I've used Slack forever. Before that was IRC, Campfire, then Github Chat (an internal product there), and others I've forgotten. I'm sure I'll use Teams at some point.<p>The thing I always think about w/ chat apps for work is you don't want it to be that good. DMs are often a cancer in terms of knowledge transfer. Unlimited history and search means that people don't write up ideas in a proper way in a more suitable place, whether that's a long email or an ADR or a google doc or a pull request. Threads are undiscoverable and missed by people who should be in the loop.<p>Most product managers building these apps want to engage their users via the standard tech metrics - usage stats, number of searches, messages sent, whatever. But if you are in your chat app all day and responding to notifications and watching 30 channels, you aren't doing work. You are just surfing your own internal twitter. I've been there, it feels fun but at the end of the day you realize you didn't get shit done.<p>All of the incentives are misaligned to actually build an effective chat app for the 'calm' organization. I have read about Twist (<a href="https://www.twist.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.twist.com/</a>) which I know is all about that focus, and I hope to be able to use it in earnest someday.<p>I know when I'm really doing well with my job I'm on slack for an hour or two a day at most, and very deliberate about when to keep it open. The rest of the time I'm coding or thinking or writing or working w/ colleagues. That takes a lot of discipline tho, and the allure of always on chat is a strong one.
I feel like Slack deserves some blame here for their poor uptick during COVID.<p>Slack's audio/video product has been abysmal, and hasn't improved during the lockdowns. If you use Slack on iOS and someone shares their screen, you can't see what they are sharing. My teams have never been comfortable using Slack for audio calls, and there were enough problems that calls were just done over teams instead. I know many companies that used Slack, and then used Teams (or Zoom) for audio/video. How does Zoom factor into all this which grew like crazy? Teams is technically competitive but Zoom really nailed an important part of the product.
I don't think it's Microsoft. Slack became too stagnated. They build a great product but didn't evolve.
They didn't seem to address the distraction part. It has created a culture of ASAP everything.<p>It just create too much anxiety with so much going on. It feels busy but not productive. It just seem the same product as it was 4 years ago.
Also, it never felt like that they cared about our work-life. Slack took away all the structure from our work and left fragmented chatter. It never felt like they cared for our work-life.<p>It's UI is still limited and searching for something is painful even though search is it its name - SLACK. It started as chat but stayed as chat and did nothing to fix issues that comes with chat. With mail, you have one inbox. With slack, you have so many random inbox.<p>All messages are treated equally..from lunch chatter to some important announcement? How do I decide what to mute or unmute? Why can't there be a better way? If it's an FYI, don't send me notification. If my response is needed on something make those messages different. I mean there has to be a better way then just a single chat only fit for picnic planning.<p>I don't know, I just feel that slack could have become a huge independent company if they had cared more about the problems of users. Everything starts in a slack message but slack did nothing to helps us achieve it. Instead, it just became a mess of emojis and random time-sucking chatter.
The more I consider it, the more I think that bundling is anticompetitive. I guess there are some synergies to having Teams and Word integrated, but they don't seem very large. It seems if you want to do chat, you <i>must</i> also do all productivity software to compete, which is a real shame.<p>The ideal world (to me) is that Microsoft is forced to charge some price for Teams being turned on in a 365 subscription, which means that some companies can justify paying for 365 + Slack, not that Slack is acquired and bundled in with Quip. Honestly I think Salesforce will lose that battle; Microsoft's Word/Excel monopoly is unbreakable. I wish that didn't mean that they could weaponize that into destroying Slack, instead of competing with them in a regular way.<p>That's an idealist's take, though, it seems impossible to write reasonable rules that produce that kind of outcome without harming innovation.
Ugh. Has the author had to use Teams at all? Seriously, call drops multiple times a day, horribly sensitive to VPN use, illogical UI, and the worst of all, it’s notifications are inconsistent, if not bad UX. Slack has its faults, but it’s reliable and sensible. Teams is none of these things.
There’s some irony to me that slack did an Apple style “Welcome Microsoft” ad, failed to compete effectively, and then sued them for antitrust.<p>If you’re going to put out an obnoxious ad and act as if they’re not a threat then it feels like you shouldn’t be able to later whine about how the competition is a getting a little unfair?<p>That said, stratechery’s take on slack’s advantage seemed reasonable to me. There’s just something about this combination that bothers me.<p>Slack selling out to sales force also feels like a loss/failure. I think slack is a great product, this is just kind of a disappointing outcome.
I have both Slack and teams at work. Teams is really bad. It’s a pain to search for text and all its many random bugs just add to the frustration. Everyone feels they cannot rely on teams.
To be honest teams just seems like a half finished project, it impacts productivity in a negative way.
