for Slack. It was an enterprise decision
That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist -- you'd be forced to buy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all separately.
Or by the same logic, an OS shouldn't be allowed to have any applications at all -- not even a calculator app, because that would be anticompetitive against other calculator apps.
In what universe should Microsoft not be allowed to add a chat component to their office productivity suite? When that's clearly an essential component of such suites these days? Sheesh.
Slack has had an amazing outcome. And awesome products, historically, tend to be absorbed by large corporations simply because it's more efficient and therefore profitable for everyone involved. There's nothing wrong with that.
I don’t really understand this viewpoint. Companies are _choosing_ to use Microsoft’s products for various reasons. Maybe they already use Office and the integration with Teams made Teams the best choice over Slack. Maybe the company had an existing relationship with Microsoft so onboarding Teams required less Administrative overhead. There are probably many more that I am not listing. These are legitimate reasons to choose a product over another, not Microsoft abusing its power.
Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem. Lone, un-integrated startups, like Slack, still pop up and shake up the market. Then big companies replicate their product and integrate it into their existing software suites and sales pipelines, providing value that the smaller startup cannot. In this case the smaller startup merged with a larger company and will likely be integrated with their systems, providing value that both companies could have easily created alone. This all seems like it’s working as intended to me.
It's not that they should not be allowed to exist. Rather, they should not be able to undercut competitors by using their leverage as massive tech companies to subsidize losing money on something while they starve out competitors. Stoller's article has much more nuance than you are attributing, and he outlines that in a world where these tech corporations were not allowed to get as big and powerful, you wouldn't have to be left with binary decisions like this one.
This sort of behavior is akin to Amazon selling items at a loss in order to starve out some competitor and then buying them out afterwards in order to benefit from their infrastructure and logistics.
> The loss of an independent Slack is sad, because Slack’s strategy wasn’t just a standard attempt to gain market power. As a company, Slack’s team thought carefully about product design, and that care showed.
That's not an economic argument, it's an aesthetic one.
The fact is, it's natural in many industries to coalesce around 2-3 major competitors. And as we can see, that's exactly what's happening here. Slack isn't being snuffed out. It's living on as part of one of the ~3 major players in the space, which is a natural and desirable outcome for consumers who want simple bundled all-in-one solutions.
And Microsoft hasn't been "losing money" by including chat functionality in Office -- what you're describing is predatory pricing which is simply not the case here. Office is an expensive product that companies pay tons of $$$ for.
It's ridiculous that you think it's ridiculous. No, I don't think Office should exist. If Microsoft had been forced to sell Word separately from Excel, we might all still have a choice to run Lotus123, or QuattroPro. There's nothing enshrined in the Constitution that says that companies have to be allowed to bundle whatever they want into their other products. I think it's the job of our government, in fact, to prevent it this sort of thing. Microsoft bought lots of companies during the 90's (good for them!), but ran a least a dozen more -- and prominent ones, at that -- out of the market by duplicating their software, and absorbing their business. Yes! Absolutely! Microsoft can make their own disk defragmentation product. Or antivirus. Or whatever. But put a price tag on it, even if it's $0, and let it compete with everything else that's already in the market. Don't bundle it. I mean, did the browser wars teach us nothing?
Why should Word be allowed to bundle a spell-checker? Why shouldn't you have to buy that separately?
And why should the spell-checker be allowed to bundle a dictionary? Shouldn't that have to come from a separate company?
Should Photoshop be allowed to bundle a set of default filters, when there are companies that produce third-party filters? Should macOS be allowed to bundle ZIP compression, when there are companies that sell standalone compression software?
You're right we don't have Lotus 123. But we have Google Sheets, and we have Tableau, and we have Jupyter notebooks.
Literally every product is bundle of things that were combined into it, until you get either to raw physical materials or perhaps single functions in code.
I don't know how you're going to come up with a standard that allows Macs to include a menu option to compress a folder, but doesn't allow a bundle of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
You can already do just that. What's the problem with that?
So yes, if we had functional antitrust laws in the US, Microsoft may not be allowed to do certain things. Like bundle a Slack competitor with an existing product.
The universe where this should happen is one where we recognize that a healthy capitalistic society is good, and putting constraints on concentrated power helps keep things healthy.
The real question behind all this is: are we as a society better or worse off now that Salesforce owns Slack?
It's a chat app. (And Slack itself is a huge company) Teams, as a product on its own merits, is not necessarily better than Slack. I very strongly disagree with the notion that integration into a locked-in ecosystem is a legitimate reason and not an abuse of power.
