Yeaaahhh I used to think that. Until I expanded to Asia.
Chats as platforms and general portals to the internet is pretty amazing, despite the drawbacks to the centralized control that some of the chat app implementations.
For the last several years when I open a new business bank account for an online-only service and the banker asks for my website, I correctly tell them I don't have one, as everything happens over chat apps, and "websites" are an antiquated, useless, unnecessary form of validation for North American and European markets for a pyramid of ad/web design/tracking services and are simply not a barrier in selling a product online.
Bots for slack/discord/telegram and platforms in asian markets all leverage pretty robust environments. Whereas in the past (and many people still do this) it was necessary to build a whole website and your own platform with the hope of reaching users like with mobile apps that have so much friction to reaching you. Can they complement each other? sure. But you should just keep selling those shovels to other companies stuck in the last decade, while building something with much lower barriers and efficiencies for yourself.
I think Slack is on the right track. They can monetize their api and bot marketplace.
I've been excited about what the general 'chat UI' can accommodate and love API's like that of Telegram that allow a ton of custom UI and functionality that augment chatbots.
And it's been frustrating to learn how in Asia this unified interface offers portals to tons of stuff that in the west I need to visit (shitty) websites for (putting aside the issue of the web technically being more open than something like WeChat).
My impression is that Slack hasn't really done much to try and bring the 'chat UI' to the masses, even though they have a lot of power to try and do so. Telegram seems to have done more, including of course native desktop apps that I feel comfortable having open all the time.
While it's true that other chat-offering companies haven't done much either (WhatsApp doesn't even have bots?), or perhaps it's just really hard to change a culture, it still feels like Slack could've put a ton more effort in trying to bring what's clearly working in Asia to Europe/US/etc.
I might be wrong though; I've mostly been reading up on this on occasion and never really dove into any of it beyond building Telegram bots to scratch my own itch. But I picked Telegram because it has much better apps for all my devices, so there's that at least.
By all means correct me though. I really, really want chat-based solutions to so many things. It's nice, for example, to be able finally order most of my takeout online with so much less friction than in the past. But it feels silly to have to make an account with at least two providers, open their 'bespoke' apps or website, learn their UI, and so on, when I'd much prefer having an ongoing 'conversation' with the restaurants of my choice where, say, I can re-order an earlier order or pre-populate an order by scrolling up the chat history and picking an order I liked. or to be able to chat with the courier/restaurant about delivery rather than having to deal with whatever shitty home-built interface the restaurant or delivery service offers.
How does a chat based solution lead to a better experience compared to an established website?
> I'd much prefer having an ongoing 'conversation' with the restaurants of my choice
That sounds a lot like ordering over the phone.
If paying for seats goes out of vogue, they have the other things and its an okay niche.
If the Developed world can't afford Slack what chance has the Developing world really got?
Slack wants €200 for a 15 member team or somthing. Per month. While Google will sell us all the same stuff and more (GDrive, Corporate Email, GCalendar, Hangouts Chat etc) for a lower price (GSuite), all of which we need anyway.
Coding the custom solution around Mattermost cost less than one year of Slack and in year three we're still happy with it
Any recommendation for experiencing it?
Can we get some of them on Western app stores , and still get a representative experience with integrations?
I was able to get this in San Francisco with relative ease, and when I accidentally gave the CCP my address book, pretty much all my asian contacts were already on it.
Maybe also easy to get verified with the student body of major universities.
For an example, most recently, I was trying to verify a client exists and couldn't find anything on Google, but when I had the mental spark to check WeChat they had a whole business page, lots of updates, easily accessible representatives, followers, accolades, etc.
What it needs now is someone who can add (for want of a better term) "knowledge management". The search sucks; it is just garbage. But beyond fixing search, it needs... something. I started sketching an idea involving users tagging comments as a baseline something to try to make it more than a realtime stream of undifferentiated business info.
Your Slack history contains a ton of info your company needs. Too bad you can't find it if someone said it last week.
Amen. It's deeply ironic that email threads actually work better at this use case than Slack does, despite it being Slack's alleged raison d'etre.
I try to think from the 'regular user' perspective and often assumed that they just don't care. I figured they'd have Slack open on their desktop all the time at work, or just not care about load times or battery drain. I figured that was just one of those '(web) developer things'.
But I've been surprised at how much friction there is to using Slack with various non-nerdy clients I have. They'll constantly send me messages via WhatsApp or even Telegram. The ones that I've convinced to use Trello often start using it for their own stuff.
But Slack is a slog to them. Mostly the desktop clients, but I've heard a number of them complain about mobile (which I don't use much, but I thought was native?).
Whatever Slack is doing right, whatever its other problems, surely the fact that 'regular folks' feel friction using a chat app that one is supposed to regularly use is a cause for concern!
Case in point - we use slack at work, but when we need a call we'll typically use discord instead, as slack is horrible for calls (blurry text when screen sharing, often doesn't always let everyone on the call, etc). If everyone in the company started using discord for text chat as well, there would be very little reason to stay on slack and keep paying, as it wouldn't be worth it. Slack don't have something like office 360 to keep companies interested if chat fails to deliver, so all of those customers could evaporate pretty quickly.
It can be a product, but I guess it will have the same fate as Web Browsers. Who buys a browser product nowadays? Web-browsing is a feature.
> team communication package
A.k.a chat program.
If Slack charges too much, there's a host of free alternatives that can be used, meaning they have limited ability to increase prices.
Compare that to office suites. There's not that many options here and it's pretty difficult to build something that would have the functionality that enterprises think they want/need and compete with incumbants like MS.
