That sounds like a cop-out answer from the CEO to be honest. Slack isn't a confusing novelty the market has never seen; foundations of Slack have existed for quite some time (eg. using AIM with chatbots 15 years ago as a kid).

It's not the market's fault Slack's revenue/sales expectations don't match their goals. That's entirely on Slack to either do a better job or be more realistic with their 'ceiling'.

I remember a quote that said basically, "If your product is ahead of its time, your marketing isn't good enough."

It sounds like Slack is drinking their own Kool-Aid.

In fact, Slack's success was precisely because it was a very well understood type of product (group chat).

Everyone shrugged and said "Yeah I need that" and it looked/felt better than Hipchat.

I switched to it from a private IRC setup. It was the same but with modern addons like integrations

Definitely not a new category, I very near share a date of birth with IRC. Even before that you had BBSs

Foundations existed for years, not even the same product existed before them: hipchat. It was pretty much equivalent. Slack had a nicer mobile app and some other improvements, but otherwise they're almost the same thing.

Slack bought hipchat from Atlassian and shut it down.

https://slackhq.com/atlassian-and-slack-partnership

People always forget about UI/UX and ecosystem.

You could argue that we had cellphones for ages, why would someone need an iPhone? You could also argue that an android has the same functionality as an iPhone, again why would someone need an iPhone?

The new "category" of software is about how people relate to software, not the software itself. IKEA created a new category of furniture, or it did not?

I think Uber created a new category of service, but we always had taxis and gps; Slack didn't necessarily create new software, but in my opinion it put chat apps on the general public's mind and it kinda became the go-to name, same as AWS or IBM. That's worth something.

> You could also argue that an android has the same functionality as an iPhone, again why would someone need an iPhone

Having used both I think it is a legitimate question. iPhone vs android is just arbitrary preference at this point.

I think the same thing with Slack. Whether you use Slack, Teams, Hangouts Meet, or something else is becoming entirely a preference. For a company that is losing money this is not a good thing.

On an individual basis, it's a legitimate question. On a bigger scale, the iPhone was/is a game changer.

Not "was/is", just "was". A customer that decides today doesn't care much about the iPhone legacy, but only if he/she can satisfy all their personal requirements with today's phones and ecosystems. And on that metric there's just as many people preferring iPhones as there are preferring Android devices, because none is clearly superior across the board, but each of them has different strengths and it is a question of personal preference which strengths someone values more.

Well, not exactly. Android has mich higher market share than iOS. There's not just as many preferring iPhones, not even close, though it may feel that way in certain geographies.

Not that many preferring iPhones? People not having iPhones has mostly to do with the 'luxury' aspect of them. Many want an one, but can't/don't want to spend the money on it. The absolute majority of Android devices sold is the sub-€300 market, many subsidised. It's mostly the tech-savvy crowd that on purpose buys an Android from what I see.

Just look at the insane secondhand value of any iPhone. Even my perfectly working old iPhone 6S I use as a backup would still sell for €240 today - which is absolutely nuts...

That's not what prefer means. By your logic just as many people prefer to fly in private jets as fly economy, but that's a meaningless statement - they don't prefer it, they prefer cheaper options and to spend the money on other things. Clearly by any definition the vast majority prefer to buy phones cheaper than Apple sell them, but the high end Android market does great too. Really Android just dominates completely in every market and has done for a very long time, which is why Apple fans like to talk about Apple taking most of the profit (as if this is a good thing!).

maybe so, but that’s not his argument.

his argument is that it’s so new that people don’t grok it yet. (which of course is wrong)

This exactly. You can tell a lot of the above commenters likely havent spent more than a few hours using Slack. Slack has completely changed the way I, and many of my colleagues, communicate with one another at work. (not saying its better or worse, just absolutely different).

Or perhaps they actually haven’t spent enough time not using Slack. I know as someone new to the industry, in all my 4 years I haven’t known a time when I wasn’t able to just ping someone on Slack. It’s natural and obvious to me.