When you switch from product A to product B only because product B integrates with proprietary protocols or services you rely on and not on the merit or price of the product itself then that's bad, and it's harming consumer welfare and competition. It also is a positive feedback loop in that those services just keep claiming more and more space and the claim of space alone diminishes the value of everyone else, because you're forever locked into a web of, in this case, Microsoft products. Which is of course one of the reasons the company is so powerful.
You can ask yourself this, if every software company waas forced to implement transparent protocols and APIs, so that clients can freely choose their end-user software, what would the market share look like? If it would look different than it does now I think you can make a strong case that consumers are being deprived of choice.
I think you are reducing my argument a little here. I mentioned in my previous comment there are other benefits to working with large b2b companies other than the raw merits of a single provided app by itself.
> I very strongly disagree with the notion that integration into a locked-in ecosystem is a legitimate reason and not an abuse of power.
I disagree with you here. There are many legitimate business (and personal) reasons to stick with an ecosystem. If that wasn't the case, then people wouldn't pick those products. Open standards with interchangeable clients and servers do exist right now, IRC for example, though nobody uses them because companies like Microsoft provide a hosted solution that provides more value.
> You can ask yourself this, if every software company waas forced to implement transparent protocols and APIs, so that clients can freely choose their end-user software, what would the market share look like? If it would look different than it does now I think you can make a strong case that consumers are being deprived of choice.
This would be nice but I don't really think things would change that much. As I mentioned above, open standards already exist. We have email protocols, IRC, RTF, LaTeX, etc and people don't use them (with the exception of email). Forcing companies to open their APIs wouldn't force them to integrate with each other and, if they did, imagine being Slack in a world where Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, etc all had different APIs you had to integrate with and their products were already integrated with each other? That would be pretty expensive to implement and maintain and would definitively put you at a disadvantage due to your relative lack of resources.
Also, if all APIs were forced to be transparent, companies would still be able to build ecosystems that are more comprehensive and desirable than a patched-together set of disparate clients and hosts setup by some IT admin. A company which does one thing well, even if compatible with all other, like services (which would be an incredible feat) would never be able to ensure that their product would integrate better into every major company's ecosystem, putting them at the same disadvantage.
Additionally, there is real value with consolidating your software services under one company. You only have to manage one account, you might get a better deal because you are buying multiple services at the same time, all support would be centralized and bundled with other services you are buying.
Slack could have integrated with LibreOffice Online and ownCloud. They chose not to.
That's already the world we're in except for the fact that small competitors can't integrate with them, or reimplement clients even if they want to. Netflix runs fine on every platform of the large players. I can log into everything with Google, Facebook and vice-versa, the very largest companies often already adjust their infrastructure to be mutually compatible to significant degrees.
It's really only third party incumbents who get locked out regularly, if you're already an Apple or Microsoft you can at least partially get your way with the other big sharks. It's the Signals and IRCs and (until recently) Linuxes of this world who have to exist at the margins.
I also think it's important to point out that nobody has to fully reimplement a services API. If you're one guy, and you want to make a sleek, minimialist facebook client, why not? If people prefer full featured Facebook they can go to Facebook, but at least then there is choice. I wasn't saying either that a company can't have huge market share in this system, just that they ought to do it on the merit of their software, facing full competition. Large companies that provide feature-rich experiences will still win customers who desire these features, so I don't see the downside to my proposal.
Also, that’s the whole point of the legal system (and part of what Stoller is arguing). If a spell-checker company feels the behavior was anti-competitive, they should be able to go through the legal system and fight it. I think Stoller is saying that this exact legal system is currently flawed.
First of all, it's not a straw man. Spellcheckers were standalone applications for years before word processors began integrating them. [1]
And second, it's not a slippery slope fallacy, it's an actual slippery slope, that's the whole point. There isn't a "pretty clear distinction" at all.
If I understand you correctly, you're arguing that when spellcheckers came out, the existing products should have been able to legally prevent WordPerfect (and eventually Word, and Docs, etc.) from ever building their own integrated spellcheckers. To this day, you'd need to buy Word, and then buy a separate spellchecking app or extension.
But there's no distinction between spellchecking and 100 other features that Word has that also used to be separate programs -- like mail merge, like drawing capabilities, like a citations manager, etc. etc. etc.
And you really think that would be a good idea?
I'm not seeing a clear distinction. Imagine a scenario where Word and Excel aren't bundled. Word has always had table functionality. The Word team decides that it'd be useful if, when creating a table, end user is able to enter @cell1 + 1 to cell two to make it show the incremental value of cell one. Soon enough they'll add sort, sum, average. Then they'll create a template that creates a document with a table created by default, which looks like a spreadsheet.
Should those new functionality be allowed and who get to decide? Any attempt to regulate such product features are futile and inevitably stifle innovation.
