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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