How has Slack completely changed the way you communicate? You can chat, share files and do a lite screen share in a single app? Integrations? I guess, I don't see it and I've used Slack for years, before that HipChat, and I used IRC for a very long time too.

Slack is nothing at all like email. It's proprietary, non-federated and has built-in data discovery/spying mechanisms to record every click/keystroke made by users.

It is basically a chat program though right? It has some newer features, but they seem just like incremental improvements over proprietary chat applications I've been using for the last 25 years.

Yes. It's basically a chat program with lousy search features. Oh and it has a "native" Electron app, which just means the user experience is better in a browser.

Doesn't sound that different from Gmail to me.

Gmail was not the first email program (which is what the OP asked about). Gmail came several decades after email was invented and already in widespread use. You may or may not realize this fact (depending on your age).

I'm the OP, it doesn't really matter which was the first, my point was that we've had plenty of new "categories" of software. And in reality many that are just like Slack.

In some ways Google Apps for Business is a really good example of a sort of "new category" of communication software. You could plugin apps online, rather than have to host it your self.

A bit of googling shows he's called Slack a "brand new category of software" many times before, but I'm not clear what he thinks it is.

Slack wasn't the first chat application either. The fact that it's a value add atop IRC is irrelevant, as Gmail is a value add atop IMAP.

Gmail's a bad comparison because it never had to make money directly - it was just there to help Google build and maintain their search monopoly by acting as another data source and shutting out competitors. Slack, on the other hand, needs to make money because chat is their only product.

Gmail is the overwhelming reason that businesses pay for Google Apps.

Yes and slack is not the first instant messaging program. /snarky quip about your age and IRC/

How many corporations use G suite for their email? How many roll their own email systems and use thunderbird?

To the average user, email is a proprietary non-federated system filled with tracking.

Sorry, I don't mean that as snark. Many people born after 2000 have known nothing but Gmail as email and are surprised to learn that other email systems/providers exist.

That's nothing unique to age. I regularly talk to people born before 1960 (and 1970, and 1980....) who don't know that email is separate from it being on a website (about the only difference is that they know of Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc)

Can you supply some references for the keystroke assertion?

I'm confused. The question was about the keystroke assertion, which this link does not discuss.

ermogourd kids it's IRC, ferchrissakes. with oh yeah bots and file transfer and groups.

i heard they were throwing money at integrations with everything, had a bumpy ride scaling (mysql master-master ffs) and had vague plans for AI that'd help automate your org, not sure where that went. But the VC wants exponential or bust, so there you go.

> it had created a new category of software

Let's check that timeline of team chat apps...

2006 - Campfire launches (now part of Basecamp)

2010 - Hipchat launches

2013 - Slack launches

1980 - usenet launches

a few million years bc - one dinosaur grunts to another

Just goes to show the market can stay irrational longer than your species can continue to exist.

At the end of the day Slack is a SV unicorn that went public without turning any profit. I believe they marketed this in their S-1 as a "loss-making" company...who does the market think it is anyway trying to act rational.

Thanks! I mean it, THANK YOU!

We were using HipChat at a previous company (2013, I think), and I never understood the switch to Slack. I was like: Wait, but what's the difference? Everybody knew about Slack, and no one about HipChat.

I also don't think they introduced a new category of software, they just spent an absurd amount of additional money in marketing. That's it.

Hipchat performed horribly at my last company and had a bunch of bugs and issues. Hipchat handed the market to slack basically.

At least when I was using hipchat, there was no way to 'tune' down the notifications, so the bloody thing was super annoying. I basically begged my company to make the switch to Slack after a quick trial.

My company switched from HipChat to Slack around 2015. I won't say hype didn't play into the decision, but IIRC there were two other motivations: 1) more reliable performance, 2) better integrations with Google Docs.

At the time it was claimed that this was really a whole new way to organize data and work. In practicality, not that much changed from HipChat. Pinned items and the ability to rifle back through conversations saved my bacon a few times, but looking back on it, I don't think they outmatch properly-organized documentation and wikis.