Apple M1 is universally praised exactly because it's a SOC with integrated functions that used to require dedicated chips from multiple vendors. Imagine the inferior product if Apple is legally obliged to use Intel/AMD graphic card, in the name of maintaining the competitive landscape?
There's nothing inherently wrong with "oligopolies" except when they collude together to raise prices, and competition is weak. But that's obviously not the case in office productivity software -- competition and innovation are intense, and there's zero evidence of price-gouging whatsoever.
If your argument is that there is a tendency towards monopoly and that’s just the way of thing, even in a “free market capitalist” economy which is based largely on the idea of competition, then I don’t find it convincing.
Consumers end up with bundled solutions with 2-3 companies precisely because those companies take steps to make that the outcome (eg Apple making integration sub-par when it is not first party)
Innovations that could have carried the company further could be digital whiteboarding, google docs like editing, dropbox style storage, squiggle like remote teams collaboration.
Also the atlassian merger via hip-chat sunset could have resulted a stronger integration between the two organizations.
Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect of things got abandoned
I'm still mad about this. It was such a great piece of software, and then Slack bought it and literally killed it without offering anything to replace the lost functionality.
The fact that so many people use Slack, but then do all their voice, video and screensharing in Zoom or some other tool says a lot about Slack as a tool and company.
My wife uses Teams for work. It's rubbish in many ways, but when she's using it they do everything in it. Somehow slack has failed at this despite having many of the same features built in.
Also, maybe it doesn't make it better, but it sounds like Slack didn't intend[1] to do this.
[1] https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-Work-57df16351a884bc...
EDIT: It also allows bystanders to learn from or keep abreast of the conversation.
However, this cultural practice can be easily transferred to another tool.
As an external observer, Slack seemed to have various issues that prevented it from innovating further.
One was lack of vision of how to innovate further. I think this often happens when someone stumbles onto an idea. They don’t have deep reasoning or conviction of where to go further.
Another issue is that they seemed to have other cultural preoccupations for a time. Look at the cultural discussions brewing when their growth was exploding. They have since stepped back from that but I think it slowed them down.
I don’t think these helped when you have a competitor that can integrate their entire suite of products into their chat system while effectively selling the chat for free. Slack didn’t even integrate as well or as quickly.
Slack wasn’t innovating enough to not be overtaken.
Do you mean Slack is or was the first to get users to communicate over channels (vs point to point) in a business or enterprise setting?
I’m honestly not sure about what innovation came out of Slack. I worked for a startup in the early 2000s, and we ran our own IRC channels.
I’m only vaguely familiar with Slack, but what am I missing?
1. Shared channels are amazing
2. The "Enterprise Grid" was the first viable enterprise chat product. Slack made chat ubiquitous at places like IBM.
It's easy to blow off #2, but I think it's big. It was big enough to threaten MS Office.
Maybe I'm a greybeard, but IBM made their own chat product that was ubique-itous* enough that Sametime became a verb there...
* Ubique is the company Lotus bought before IBM bought Lotus, before IBM sold the scraps to HCL.
You also have to consider that if you're a startup you can be a lot more agile because you deal with a lot less bullshit. Microsoft probably has tons of red tape and they are also spread thin. Their design space is also restricted in that they have to follow existing patterns. Slack should have been able to roam the earth however they wished. But they didn't. Slack had the lead and momentum but they blew it.
I don't see Teams as necessarily a bad thing as the article implies. Every product we have is a derivative of something else. It fosters innovation.
Bootstrapped products/companies like Campfire by 37Signals didn’t need to grow, but they also stopped innovating and the chat frature became just a feature inside basecamp.
I think it’s really how companies are structured.
The way Slack was positioned, it also had to grow or it will get taken over by a competitor like teams, or risk getting bought out which is what happened. Maybe the stakes are different when you’re #1 vs #10 in tech!
In the closest strategy to what slack did, one would define a main product and then optimize away any prototype bloat. As far as I observed, Slack's clients stayed pretty awful and they were trying to do Dropbox's strategy without success.
On the other hand, what knowledge worker today can function without video conferencing, desktop sharing, file sharing and VoIP?
No that many.
Teams provide all of that natively. That's why they're wining.
Let's be frank, if Teams had been just a chat application, it would never have had the success it currently has, even as part of O365. Being bundled with something popular is not a guaranty of success. IE is a very good example of that.
The reality is that MS made Teams a complete collaboration platform and Slack couldn't do the same with their product.
In the Old Testament God commanded the israelites that every 7th 7th year (or every 49 years basically) was to be a year of jubilee. Included among the instructions for the year of jubilee was the requirement that all debts be forgiven and all land revert to it's ancestral owners. Basically the financial system gets reset every 49 years.
