Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss

Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by czhu12 on Monday January 19, 2026 @01:19AM (#46675582)

I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Microsoft, and arguably the most sticky part of the MS cloud productivity stack. So it can’t be lost on Google how important it is to have something here.

Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just

A: making it better?

B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by m_km on Monday January 19, 2026 @03:46AM (#46676443)

And Google Chat does not have a native Desktop app. I guess they're the only chat app that don't.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by surajrmal on Monday January 19, 2026 @11:09AM (#46680576)

Since when does an electron app count as native? You can install the webapp and that seems to feel basically equivalent.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by tormeh on Monday January 19, 2026 @01:26AM (#46675612)

Really? Teams is the most sticky? Teams sucks. Excel and PowerPoint are the most sticky parts, and Teams just comes bundled with those.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by michaelt on Monday January 19, 2026 @03:06AM (#46676139)

Perhaps he has a very narrow definition of "the MS cloud productivity stack"

Windows? Office? Not cloud, in its roots. Active Directory? Entra? Azure? Not productivity. Github? Not MS. Copilot? Not sticky.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by pedalpete on Monday January 19, 2026 @02:00AM (#46675783)

I agree that Teams sucks, but speaking to people who are locked into the Microsoft environment, they love it.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by prmoustache on Monday January 19, 2026 @06:38AM (#46677848)

I guess people love having a chat/videoconference tool available.

As for loving Teams ni particular compared to other solutions, I think it is far from the truth.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by ted_dunning on Monday January 19, 2026 @04:28AM (#46676781)

Yes in some ways. Teams being bundled means that Slack and other messaging apps have to justify against a sunk-cost solution.

That makes teams very sticky.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by czhu12 on Monday January 19, 2026 @01:28PM (#46682671)

I mostly meant sticky as in the most touched surface for day to day usage. Maybe sticky is not the right word.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by PunchyHamster on Monday January 19, 2026 @04:50AM (#46676957)

History of Google text/voice/video chat is frankly insane, they refuse to just have a product and develop it, instead every few years the new thing pops up and the old thing gets deprecated.

They should've been dominating the space for near 2 decades now. Instead they had Google Talk (that even worked over XMPP!) then replaced it with google hangouts, and then Google Chat.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by happymellon on Monday January 19, 2026 @06:24AM (#46677743)

And each iteration is basically worse.

XMPP should be able to be a Slack replacement.

Hangouts was a proprietary reimplementation, that had most of the features in an awkward way. Group chat in columns wasn't a great idea but was fine on mobile.

Duo/Chat was weird, separation of communication for no great benefit, and wasn't really any better than Hangouts. More like Hangouts that they had given to an intern to fix up, but forgot to tell them that it still needed to work with Hangouts.

Now we have Chat and Meet, Meet "replacing" Duo, while Duo is becoming Meet?

All I know is that after Hangouts finally was retired and replaced with Chat, they hid the chat tab in gmail, and required you to unhide it, and then appeared to disable notifications so I never knew when the last couple of people using it messaged me.

1/10. Wouldn't recommend.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by PunchyHamster on Monday January 19, 2026 @11:55AM (#46681304)

And don't forget Google Wave that did the whole "chat integrated with various multimedia elements" decade before the competition (and arguably, better, coz those could be interactive elements not previews of websites and embedded media)

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by happymellon on Monday January 19, 2026 @12:20PM (#46681714)

I never actually used Wave. I didn't understand it, and by the time I was going to try it was shutdown.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

Apparently it was generally available for 3 months. Probably why I missed it.

I didn't try Buzz either.

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Re:Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day me... by FeloniousHam on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @10:59AM (#46693268)

For me, Wave was the most exciting thing Google ever tried. The requirements exceeded most corporate hardware, but the whole "email as a wiki page" struck me as the future. Replay the messages in order to follow the responses.

(there was a lot of other stuff going on in there too)

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