Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product.
There's a tipping point where having to check multiple apps will push people towards consolidating in a single client if they possibly can, which (in the long term) may not be slack if it doesn't support "ad hoc" communities or personal use-cases at a reasonable price.
I’d suggest the answer to that is probably no - an open source community is by its very nature going to want costs and overheads down, and all but the largest non profits and NGOs are going to try to get by by stitching together free tools and services. The one that is paying in your example is the one in Slack’s target who is going to be most likely to pay. Does Slack care about a few open source communities potentially churning? Probably not. Does it care about lowering average Time to Revenue? Absolutely.
None of them can pay, and they should be sponsored by our usage of Slack for our main job.
Arguably this is even worse from slaks POV, no? Everyone on free slack is on free slack because they aren't willing/able to pay and slack would indirectly benefit if those customers were freeloading (and incuring costs) for their competitors.
2. Every private group chat might involve people who never used something like it before. For these people the software they use first is the baseline. And they are more likly to recommend the solution they already know to a organistation that is willing/able to pay for a higher tier.
People who are used to slack will pressure their boss to buy slack for work.
The slack company will just see a boss reaching out and buying. They will not relate it to the fact that it's the employees requesting it.
Bosses want to use microsoft teams, because it's included in the company's subscription. They accept to use slack because of the employees.
But if the new employees will not even know slack exists… they will not be asking for it.
tools used for reasons outside of work may be perceived as good tools for work;
and tools used professionally are sometimes considered to be good for use for personal reasons.
tl;dr it doesn't need to be true always, only sometimes, which it is
someone hav[ing] used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work is not enough to justify spending on those personal use cases
I am sharing that I have an equal and opposite opinion, which is that the someone having used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work sometimes IS enough to justify spending on those personal use cases
You are right that data can inform the decision, of course, keeping in mind that the benefits include intangibles like goodwill, which goes further in the techie community than in a layman community imo
They also own Tableau, which has stagnated as well and is pretty badly handled.
These tools built themselves on being free (as in beer) up to a certain extent, and now they're big enough, and trust their momentum, so they change their stance.
This will inevitably create some changes, both how they perceived and being developed, but we'll see...
However, web application development is much easier and scalable infrastructure is democratized now. Their moat may not be as robust as they imagine.
This will get interesting.
Salesforce bought Slack in 2021.
For legit freemium users who to "try before they buy", indeed... it's a sad day for Heroku to lose this audience.
(they’re technically in beta but a bunch of popular discords use them)
Neither you nor GP are articulating or giving examples. Start there and we can have a proper discussion, otherwise it'll be just another case of 'he-said-she-said'.
In case you are wondering, I don't consider the UX for IRC "good" (in a forum with "hacker" in its name, of course IRC will come up). It is good because it is open, simple and lightweight, but when you want a history and image/file transfer, and most people do, it breaks down and you need ad-hoc solutions.
Which is exactly why the IRC clones (Slack, etc) have taken off
The only thing that took me some time to adjust to was how overwhelming joining a new server can be. So many channels! Everything needs my attention! But after using it for a long time, I think this is actually a feature. I can mute channels and categories I’m uninterested in, but how many channels on Slack are never found due to poor discoverability?
We run both Slack and Discord at my work and the engineers vastly prefer Discord, for what it’s worth.
Caveat: It seems much more geared towards users who commit significant brain-space to the subjects they join (for example: catching up on threads is easier if you’re paying attention to realtime notifications), whereas I have a lot of interests and really just want the gems whenever I “sit down” to work with a particular interest.
Some people like this kind of constant distraction, though.
I could see Discord as made for power users where Slack and Teams would be aimed at casuals. But I do think that Discord does a pretty good job at being intuitive.
Discord is leaps and bounds above all of those, for very different reasons.
About IRC you're obviously wrong :)
Discord is the best thing I’ve found. My group and I love it.
I'm running my start-up via Discord and it's grown to a 60,000-member community. Incredible engagement. Fantastic way to find customers and business use cases, too.
For "enterprise", we run a separate instance for staff with lots of useful Github, Clickup, and other integrations.
Most apps have no good open source alternatives.
There are dozens of products and countless open protocols to base new products on. We could even just use IRC again.
The voice channels are flawless, even when there's people on shitty internet connections.
The client is always responsive and snappy.
Their design of how the server/chat/voice/videos/users is laid out is is clearer, easier to see what's going on at a glance and it manages to do that while it fits more information on screen.
Their dark mode is much better.
Their code display/highlighting is better.
The user groups/roles which is more like tags is much better than others.
It's way easier to find where notifications come from.
Auto-archived threads automatically unarchive themselves when you send a new message. Locked-threads, on the other hand, require explicit unlock.
Yikes, here's hoping you mean "after a year" or something, because having to make a fake new thread just to comment on an existing locked thread would make me rage quit
Someone with the manage threads permission can unarchive it, but like the pinning thing that also comes with permission to delete it, so you can't just grant that to everyone in your server.
Slack does app integrations and bots pretty well.
To give an example, let's say you have both a Discord channel and a Slack channel with the same 10 people working on a project, 7 of which are software developers. To mention the developers, your Slack option is either @everyone (including 3 non-developers) or individually. On Discord you can create @developers and add only those seven, not bothering the other 3.
You can really go buckwild with that basic concept: only admin can tag @everyone, only @talkers can join a voice channel, only @projectmanagers can run some bot, only @collaborators can post to #project, @watchers can read #project but not post, while those that are neither @collaborators nor @watchers don't even see the channel... And in #otherproject you can have those same people in totally different groups and with different roles.
Way more customizable than by just having public/private channels and @everyone at your disposal, as Slack does.
And some other features like colours which are nice when you want mods to stand out for public servers, or teams for some sort of competitive event server.
Because devs use it for OSS/hobbies, they want to use it at work. Simple.
Users pay for convenience and for more, not just slightly better.
I started using Slack in 2015, and never in my life used a free Slack account.
So why assume it’s positive ROI? The people who make purchasing decisions in the organizations Salesforce plays in don’t typically make them based off recommendations of people happily using a free tier on outside projects but rather those made by massive sales teams.
Why else do you think students get software or checking accounts for free or much lower cost? The net LTV of getting users accustomed to your product who later evangelize it for free is priceless.
So tinkering with free plans downwards can have unforeseen consequences.
And with the amount of data slack uses so low and costs of bandwidth and spinning rust approaching zero - the idea that free tier limitation are anything other than create a painpoint for people to upgrade is a joke.
I wonder when it will hit github. At the moment they offer free hosting for open source projects, including github actions. It seems pretty clear at some point they'll have to back off in some form or another. Maybe the "open source" part is enough of a filter?
Genuine question, has there been any evidence to substantiate your claim?
[1] https://github.com/features/copilot#what-data-has-github-cop...
You just provided the evidence. I was incorrect to use the term "all the code", but they clearly and openly used GitHub code to train Copilot
They did that already. Years ago, they did that. Now everyone knows about slack.
This is the same with Slack/Discord. If I can attract bright individual to work for me if I offer them Discord, I don't really mind switching to Discord.
Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth. Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further. There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Slack-fluent friend.
And because there’s no way to know; the cost-cutters look at the numbers and say “cut the free plan enough to stop the hemorrhage”. Worst part is the next quarter looks great. And maybe the one after that. But soon enough the income starts dropping and there’s no “clear reason why” and then it’s too late to recover it. It has to be built again by building trust from scratch.