It seems to me that there are great things that can be done when a business has the right resources but at a certain point business stop competing and start regulating or burying their competition out of existance. Now of course we can't due it exactly how the bible outlines things but I've been increasingly interested in the idea of a regular societal reset on a half a century or so basis. This creates enough time for large firms to grow innovation to happen and wealth creation to happen. Whilst at the same time it prevents eternal dominance by a handful or large players .
What would y'all think of a societal reset?
That said, when we started dogfooding our own conferencing product it was partly because Slack consistently had issues dropping calls after 5-10m of group video. I'm kind of surprised to read such similar complaints 18 months+ on. Presumably it's harder to solve those problems at mass market global scales, we're pretty vertical specific.
$27bn is actually successful for a company that's just a few years old.
The competition that was stirred during those years ended up with Microsoft developing what is now a good product for 80% of use cases, with integration with tools (Office) that 80% of companies use, and all those companies benefitting from it did not have to shell out a single additional penny.
From the eyes of consumers, I would call it a success of competition rather than a failure. Sure, it has now run its course, but making $27bn out of it is not what I would call a bitter end - the dream of independence aside. But that's a for few individuals to dream about...
E.g. if an O365 subscription costs your organization $10MM per year, why not donate $100k per year (along with 10 of your peers) to a group writing open source bare bones versions that handle 90% of your employee needs.
The world would seem to benefit in this model...
An organization that pays $10MM per year has a lot of leverage and likely has long term contracts to hedge risk. So why, basically, waste $100k?
Free though helps businesses start. Though economies of scale in tech are so huge now.
It's an opinion piece.
We definitely could do a better job of "championing the little guy." But the title here -- which is not as click-baity as the actual title, is something I experienced as misleading. I expected this to be an interview with someone in the know, not speculation by an outsider based on previous public statements.
You can infer a lot based on public statements, but there may be things that weren't being said publicly. It can be impossible to know "the real motive" behind something without a direct statement by the person who made the decision.
It is that companies have tens of billions of dollars they can spend to acquire companies that are hundred-million-plus net-losers.
That lump sum of acquisition money could have been spent in significantly more meaningful ways.
Wait, what? When did that start happening?
Slack's worth $27bn (which is in the top 100 GDPs by country) and was FCF positive. With the right cap table it could stay private and self fund. But it went public, and by the rules of the game it chose to play ended up valued at like 30x forward revenue. To maintain that valuation it had to sell.
The one and only thing people who are concerned with the tech giants should be talking about is ending #ImaginaryPropertyLaws.
Anyone talking about problems with big tech but not talking about ending IP Laws are just paying lip service.
I worked at Microsoft. Great and brilliant people. They don't need #ImaginaryProperty protection. End that and sure, shareholders of MSFT will be worse off, but the world will be better off—a ton of people there will go off and start their own companies and there will be a lot more competition in the space.
Same for Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. All of these companies rely on #ImaginaryPropertyLaws for the root of their power. Such laws are just plain wrong (we could enable every child on earth to have the same access to information as the richest with a snap of our fingers, but everyday we choose not to), but putting all that aside, if all you care about is ending the monopolization going on in the tech industry, this is the thing you should be looking hard at.
These companies have absurd amounts of proprietary information on everything going on in the world, and it's near impossible to compete. You are right, they will generally just buy you out, but if you don't accept, they will buy out your competitor and then your competitor will suddenly have access to all your customers (and many more), your potential customers, your usage numbers, data on your employees, your financings, et cetera.
It's not a fair fight, and it is the way it is because of ImaginaryProperty laws.
Microsoft has the ability to include teams as part of a bigger integrated bundle which businesses find more appealing.
What a bizarre statement. The only think the free market assumes is that the market decides. Nothing else.
At least something like Zoom seems to not be as easily cloneable (the alternatives don't compare yet, in my opinion at least).
The existence and seemingly never-ending expansion of mega-corps is a different story though.
I wish calls had native support for Apple pencil as I'd like to use my iPad to draw on screen or a board during meetings
OK sure, but the author doesn't say how. She's involved in a whole bunch of initiatives to help the little guy, so surely she has a lot of experience to share?
Painting my impressions with a very broad brush: It seems that capitalism was formerly sold to the public as good for society: It provided economic growth, opportunity, and fairness. Those were the goals, and where there were market failures (such as monopolies or prejudice), society would step in and correct it, to further those goals. Now capitalism itself seems to be the goal, the religion, the ideology. It serves no higher purpose - the highest purpose effectively becomes the capitalists. If society steps in, it's rejected as a perversion of capitalism.
