Re:Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
by lmm on Monday June 13, 2016 @11:19AM
(#11894547)
The problem is semi-persistent group chats. There are a bunch of partial existing solutions, but they all have issues:
* IRC: UX is pretty awful, any persistence of chats is ad-hoc and hand-rolled, plain text only, relatively high burden on sysadmins.
* Jabber/MSN/Yahoo/etc.: very poor group chat support
* Skype: very difficult to integrate with anything else, no support for self-hosting.
* Slack/HipChat - good options, more or less contemporary, very much in direct competition with Yammer. Both more ephemeral though - IME Yammer ends up better than either, because it's just persistent enough that you can find old discussions/documentation when you need to.
* IRC: UX is pretty awful, any persistence of chats is ad-hoc and hand-rolled, plain text only, relatively high burden on sysadmins. * Jabber/MSN/Yahoo/etc.: very poor group chat support * Skype: very difficult to integrate with anything else, no support for self-hosting. * Slack/HipChat - good options, more or less contemporary, very much in direct competition with Yammer. Both more ephemeral though - IME Yammer ends up better than either, because it's just persistent enough that you can find old discussions/documentation when you need to.