I loathe Teams. Slack started right, IRC on steroids, then enhanced it like a web app.<p>Teams was done the typical Microsoft way. Seeing a competitor that exists, not learning from it, but making a poor response.<p>Teams wouldn’t get off the ground if companies weren’t already so entrenched with MS. Skype for Business (poor rebranding) made more sense for what it was to do. Teams is a monstrosity of Slack (without the simple automation? I haven’t seen anything like that) + a piece of Dropbox sort of (toss your documents in it) + Sharepoint, there’s a concept of channels, conversations, groups, meetings (that don’t end unless you force them to, I’ve had windows open for days before realizing it didn’t end when the meeting does), wiki, note taking, ... like, I can’t even figure it out sometimes.
History is strewn with chat apps that had their heyday and then died. It's a very dangerous business to be in.<p>Slack is a total anomaly. Technically it's not very good considering the resources poured into it, but it has had a very outsized period of dominance.
Has Teams actually overtaken Slack? This is anecdotal of course, but all the companies I have worked at and all the companies I know of use Slack and are fairly happy with it. No plans to use Microsoft products at all. But as I said, this is anecdotal and I'd be interested in knowing more.<p>I don't see actual numbers for comparison anywhere. Slack has published concurrent users count while Teams has published DAU, which are obviously different.
Teams is awful. Specifically the non-native notifications which have been complained about for 4 years with no action.<p>Fix that single item and I'd have a positive view of the product.<p><a href="https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16941685-use-built-in-notifications-for-macos" rel="nofollow">https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...</a>
Reading back the NYT full page add Slack bought when Teams launched is really interesting[0]:<p>"We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade."<p>It seems they were right about the "something just like it" part!<p>[0] <a href="https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft#.os9n0emzt" rel="nofollow">https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft#.os9n0emzt</a>
Meanwhile in education Slack never was a a thing, everyone already had Office 365 and some adventurous users had already started to experiment with that chat client thing tacked on to Sharepoint.<p>Then, when COVID-19 hit, what we needed was not a chat client with history and file sharing but a video conferencing tool and it turned out Teams could do that, too. Sure, Zoom was better at first, but Teams came with that shared files thing, it already had some basic education friendly extra features and, very important, it quickly improved. By a lot.<p>The first day all education institutions in my country worked from home, Teams collapsed under the load. Microsoft quickly fixed this, however - and then started adding useful features.<p>I’ve never been a fan of Microsoft, but that was really ace work.<p>Meanwhile, Slack was ... a chat service with extras.
How Microsoft crushed Slack despite Teams being maha crappy than Slack.<p>Ans : just made use of their large install base and thrusted it on their customers.
When will companies ever learn that “welcoming” a huge competitor into your market with an ad, never ends up going well.<p><a href="https://www.incimages.com/uploaded_files/inlineimage/630x0/welcome%20ibm_51944.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.incimages.com/uploaded_files/inlineimage/630x0/w...</a><p><a href="https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-the-release-of-windows-95-twenty-years-ago-today/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-the-...</a>
I find Teams has a subpar UI and UEX compared to slack. I catch myself still saying “slack” me much like how “let’s call an uber” became synonymous with ride share. I really wish slack had a fair chance to compete with Microsoft.
Why are people speaking of Slack in the past tense? I'm as much of a software liberty zealot as it gets and will never understand people flocking to "platforms" when we had open protocols for chat for decades (irc, xmpp), but Salesforce certainly is a respected company having pioneered SaaS long before that became a thing in this decade, isn't it? At least I remember Salesforce being looked up to by the likes of SAP and Oracle 12-15 years ago.
I have Office 365 or something installed on my Mac to use Office tools. A few weeks ago, after a restart, Teams started at login. I’ve never consciously installed it and certainly never set it to self launch, but I wonder if I now count as one of those 115m users?
Microsoft has very good sales team on Enterprise, even more so on Government front. They are offering teams as additional feature to their already popular package, it is hard to beat it. I personally find Teams interface very annoying. They introduced threads to work with channel with many users, I find it very ugly in my opinion. The webhook is also something not as clean as Slack. That said, you can't beat strong sales and existing customer base.
well I'd say Slack is lucky to survive after kicking the Microsoft's nest, you know, the last two times when Microsoft is really pissed off, you got .Net and the death of Netscape. And an antitrust of course.
We recently switched to Discord from Slack after trying out Teams and some other solutions.<p>Despite the gaming community focus, Discord feels like a much better product. Maybe they should change their image or something.
I hate Slack and MS Teams. There are just too many features and the UI for both is clunky.<p>I would love to see IRC used more. Can’t we just bake video chat into that?
> And yet, if there’s a lesson of the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got the company about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design.<p>It's ignorance like this that (asking with the clickbait) make me way of Vox. That's not Slack design. It's the design of chat apps. Hipchat looked like this, and IRC has looked like this for decades.
I was always baffled at why Slack doesn't support syntax highlighting? It's almost as if Slack developers themselves never use their own product or never share any code - otherwise how come they're not frustrated at it?<p>Subjectively, Discord is just better. The client is faster and nicer, it's better at managing big communities, there's proper syntax highlighting etc.