The main free alternative (libreoffice) has had recent struggles with funding, due to the level of work needed to maintain and improve their offering
It's like saying Windows is not difficult to replace. Technicaly true but practically false.
Well, that's not true. That is easily refuted by it having been replaced at least once.
> It's like saying Windows is not difficult to replace. Technicaly true but practically false.
While you may believe that Slack offers something that other solutions lack, that simply isn't true. I know of two companies which have replaced Slack, one with a commercial offering, and the other with an in-house solution. Rewriting most of Slack is a week-end project.
Slack, over time, actually locks a company more and more into their ecosystem, since to have history you must pay them. With many other solutions, including 50 year old email, messages can be stored locally and filtered as is beleived to be appropriate by each user. If all you want is a chat bot with channels, then use Slack, and throw it away when you're finished.
Products like Atlassian's HipChat predated Slack by many years.
It is easy to dismiss something as "just a chat product" but then again, it is incredibly hard to make a product that is so easy to use that everyone can use. Reminds me of that comment about Dropbox from years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Personally, I think what happened was that GChat became popular, and killed all the alternatives, and then basically stagnated and confused the shit out of its users through hangouts etc.
Slack was one of the first products that realized that since GChat had gone, there was a huge gap in the market.
I’m hard pressed to think of any area where they were beyond predecessors in either ease of use or features (I can’t remember if persistent chat rooms were available in all the other messengers) beyond those little custom emoji things.
and all the teenagers in all the high-schools who otherwise had no affinity with computers whatsoever.
/slap
But that was 20 years ago, of course. You can't compare the technical prowess of a random kid back then with a current well-paid software professional with access to portable hardware 100s of times more powerful.
There's a reason Mozilla moved away from IRC, and it wasn't that "their engineers couldn't figure out IRC".
* Many businesses have purchasing rules that discourage buying 2 duplicate products -- so by bundling a bad team chat product with Office 365, they significantly reduce Slack's ability to get paying customers simply because of their monopoly position (not because of their product's quality).
* Microsoft is in a market position where they can effectively bribe potential customers with discounts on other services they sell (E.g. we'll add another $250K in Azure credits if you agree to go all Microsoft).
> You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.
This I agree with -- but the reason is that we're in a world of essentially unconstrained monopolistic tech giants, and it's basically impossible to stop a tech giant 100 times your size from taking your market if they really focus on doing so. And Microsoft is clearly very focused on the team chat market.
There are very few markets where it's possible to create a moat that can resist a monopolist copying your product (however badly) and then making the price of their copy zero (or negative!). I don't think we should accept a world where the only long-term outcomes for a fast-growing technology company are to be acquired or destroyed by a tech monopoly.
> Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets
This is a common misconception. While you can make "chat" as a demo with any web framework, nobody would willingly use that tool. Creating a team chat user experience that isn't terrible requires a huge amount of work because there are hundreds of features that significantly improve important workflows for large classes of people (if you don't believe me that it's hundreds, read https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/changelog.ht... and https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen...).
Dropbox, Box, Asana, Airtable, Zoho, Amazon, Adobe. There's other ways they could grow to become Microsoft that don't start with document editing. Adobe in particular would be an attractive mix. Google and Facebook sound like mediocre homes, because they already offer such overlapping suites, but maybe its just about user acquisition. Oracle would probably be interested in monetizing chat.
At the end of the day though, they will need a competitive spreadsheet offering. Everyone needs spreadsheets.
And at least anecdotally, Dropbox has completely disappeared in the world around me. I used to get links to stuff in someone's public folder, or be added to a company/person's dropbox to collaborate, and all of that's gone now. It's usually Google Drive, sending stuff around on Slack (which I'm not a fan of), or back to email attachments.
Maybe that's just very particular to my situation, but considering the variety of people I interact with as a freelancer/consultant, it doesn't bode well for Dropbox in NL at least.
Not that I need 1TB of cloud storage at all, which is why I haven't committed to either yet.
At the same time, I think Slack has an exit problem. As you've said, they're selling chat. They have to hope to be acquired - but by whom? Google already has 12 platforms. Facebook has 2, and famously doesn't compete on this part of the business side. Similarly, many of my friends companies have left Slack for things like RocketChat, Chanty, or Mattermost.
I think Amazon may well feel a need to go up against its cloud infrastructure competitors Microsoft and Google with its own set of office/collaboration offerings. And they have a pretty deep cooperation with Slack already.
(Disclosure: I am a Slack shareholder)
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-...
This is clearly a case of confounding an app being easy to use, with it being easy to build [1]
[1] - https://graymatters.substack.com/p/-why-easy-to-use-apps-are...
My freelancer friends write bots for Slack that integrate various other products to work within slack. They would say Slack is a "platform" for communication.
Ouch, what happened to Netflix?
You're selling something that isn't a product. Standalone chat is a feature, and you won't win against a full product offering unless you drastically reduce your prices. You need to get acquired (by Google or Facebook), because I don't think you can innovate an office productivity suite fast enough to compete. And that's clearly the enterprise puzzle piece where chat fits into nicely.
Microsoft isn't being anti-competitive here. Out of all the FAAMG, they're the one that least resembles a monopoly.
You're struggling because you are selling chat as a service. Something that has been free since IRC and AOL Instant Messenger. Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets. You built a pretty (through opinions vary) version with access controls.
You had a chance to build a moat and make acquisitions to fortify your position, but you didn't do it. You invited competition from Microsoft and instead of doing something, you rewrote your Electron layout six times and made a WYSIWYG that everyone hated.
You had four or five years to do something. You had a chance most startup companies dream of. But here we are. You squandered that chance while you reveled in hubris.
You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.