We were kind of heavily invested in Atlassian stack, which means we used Confluence a lot.

We had a good system for creating and looking for documentation in our wiki system, so I hope that was not a selling point for Slack. Unfortunately we (Tech) never really knew why we switched.

EDIT: Also, on the performance side, we were there for the beginning of both systems, and both had their good amount of issues initially. By the time we switched, I don't remember that many HipChat outages. I remember a lot of Slack outages starting up as well, and these days I have issues with Web interface connectivity at least once a week (native works).

I can tell you my experience of having witnessed some companies move to “slack”, “Jira” etc. There were multiple similar cases.

It went something like this:

“We are now ‘agile’

Ok what are all the cool agile dev ops companies using?

Aha Jira&Slack. Ok let’s use that”

From there it gets even more crazy. The tools get included as a standard question for evaluating vendors on RFP’s. Vendors that use a similar toolset are rated more highly.

When you question why. The response is along the lines of:

“Oh if they are using Jira/slack/other tool, it must be an agile/dev ops/chat ops shop”

Put another way sometimes these tools end up being used as a “signal” to others rather than intrinsic value. The value is in the signalling, driven by social proof.

If one can pull this of when marketing your product you have a win. Effectively you have associated a movement (I.e agile) with your product (I.e Jira). So the buy decision is driven by the need to show they are doing {x}.

There must be some basis Of this and reading on how this is done? The broad topic would be marketing but what specifically?

Notes:

* This is merely an observation. I am not judging the accuracy of the statement that using a specific product = demonstrating some property.

These associations may not be applicable in all markets and I have seen them change over time.

equal parts sad and funny

cargo cult driven marketing

My company switched around the same time. Hype was primarily why we switched.

My experience with group messaging was MSN Messenger -> Basecamp -> Campfire -> HipChat -> Slack.

Slack's "good enough" for most communication and has better integration with most products, so it stuck. Others always failed in some way.

It's not that Slack is irreplaceable, if anything it's more vulnerable than ever, but that it has momentum. Other platforms like Campfire or HipChat always fell short of expectations.

you have a different memory to me. I remember switching from hipchat to slack, and it was night and day, obviously better. Slack had more features, a better UX, and wasnt buggy as hell like hipchat

Why do people keep comparing slack to email? It's nothing like email. It's just an instant messenger.

This is the ultra-aggressive marketing that Slack has been pushing ever since they got any traction. They seem to pitch that idea to anyone who will listen even though like you say, it makes no sense.

Slack is kind of like what google wave should have been.

Slack is different from those companies of yore. Back then, if you created a chat program and went to an investment bank, they'd laugh you out of the office, or advise that you take whatever acquisition offer you can get, because a chat program with tons of competitors isn't enough to build a profitable business on.

Skype got investment from VCs in 2003, 16 years ago. is that "yore" enough for you?

https://www.vcgate.com/Bessemer_Venture_Partners.asp

Skype wasn't a chat program.

Skype was a P2P phone calling program over TCP/IP.

I.e., a neat trick that might have killed traditional telecoms.

Then Microsoft bought Skype and killed it instead.

Thank you for reminding me that Skype was a good product at one point.

Skype never went public though. Investment from VCs happens well before going to an I-bank with the intention of going public. VCs can invest in anything, investment banks are the ones who create the initial public offering.

Even so, Skype was a household name for video chat for years (despite it's sometime shoddy quality) until FaceTime, Gchat and others implemented video towards 2010.

What's Slack done that's different from other chat platforms available today? Stuff like Jira integration is of interest only to a small portion of its target market, and it's that exact market that will complain about the pricing, that it's non-federated, heavy on resources, intrusive in its tracking, etc.

Then Skype got bought by eBay shortly thereafter for gobs of money, in the somewhat blind hope that synergies would develop between eBay, PayPal, and Skype. Never quite panned out that way.

