To bad 99% of managers never think that way. Usually it is salaries are a fixed amount in our budget this extra money needs to go through the process of being approved = Make people work longer to save the hassle. No one accounts for the most expensive cost which is salaries.

If you have a product (any product) in daily use by 30 staff, then switching costs (productivity hit) likely become the dominant factor in making a decision. I would be shocked that $500/mth comes into the picture when the salary expense has gotta be north of $100,000 a month for 30 staff.

Salary and benefits are an HR cost. As Project manager I don't care about that.

IT costs are booked to the project or if you are lucky to central licensing bucket which can aggregate users and obtain a discount. Either way that comes out of my project bucket which is already besieged by too many expenses.

I think you just gave a perfect description of how bureaucratic details produce microoptimizations that, while beneficial to the individual decision-maker, are not optimal for the organization.

I'll refer you back to the "Shadow IT" that was mentioned in the article, while the company I work out has the money to spend on something like this it would never go anywhere since we are a "startup" (Stretching the definition a little) and any cost over $0 is heavily scrutinized (for better or worse). We still use jabber because "It's Free" and now that we have 70-odd employees switching to Slack/HipChat seems like a huge expense. I will readily admit that the issue here isn't as much the cost as much as the people making the decisions thinking that ChatProgramA == ChatProgramB except for ChatProgramA.cost < ChatProgramB.cost where ChatProgramA.cost == $0.

I suggest Sococo (I work there). Free. Includes chat, webcam/audio spaces, doc sharing. Best for distributed teams, especially if practicing Agile.

Thanks! I think we may have just pushed through at least a trial run of HipChat but I'll pass it along and check it out myself.

It depends. If you have no current process, $500/mo for this revolutionary extension to your workflow is great.

If you have a current process, an incremental improvement to it might be a hard sell at $500/mo. And I can guarantee that at 1k users, the $15k/mo is going to be a far harder sell than 'use sharepoint/the public file share/e-mail, it works fine'.

At 1000 users you can likely get a good licensing deal to bring that down a bit.

I agree and this debate has ended along time ago.

Dropbox already proved this point.

If you have hard budget caps and more than 30 employees, it means you're still not going to pay for it this year. This announcement just seems like bad timing. Or maybe they're gearing up for next year.