That's not pro-consumer. That's anti-consumer. It makes me poorer and both Microsoft and Slack richer.
Example: Atlassian can bundle Jira, Confluence, Hipchat.
Microsoft can bundle Office 365, Exchange, Teams, etc.
From the outside, Teams (and Zooms) growth was accelerated because video conferencing became way more important. People didn’t need video conferencing pre-COVID because that would have just been a meeting. When they suddenly did, Slack wasn’t that good. My pet peeve continues to be that on Slack I cannot see someone’s screen on iOS - that one annoyance had us move to Zoom then teams.
An argument could be made that Slack was ultimately unable to compete in video by virtue of not having an army of high paid engineers to throw at the problem like MS does, but the features that Slack chose to focus on (like the WYSIWG editor) doesn’t say that to me
The most meaningful thing they've had recently is the cross-org shared channel thing, which is awesome when it works but still onerous to manage. That was two years ago. And it doesn't open up that many new users, it just keeps people in slack longer (good for stickiness, bad for growth).
Not sure what the example of IE would entail. IE was insanely popular during its prime of 2006-2008. Even today, Chrome has not captured as much of the market as IE6 did at that time.
It was only years of neglect (i.e nearly the entire IE6 team was reassigned to other projects), and governmental intervention that allowed other browsers to even have a significant plurality.
So yes, you can win merely by being bundled for free with another popular product.
If Slack for instance just came preinstalled on iOS/OSX, then people would have standardized on it so long as it was also available on Windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Android is the most popular mobile OS on earth and I remember when Google+ was bundled as part of the base OS image. Even that and the huge marketing Google did wasn't enough to popularize the service and Google ended up killing it.
Another thing is -- the public stack overflow is really nice for reference, but in my experience I don't like the culture around it. It isn't inclusive. The thing that turned me off was when they would shut down a question because it would lead to extended discussion.
Now slack allows extended discussion - properly off in a thread - and through that fosters a corporate culture in a good way.
That said, I’m not sure they could have competed with Teams in MS corporate deployments under any circumstances. If a company is already using Outlook, Exchange, AD, O365, Teams plugs in very nicely. But, seems like that still leaves a pretty big market.
I don't understand this. Chat has always been an integral part of work in all my jobs. Before Slack it was Skype. I can't imagine working through email only. It would be hard enough when we were sitting in the same office but impossible now when we're remote.
SharePoint has always been too complicated for most people to use, but part of Teams is an easier to use UI over SharePoint.
Huge problem solved, right there.
1. IBM
2. AT&T
3. Kodak
4. GM
5. Standard Oil of NJ
6. Texaco
7. Sears
8. GE
9. Polariod
10. Gulf Oil
Not a single one of these companies is in the top 10 today. (Edit: correction, one is: Exxon.) Many of the current top 10 didn't exist at all 50 years ago. Thankfully our economy seems to be dynamic enough that companies must continue to compete or lose marketshare organically.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
Something like that could counter a lot of financial games that are played to the detriment of so many, which is why some societies had things like dept jubilees.
Forest fires are good for forests over the long term. They remove large old trees that are full of rot, dead wood, and parasites. Those old giants aren't using the sun's light and other resources efficiently, but they block too much light for smaller trees in the understory to grow tall enough to compete. A forest fire clears those out, returns the nutrients in them to the soil, and provides a level playing field for smaller trees to grow and compete.
I wouldn't go full Fight Club Project Mayhem, but I'd love something like a cleansing fire that periodically breaks up or disbands all corporations above a certain size.
Forest fires reset competition at the ground level while mostly maintaining the status quo for large, established trees.
You read my mind: this is exactly what is needed! I could not think of the right phrasing (because i, too, agree that a societal reset might not be the right thing here)...and the forest fire cleansing is an apt metaphor here. So thanks for sharing this thought!
The dead person's estate is responsible for paying back creditors, even if that means liquidating the estate to do so.
Not quite. You should have life insurance and something the bank can seize to be able to get financing. So even if you die the bank can recover some of the principal. You can also file Chapter 11; that's actually a reset.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/a-pr....
Likewise individuals; for anyone who doesn't own land at the start of the system, is there a path to land ownership?
Ideas of large social changes always sound good in the abstract, but once you propose a real plan the devil is always in the details. In the US, we can’t even agree to let the government forgive student loan debt it already owns — but somehow completely reworking corporate debt and property will work/help/ever possibly happen?
Because those who's great great great great great grandfather did well out of knowing Henry 8th don't already get enough headstart in life?
Land shouldn't be owned by the people, with rent paid yearly to the people based on its unimproved value.
I think the problems you’re trying to address with this need to be addressed in a more fundamental and continuous way.