Btw, although I've seen little difference between HipChat and Slack in my day-to-day, the switch from Skype to HipChat was a profound improvement. Messages sent on Skype could and would frequently vanish into the ether, and/or arrive in the conversation thread way out of order. Imagine troubleshooting production issues under those conditions!...

> it would take time for the market to understand his company

Perhaps, and also perhaps when they do, it won't be so valuable anymore...

What’s the new category? “Basic applications that somehow consume multiple gigabytes of RAM”? To be fair, I don’t think Slack pioneered that, but they certainly popularized it.

What an arrogant take on the impact of Slack from Butterfield.

Even if he says that Slack is "not about tech but about making work happen", there has been countless of other programs that, while being "tech", made work happen. I just can't see this "category innovation" at all.

The sense I get is that he's trying to differentiate Slack from the general category of enterprise chat and want to communicate it's more than that. I do know small teams that use Slack to automate their business process workflow that require some manual steps. There's a valid argument that it's yet to realize its full potential in that regard.

However, I agree with the general sentiment that Slack must be profitable by now and if their messaging isn't reaching the target audience it's their fault and their fault only. Not to mention the ridiculously high valuation.

Why anyone would willingly plug an opaque, overly complicated, poorly optimized, externally controlled failure point into their tech stack is beyond me.

When I go to work every day, I don’t want to have to worry about whether or not our chat server is up. My job isn’t to manage chat servers, it’s to manage all the servers we actually need to get our shit done. I don’t want to get paged at 2 AM because some XMPP server is down, which will, the next morning, prevent everyone from communicating. Sure, Slack goes down too, but I can make some coffee and let an entire team of dedicated people fix it; it’s their emergency, not mine.

Only host things if you really need to, and only if you have the resources to support them. Unless you want to add “manage chat servers” to your list of core competencies, just buy something and move on. Our business isn’t managing chat servers. All we need is an IM service so we can communicate and get our stuff done. Slack, for all its faults, works for us, and frees up our time to focus on the problems we actually want to solve.

It loses money. A lot of it.

Isn't that the majority of modern tech companies? Take something which is marginally profitable, scale it beyond all comprehension and make it unprofitable.

I didn't see the need for a global digitised cab company but it didn't stop two companies burning $30 billion to try and make it happen.

Your view is parochial. A lot of people can't live without Uber and Lyft now. It seems arcane calling a cab company or waiting till one magically appears near you.

It doesn’t cost $30 billion for a cab company to build an app though.

Everything seems easy behind a computer..

No, he's right. Uber loses billions because they subsidise rides. That's easy. Anyone can sell a dollar for 80 cents.

Please do that and get investors to fund you for a long period of time.

Honestly it's sometimes been tempting when you look at things like Uber. How long have they been around now? No signs of investors pulling the plug yet. How long is a long time?

Agree - that’s a total cop out. Whether or not they are a novelty product or creating a category is a separate issue and isn’t as important in this context once it’s clear that they have strong product market fit.

What matters to the market now is that they are a subscription-based software business model not unlike thousands of other SaaS companies. It’s a very well understood space watched by investors who can compare what they are seeing to many other examples.

Slack needs to adjust to life as a public company - how to set expectations, how to manage to those goals. In fairness they also were saddled with hugely inflated expectations before the media and some investors likely realized that they are just like a lot of other SaaS businesses.

Slack is just a message board, or chat room, or IRC with modern design.

He says this because the kool-aid is flowing and he is financially/emotionally/reputationally incentivized to believe it.

If you want to hear some world-class puffery, check out this interview with Ev Williams that I heard last night on NPR:

https://mastersofscale.com/ev-williams-never-underestimate-y...

> why does he think his is something new?

Artifice. Just like WeWork trademarking the word We and coming up with a bunch of frothy "created with the power of We" bullshit

It's irc but fancy. So I guess they created the fancy?

Um, yes? And they also took time for the market to understand. A lot more time.

It’s the usual marketing wank