I think even Amazon realized how awful Chime is, given that they, as a company, switched to Slack just a few months ago.

That may just be a peculiarity of my department, but saying "Amazon as a company switched to slack" is definitely overstating what happened.

It must be just your org/team, because a few of my friends working there in entirely different orgs had their teams switched to Slack fully within the week of announcement. Not claiming you are wrong though, because my sample size of 3 people/teams is purely anecdata.

I can imagine that the main driver behind IT announcing Slack support was for their customer-facing staff to be able to provide support for their customers.

It definitely helped to have a faster turn around time and provide more visibility for people.

Switching to slack was brought up in our org and most people were at best noncommittal, because the option wasn't really "chime vs. slack", it was "chime vs. chime AND slack".

We'd still all need chime for meetings and interacting with any groups that hadn't switched.

You cannot leave individual channels of a Team though you can mute them and you have even less permissions than Discord.

So maybe it isn't a 1:1 replacement for Slack but it certainly could compete in the field.

EDIT: Another example of discord's permission system being a poor match for the business use case is pinning messages to the channel is the same permission as deleting other user's messages. Additionally, the channel per server limit is 500.

It's like they took IRC, saw it worked for businesses, and were like "how can we fuck this up, slowly, to destroy the very essence of what made chat channels useful in the first place?".

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/Ending-Support-for-Voice-Ch...

Curse Voice released in June 2015. Discord released in May 2015.

At best you could fudge the numbers and claim that Discord and Curse came out at the same time. A claim that Curse Voice was anything before Discord existed is flat out false.

[1] https://www.player.one/curse-voice-vc-funded-skype-gamers-be...

[2] https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/17/curse-gets-a-million-game...

"Ok, you know our motto, 'Don't be Evil.'?"

Heads nod.

"What if ... what if ... what if we simplify that?"

"How so?"

"Just cut off the first word, 'Be Evil.' Simple, elegant."

"I like it!"

----

Jokes aside, I think Google does a pretty good job of keeping the major products steady. Our little cohort on HN isn't a great sample for determining what "major" is.

They've killed off a lot of buds, but they've also killed some great products.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

They still haven’t fully closed on their Fitbit acquisition, so I’d expect they’d have a tough hill to climb for a Discord or a Slack.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

My gut reasoning is that cloud infrastructure is not the same product as office productivity and the two use cases are not the same, the purchasing decisions aren't made by the same people (except at scale, I guess, I'll concede that), and the boots on the ground building shit in the cloud take the path of least resistance where that logic would never apply.

I don't really subscribe to the belief that a company should half ass a product or acquire something in a new market because they aren't already there, but I may be in the minority. Amazon has shown they can build a trillion dollar enterprise without caring about office productivity or chat, but they'll sell the shovels to anyone who wants to try and dig those holes.

And then you want to automate or do some nice charts, and there is Power platform just around the corner...

and then you find yourself limited so you go Azure Functions... and then start one VM on Azure...

Power Platform is for "power users" to be able to "no code" things, this is targeted (MS Claims) as non-IT Users, as is the Rest of the office/Microsoft 365 stack

Azure (including Azure AD) however is targeted at IT Staff, dev's,sysadmins, etc. There is a clear line in how the tools are marketed, deployed, licensed and utilized

After that, you already have some firewalling and VPNs in place so adding the odd server is just a step away.

Adding dedicated lines and firewalls and rules and all bella and whistles with all four big players (AMZ, IBM, MSFT, GOOG) plus 2 ISPs adds cost fast, so you typically pick 2. MSFTbis already there for O365 so yeah, they have a head start

Hosted AD on Azure and Office 365 are _so good_ that nobody is coming close, not even Google.

I am sorry but the concept of "Beta release level" is a complete misfire/mismatch for what an enterprise needs. For example, you cannot, on one hand, advertise that you have a competitive feature (Google Functions competing with AWS Lambda), but then, on the other hand, turn around and label it beta and basically use that an an excuse for inferior reliability and inferior documentation. How can you basically GA a major piece of platform functionality, call it beta, and then ask any enterprise (that has lower risk tolerance) to use it? Enterprises don't want to invest into beta-labelled features, because they know it's an excuse for bugs and half-baked support. No wonder GCP is struggling for adoption.

("beta release" level is a conversation you have with select trusted partners that are willing to tolerate your early stuff in exchange for early access to value... it is not something that is acceptable to advertise as open enrollment to all)

Flow, Teams, Lists, Planner, Sway, Stream, Forms, Kaizala...

Sorry, but these aren't battle tested enterprise apps at all. Could as well pull random apps from the Google store.

Whenever something new releases the first reaction already is "not again"...

Anyone who uses GCP knows you type “gcloud beta ...” an awful lot. But enterprise sales are made on the golf course between people who have never and will never use the product themselves.