I hope I never see a societal reset.
Let's say you wipe out debts. And let's say that my pension was invested in those debts. That's going to be a bit problematic.
Let's say you reset companies. Including, say, Intel and AMD. The CPU monopoly is wiped out. Oh, yeah, and Microsoft. But next month I want to buy a computer. Can anybody make me an x86 chip? Can I get Windows, assuming that I want it? Or do I have to run Linux on a public-domain chip?
It's not going to be easy to maintain continuity of supply while shaking up firms that dominate important markets.
But maybe it would be better to reset in a cascading fashion, rather than all at once.
When you're 18, you're about halfway through. If you work hard for 10 years to accumulate wealth, add value, whatever, by the time you're ~40, it's about to all get taken away. What's the point?
No debt. Just gifts or charity.
Slack is actually free to use (last I checked), if you don't care about the chat history.
There's room for independent apps in the face of a bundled solution. By focusing on one thing you can do it better and cheaper than the packaged solution. And indeed Slack, at least to many, was worth the extra money.
It's possible that Slack's company insiders (founders, C-executives, investment bank advisors, etc) ... all concluded that continuing to compete as an independent company had a more risky outcome:
https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+not+profitable
In other words, let's give the benefit of the doubt and assume all those folks above are above-average intelligent and can use Excel spreadsheets to model user growth, revenue growth, expenses, new products in the pipeline, "what-if" scenarios, etc.
Also found a recent related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422092
EDIT REPLY to >"It seems like you stopped reading before my last sentence."
Yes, I read that but a healthy business needs to be an ongoing concern and _profitability_ is part of financial health. E.g. Blockbuster Video went from having a market cap worth billions to being worth nothing because of competition from Netflix. Blockbuster went from being profitable to losing money. In one way, Slack is even worse than Blockbuster as it has yet to turn a profit.
Setting your snark aside, what justifies your confidence about Slack's possible independent future more than the company's insiders who have all the internal metrics and private financial data to analyze?
Heh, ironically, Blockbuster was almost never profitable either :)
It takes 5 seconds to change the permissions on that channel to restrict posting to admins only. We figured that out a few hours after rolling Slack out to a small subset of users to test.
The use of channels was eminently useful then. You discover the general channel to use and then people that you didn’t previously know can help you. Also it doesn’t have to be a specific person helping you. Different people can help you at different times and with different questions. Likewise, you return the favor.
Also, you can then snoop in on a channel to keep track of areas you are interested in. This was a way of extracting and sharing institutional knowledge.
Lastly, you can create temporary channels for coordinating projects.
Although channels existed before, this was the first setting that I found it used extensively and effectively in this way. Perhaps most importantly to getting the whole system to work, there were cultural expectations placed on groups responsible for particular channels of being timely and helpful in replies.
Therefore you would get replies to questions in seconds or minutes. That was very useful in getting unblocked and unblocking others. You would almost never encounter the flame wars that you would see on Hacker News (well besides the social channels).
The organizational environment and the culture of how to use channels is what I mean when I say the innovation was cultural. Divorce channels from the environment or culture and you will see very different outcomes.
There are obvious downsides but the benefits outweigh them. I really don't want to go back to forums and email for customers.
Corporations are legal fictions through which their owners operated. If ownership of corporations can’t be inherited, it doesn’t make “corporations” more powerful, it just distributes power over corporations (presuming that the absence of inheritance means that assets escheat to the State, and that the State itself is fundamentally democratic.)
I agree that a reset on the extravagantly wealthy is needed...but that can also just take the form of, say, a wealth tax, without also raising questions on how new people enter the system fairly.
We aren't living in ancient times, and the distribution of wealth and debt in the world isn't what it used to be. Debt isn't "our crop failed and my family is going to starve this year" anymore.
Yes there were other browsers, and yes there existed people who used them, but it was very small
This is the important point: because of tech monopolies it is no longer possible to compete on software quality. This is why Congress needs to break them up.
I wonder if Microsoft's Teams numbers were pumped up by it being freely included in O365 subs. "Oh you're a paying O365 customer; we'll just go ahead and count your included Teams sub as a Teams sub."
As it stands it seems to be the other way around, at least for the features we care the most about (meetings, screen sharing, voice calls).
So I think it's possible to compete on quality, but it's definitely harder as a lot of people will get by with a lower-quality offering.
They claim they did, but Slack screensharing is nowhere near what Screenhero's was.
A more Screenhero-like replacement is Tuple: https://tuple.app/
As a business with employees sure, but as a community? You couldn't have moved everyone to discord faster
Discord has like a $2billion valuation and no exit. Slack had a $24 billion IPO. Consumer software is not as valuable as enterprise.