> medium-term future of work is increasingly a choice between three giants: Microsoft, Salesforce, and (in a distant third) Google<p>I have a feeling that every 8 of 10 midsize companies has G Suite as an email provider. And you still can't do anything without email, despite Slack's statement of burying it for good.
Slack is basically just IRC with stickers for children. Did they ever have a unique selling point? I'm not surprised that the winds of fashion have turned now to some other set of stickers.<p>Easy come, easy go.
The development team I'm in used teams for a while but we go so annoyed with how teams handled code snippets, messing with spacing and such that we move the slack.
I don't know how "tight" Teams is coding and architecturally, but Slack didn't do itself favors with electron.<p>It's the rare example of the "total rewrite" absolutely being needed and (maybe) coming a bit too late.<p>Slack's revenue is rounding error on Office's revenue. And while I still fervently distrust Microsoft due to its past sins, monopoly defense development isn't exclusive to Redmond.
The reason slack just got acquired is that it was the best outcome for them. The reason that it was the best outcome is that they no longer saw a path to continuing to inflate their valuation. They were out of ideas and growth was slowing down. And since they took big piles of investor money, an acquisition was the obvious move to provide these investors the ROI they wanted. It's well executed; I think they managed to sell at their peak valuation.<p>Technically, what Slack did was provide a commodity with a nice UX that was easy to copy. The moat to defend against competitors was completely non technical: i.e. an enthusiastic user-base instead of patented hard to copy technology or a data lake. As such, that moat was doomed long term unless they would have succeeded in piggy-backing more products and features on the success. That never happened. MS, Google, and others waking up and building similar products was a matter of time and that happened some years ago. So, an acquisition was a foregone conclusion once the market filled up with many products doing more or less the same things.<p>Slack could have succeeded by doing something that completely went against their instinct of proprietary everything: open up and become an open standard with them as the reference implementation. Take Outlook as an example: it supports sending emails to people not using MS Exchange. That's not because MS likes doing that but because it's a core feature of email to be able to do that. They lost that battle a long time ago. Exchange actually started out as a walled garden and then email happened to become the thing that drove internet adoption. MS was left no choice but to add email support to Exchange.<p>Federation and open standards ensure that email survives more than four decades after its invention. Slack tried to replace email in the work place but they overlooked federated protocols as the key to long term success and survival. Of course success is subjective. I'm sure the 27 billion in shares is considered a great success. And who knows, maybe Salesforce will even do a good job of managing it.<p>But the reality is that chat is a commodity. Chat apps have come and gone for decades. Anyone remember ICQ? Did a great job in the late nineties. No longer exists. I actually used that at work. Yahoo messenger? All but gone. AOL messenger (later merged with ICQ), gone. MSN, gone. Jabber of course tried federation and for a while it looked like Google actually was on board (Google Voice was initially jabber based). Technically it's still around but I don't have a working implementation on my phone because I don't know anyone still using it. And I have just about everything else on my phone: slack, skype, telegram, whatsapp, signal, etc.<p>IMHO where Slack dropped the ball was with audio and video integration. They didn't do a great job and world + dog kept using alternatives even if they paid for Slack. So, instead Zoom just became the new darling of their target audience. They bought Keybase, which tried to be a secure Slack alternative. On paper the combination could be a Slack killer. And the data security features of Keybase could be a killer feature in e.g. the EU. Who knows, maybe somebody bright enough is in charge at Zoom to not that mess up. They have all the ingredients to learn from Slack and do better. But I'm not optimistic that will happen and predict an eventual acquisition is more likely.<p>So, many walled gardens and I still use email because it's the one thing everyone is on. You might call someone on Zoom; but you'll likely set that call up via email. Success would have been if you'd be able to use Slack to setup a Slack call because everyone you'd want to possibly talk to would be reachable via it. That never happened because it's a walled garden and they never stood a chance to replace email because of it. True for everything else in this long comment as well: ten years from now, most of that stuff will be forgotten and we'll still have email.
Unpopular opinion: I never loved Slack and the Linux client wasn't working really well for me so I had to use the web one<p>I work for a company with thousands of employees and we used Slack in our small team, we chose it because the majority was already familiar with it (I voted for Mastodon) and we spent part of our team budget to pay for it<p>When COVID hit the fans and we started working from home, the company chose Teams as the collaboration platform for all of us<p>I don't love Teams either, but I honestly have to admit that the voice/video calls are incredibly reliable even on some shitty DSL connection I found myself using that had a packet loss ratio around 50% and no other alternative worked<p>For everything else Teams is worse than Slack, except for the integration with the AD domain and sharing documents with colleagues that never used anything else than Windows<p>On average Teams is as good as Slack and for casual users that only use chats and calls there is no difference at all<p>I can see why companies are switching to Teams, they have been MS customers for years and Teams comes bundled, it's one less contract to sign and one less vendor to start a relationship with.