This is all obsolete anyway, since GCP has announced they're moving to two stages: Preview or GA. That's it.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-gets...

My point was that features were being advertised as essentially GA that were not actually GA. When evaluating the Google Cloud Platform sans-beta features, I was suddenly looking at a much more barren offering, in comparison to AWS.

While I think an MS environment can be a boon to enterprises, I think the MS cloud is very lacking, especially on performance.

Maybe because I am located in Europe, but it is not fun to work with.

We produce hardware and in dire cases we can do that with the pen and paper office solutions as long as our basic ERP solutions are working.

It would be no problem to use Linux and Libre office, it wouldn't affect productivity at all.

MS has good long term support but their cloud is certainly an exception to that. Not yet sure if good or bad.

Eero devices require this customer support, but that can be merged with their IOT support team for all other in-home objects. I think Amazon made an exception to their “user support is never our priority” choice because they know it’s the only way to get a physical foothold in our homes, with Kindle and Echo, and I think the burden of Eero support was worth it to them for the mesh networking technology that has been harvested for Sidewalk.

Slack customer support cannot be easily integrated with any existing Amazon support team that I’m aware of, and does not offer a world-changing advantage to that degree.

Amazon is virtually the singular FAANG company that not only has customer support, but has generally very good customer support.

If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void.

If we move the goalpost to "have I been able to resolve problems", then yes — after 30 minutes of research into how to hack Amazon customer support in order to talk with a human, followed by multiple phone and chat interactions with generous on-hold time, I can share that Amazon support for retail technically exists and is excellent except when compared to 95% of other customer support experience I've ever had.

> If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void.

Ooof, I believe you. I'm Facebook-free, but maybe it's time to start looking for another email provider.

I've had good experiences. But when you have bad experiences, they can be really bad. I ordered a TV on Amazon (Prime) and it was scheduled for delivery in 3 days. Because it's a large shipment truck delivery, they give you a window. Like Spectrum/Comcast. So I sat home all day and... nothing. I checked my messages and almost the exact time the delivery window was closing they left a message saying "could not deliver will try some other time" basically.

It took a month and about 15 customer service reps before a single person could tell me where my TV was. I'm not exaggerating. They had no clue what happened to a $1,000 purchase. It fell into their bureaucratic black hole like some scene from a Monty Python skit.

when this happened to me, I simply filed the claim online and they resolved it, no need to talk to anyone

Also paying user of google products and GSuite - support not great on the gsuite side, but retail order for Google Wifi etc pretty OK.

Not sure why using Office would be a reason to prefer Azure over something else. Can you elaborate? Are there some useful integrations one can benefit from?

Regarding Amazon buying Slack. My guess would be it's too expensive. If you look at Amazon's acquisitions history, you would see they almost never spend more than $1B. The one exception I recall is Whole Foods which they paid ~$13B for.

Kubeflow is an OSS framework for doing distributed data science / machine learning (including Tensorflow hence the name) on Kubernetes.

With the AAD integration it's just much more convenient to give a team of data scientists access to a Kubeflow Kubernetes cluster - AAD with the Kubeflow OpenIDConnect component will handle AuthN & AuthZ. Kubeflow itself sets up different Kubernetes namespaces for each authorized user upon first login.

You definitely don't need to run Kubernetes on AKS or Azure in general to take advantage of the AAD features.

It's nice to be able to get your email (Exchange), identity (Active Directory), productivity/office apps (Office), and underlying infrastructure (Azure), and even business intelligence/analytics (Dynamics) all from one place.

While slack and Dropbox are customer facing and build on top of Amazon.

Theoretically that stuff is more value added, but I think their markets are smaller compared to what Amazon is going for.

If the goal is to be the buggy whip maker for the universe there’s a lot more there until they need to start vertically integrating and buying stuff that uses the buggy whips.

I truly hope not. I like discord for its informal, gaming, and specifically not enterprise or "professional" approach/atmosphere. I use it to chat with friends and talk in some communities (eg. programming ones).

/s

I think Salesforce compares itself to Microsoft and sees its ambitions to enter ERP, CRM and BI markets and they already have a collaboration platform with Teams, for better or for worse.

Are you suggesting an enterprise is going to leave Office for Dropbox and Slack? Cause that's not happening.

Edit: in 2016 Dropbox stored 400PB (https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/magic-pocket-infrastruct...), in 2018 S3 was storing multiple exabytes (https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Amazon-S3-across-all-region...)

I suspect multiple exabytes is a low ball.

Probably -- came back to my comment 24 hours later and realized I mixed up DB and S3 in the sentence.

Before long, they’ll own the entire feature for “oh, I need to buy cereal. Alexa buy me cereal. Ok, done. <few mins later>. I’m passing by the Amazon Go store on way home, Alexa. Can I return these shoes I bought last week and pick up my cereal there. Sure.”