The only ones who I haven't heard lament the switch are the ones whose budget Slack used to (and o365 does) cone from.
We can see this market mechanism play out in the corporate lending market where companies with high credit risk must pay double or more interest rates. A debt jubilee would simply raise the default risk on all of society and thus increase rates to compensate.
I would think the bigger effect would be to dissuade lenders from lending more than the borrowers could repay before the debt forgiveness date. Also certain things that are inflated due to finance (like housing, cars, college) might see an adjustment to more affordable prices, or maybe some things would cycle, going up when people could borrow, and going down as the debt forgiveness event approached.
It's an interesting idea, to think about the pros and cons.
I also don't agree that a jubilee date won't increase rates. The default risk is simply much higher now and therefore the rates must go up to compensate for the added risk. In the current system, debt isn't forgiven when repayments are late, which allows for lower rates since the default risk is lower. If late repayments automatically implies default due to the jubilee date, then rates must be higher.
Of course it is different in that it follows you around for a while, but there also isn't a weird enforced lending cycle (and carrying lots of debts into a jubilee might not officially follow you around, but it would follow you around).
We also know that from a technical perspective Teams actually was a "cheaper product" because it was built on the backs of other existing parts of Office 365. It shares a ton of backend with SharePoint and it swallowed up Skype for Business/Lync. Both key products of the "bundle" before Microsoft decided on a need to compete with Slack.
You can expand the definition of "(enterprise) Productivity Apps" ad infinitum.
I look at it as mostly a thought exercise, questioning the way we currently handle debt. I think there is a lot of room for improvement. Maybe debt jubilees would act as a check on out-of-control debt, which seems to be a thing lately.
Take student loans. Politicians are talking about forgiving those debts. Maybe it's not such a crazy idea? But then again what they plan on doing will amount to just giving the banks the money, either inflating the money supply or treasuries that future generations have to pay back. Ugh.
Or maybe like in other countries, the price of housing would decrease to a three year loan instead of thirty.
I think it's better for people to stop working when they get pretty rich, like $20mil. People should stop working when they get rich enough to pay for an awesome life, and give someone else the chance. And if they actually enjoy working, they can do it pro bono.
I do not trust the uber rich to mind their own business and stay out of other people's lives.
Making money is generally a positive sum endeavour as long as you're not generating unpriced externalities such as carbon pollution, and as such I don't like the idea that rich people stop working after they're rich. As long as they're not creating externalities we want them to continue building and contributing to society. It's a much better alternative to them relaxing on a yacht somewhere, which contributes nothing.
It's also inaccurate to think that making money by building crowds out other people from doing so. The opposite is the case. It's the same mindset behind the "immigrants took our jobs" train of thinking.
What about just charging income tax on inheritance (but allowing deferral of tax recognition of windfall income over a period of, say, up to 10 years from the date of receipt.)
1. Slack from a very early point in their pivot away from games branded themselves as an Enterprise Productivity app and made comparisons to Enterprise Email tools.
2. Microsoft's inclusion of Skype for Business/Lync (and to another extent Outlook, especially given Slack's own email-competitive marketing) for years prior to Slack/Teams implies that Chat/Communications has a long history of being considered an Enterprise Productivity App.
Perhaps, but in the case of Teams you don't even have to stretch.
I’m literally astonished to read this.
Teams is the king of “press a key and wait for the screen to unfreeze”, or the “launched but all you get is a white box until you restart”.
It also features what I politely refer to as “no search”, which is where you search your chat history, and conversations just aren’t there... until you go back through your history and find them, and then wow! Suddenly you can search for it.
Screen sharing can cause a meeting to drop out for no reason.
Want to upload a video? Or an image? Well, you can get an empty white box and when you click on it, you’ll get an empty white pop up. Great job.
Now, all of that said... that’s on windows.
Now try using it on a Mac. Ha! Haaaaaa!
Usable? Yes.
Good?? Not in my books.
It’s one of the poorest chat applications I’ve used, personally. /shrug
To be fair, I haven’t had much trouble with the mobile app on iOS, but I don’t use it much, and it’s seems on-par to the slack one to me.
...but I certainly wouldn’t call it a marvel of engineering; it’s just deeply integrated with outlook and it’s mandatory; so people who don’t do “chat” also use it.
Never faced issues on the things that you mention - screen sharing, uploading of a video or image etc.
Perf no issues, conduct internal as well as external conferences with college hires and interns (session attendance can go up to 70-80 people).
Yes there are some usability issues - the most notorious among my colleagues being the very clumsy meeting link share.
Never heard any issues from my colleagues either, including the less technically minded at sales which usually come running if something doesn't work.
While I think it has room for improvement, for basic stuff it just works for us.
The only problems I have had with Teams is the robotic-voice quality and the strange fascination that Microsoft has in changing their UI's from update to update leading me to keep hunting for that button which was there previously but can't be found now since its moved to some other place.
Our Teams instance has the calendar disables making it a pain to join meetings if you don't have easy access to your outlook calendar. They've also disabled any sort of api access which really limits what can be done in terms of integrating it into our other workflows.
In terms of general usability the app is lacking in information density. I routinely miss messages in team channels I've collapsed.
I’d also add that since my company moved to 365, about once every two weeks I get some email from it dept talking about service level disruptions.
And in the meantime it emails it’s creepy “we were watching your productivity” messages weekly.
Not a fan.
This sounds weird, like a configuration or permissions issue. Those basic features work flawlessly.
I guess you’re just lucky? Or we’re unlucky?
...but we have about 900 staff using it, so it seems like a strange outlier to me.
I’m absolutely astonished to hear that you don’t get the “missing image” bug; that one happens all the time with larger images you share. It literally happened to me yesterday morning.
Maybe it a regional thing, and the Australian infrastructure is just rubbish behind the scenes and we’re seeing latency issues?
No idea; also don’t really care that much; teams gets my thumbs down. It’s rubbish as far as I’m concerned; hopefully others have better experiences with it.
The focus on video conferences might be the most annoying part. Most of the time, I just want to see the shared screen at best. There's an option to stop incoming video, though this one isn't on by default. There also flat-out isn't a way to stop looking at your own face when sharing video.
Meetings with Teams links tend to inflate the history, dozens of chats that could've been one thing now cause dumb questions like "should we stay here or go into the other call?". This was already solved by apps like Teamspeak more than a decade ago. It feels immensely clunky, but the culture also doesn't provide an intuitive way to avoid this problem.
The last bit highlights my biggest problem. It's mostly culture. It feels as restrictive as your average enterprise program, yet it also feels chaotic in all the wrong ways. Many problems have already been solved and plenty of cultures, like global social gaming, have already experienced ways to handle this. Had I not had any experience with other apps, I likely wouldn't feel this way.
I also realize part of the problem is how Teams is configured, which I have no experience with. But then it once again boils down to "here you have this tool that can do a lot, but it's not intuitive and we don't give you a lot of guidelines" despite the fact most companies have zero experience with remote.
I'm not worried about making money being zero sum. I'm worried about uber rich people doing uncalled for things with too much money. No one should have that kind of power.
> No one should have that kind of power.
I fundamentally disagree. I strongly prefer that Bill Gates gets to spend his money the way that he sees fit rather than it go to the federal government. Just the same with Elon Musk and Warren Buffet.
You'll certainly remove their clout over society but I think you also need to consider the significant downsides to this proposal. Maybe you would be better off finding ways to limit the power of rich people over society (eg political contribution laws) instead of trying to ban being rich?
1. Have real practical advantage over other people in their community 2. Have real practical power to shape their community
For #1 that's mostly the middle class, who want better schools for their children, and safe pleasant environments for their families. Actions that remove that incentive, make the middle class irrelevant. Very few people are willing to work 9+ hour days during the start of their career, just so they can have more toys, and not a larger house in a good neighborhood later in life.
For #2 that's mostly the elite. If they're denied influence via money, they'll simply go into politics or religion where we'll end up with a society shaped by lucky charismatic people, and not necessarily anyone who has any skill. At least we can say non-hereditary wealthy people are lucky, and skilled as opposed to just being lucky.
Most "help" is just webpages or ebooks today. All Microsoft did with "HTML Help" was essentially a very early version of EPUB.
I think these are very strange things to complain about.
(Of course, they still would have lost on the other claims involving more egregious behavior.)
The AntiVirus claims set Windows virus/malware safety back by like a decade. Needing to install Security Essentials into XP/Vista instead of it just being out-of-the-box probably cost a lot more dollars to Windows users than if the court had agreed that such security concerns were the domain of the operating system.
The PDF claims that Office shouldn't be allowed to directly export to PDF because that was the domain of paid add-ins also seem silly from 2020.
Counterfactual are hard, but if you see browsers as a sort of "replacement OS as desktop application" then you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!
Web "apps" seem to only increase cross-platform interests, rather than serve to "smooth deficiencies" in a single platform.
> you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!
We've seen exactly the opposite in practice: a ton of web "app" innovation occurred when there were a variety mobile "smartphone" OSes with reasonably modern browsers whereas development has shifted much further back to OS-specific apps as mobile devices have calcified into the iOS/Android duopoly.