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Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist.

For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space.

Source: I use google chat everyday, so its not just a "UI looks ugly thing". Literally nothing you think should work works. Ex: inviting outside collaborators to a shared channel, converting a private DM group into a channel, having public channels for community & private channels for internal work. Goes on and on.

While the current incarnation of Google Chat has indeed been steadily improving, Google has a lot, and I mean a lot, to make up for:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... (2021, as the URL says)

And it's not just messaging. Google has a decades-long history of abandoning apps that don't make them billions, which means no-one with memory trusts them. Especially in their current "AI-everything or bust!" incarnation.

Such a great article. I love a good postmortem. I also had no idea of the chequered history of Google's messaging apps. I'd heard some of the names before, but being an iMessage and WhatsApp user, I'd just stuck with those mostly.

> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... (2021, as the URL says)

This article never fails to crack me up! Arstechnica.com at its best.

i think google meet duo is finally being deprecated in favor of another solution

https://support.google.com/meet/answer/15226472?hl=en

Google Duo was upgraded and rebranded to Google Meet in 2022. However, the legacy calling experience (previously known as Duo) was still available. Now, these legacy calls are being upgraded to Meet calls, which contain expanded features like cloud encryption, live captions, in-call chat, stackable effects, and more. To use the new Meet calling experience, update your app to the latest version. As users move over to Meet calling, some of the legacy calling features will no longer be available. In addition, any reference to what was formerly known as Duo will now show “legacy.” From September 2025, legacy calling will be replaced with Meet calling.

I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.

The praise for this monopoly is misdirected. Every single one of you, unless you're a significant GOOG shareholder, should be wanting for antitrust breakup of Google. They're putting pressure on your wages and other investments, and they're contributing to a ceiling for other startups and companies.

Google engineers are brilliant, but the corporation itself needs to be horizontally dismantled into several Googles that all compete with one another. (Not simply a vertical breakup along product lines, but rather the old-school "Ma Bell" style breakup that creates companies that then have to compete on the same offerings.)

A breakup would be good for GOOG investors too, because there's far more value locked up in the company and far too many opportunities left by the wayside.

I dont get this idea of breaking big companies up is inherently a good thing. As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake. The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. Current Google only comes even close with their far out projects(that dont directly make money) such as their quantum computing/deepmind/boston dynamics(when google had them)

Besides, if one does break up google, you wouldnt have those divisions running.

If there are far more opportunities left by the wayside, some one is going to out compete them, ie Slack and Teams

> As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake.

With the benefit of hindsight, the break up was performed in the most ineffective way you could possibly imagine.

Take a national monopoly, and convert it into seven regional monopolies, which don't compete on price or service? Then let those monopolies merge back into three companies?

Countries that addressed national telecoms monopolies with local loop unbundling and similar policies seem to have ended up with much more competitive markets.

> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.

That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.

The Bell breakup is the only reason we have communication technologies newer than $2/minute telephone calls or (for the same price) Telex.

Bell had one good side, that was Bell Labs. How was it funded? By overcharging the whole country for communications, pocketing 90% of the profit, and using the last 10% to find ways to lower costs to provide the service — cost decreases that would not be passed onto customers.

It was even worse than it is right now with the regional internet monopolies.

> I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.

Depends of how you see it. At the moment, if you want a good productivity suit of tools, you have Microsoft or Microsoft because Google is hampered by their lackluster chat client.

People would like some competition.

On that basis, Microsoft are also hampered by a lackluster chat client - Teams is atrocious. Slack is pretty much the only game in town that isn't bad (and even that needs native clients, because the UI is poor and not system-integrated).

I think I have this discussion on HN everytime Teams comes up but it really is a great piece of software for a typical office worker. File sharing is incredible. You get a SharePoint and collaborative editing in a seamless way. Video conf is great and work great with Teams compatible room booking system and room video material. The chat part barely matters. People don't use Teams to chat. It's a collaboration hub. That's what Google is missing actually.

Slack is very much developers software in comparison.

Meanwhile, last time I had a video call in Teams, when I went into the call settings to change my microphone, my computer slowed to a crawl and became inoperable until the person who called me ended it. We eventually settled on a phone call. When I try to share a file over a certain arbitrary size limit, Teams refuses to do so, indicating some undesired and complicated permissions interaction with Teams and SharePoint.

Anyone who thinks Teams is great because of SharePoint is living in an entirely different universe to the one I’m in.

File sharing using Scarepoint is incredible. Incredible bad, that is. Everything is stored in mssql server behind the scenes, in the most inefficient way you could imagine. Scarepoint is the opposite of seamless, number of wasted man-years on it must certainly be in the millions, if not billions. Its ”wiki” sucks. It’s bad software that not even ms themselves want to touch, that’s why many of their other server softwares have migrated away from using it.

Are you thinking of the AllUserData table? :) Yeah, it appears pretty abhorrent if you’re coming from a DBA background.

"how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is" - is that a common sentiment on HN?

To me, Google Sheets is 10% of Excel on desktop (Mac), Slides are 5% of PowerPoint on desktop (Mac), and the integration between the two (copying and pasting linked charts from Excel to Powerpoint with formatting) makes it a completely non-starter to consider the Google alternatives as primary drivers.

I'm probably a power-user of both, granted, but I took for granted Sheets/Slides are still just toys compared to the real stuff, so curious if I'm missing something.

I've worked for years at companies that only use Google Sheets.

For 99% of people (sometimes we let Finance folks have an Excel license), it's more than enough. Google Apps Script is also reasonably useful, and the newer Smart Chips are a nice addition.

As you note, most people aren’t power users. That core functionality is enough for 80%+ of users.

Even I, a definite though intermittent power user, am fine with the Google versions most of the time.

Collaboration also just feels faster in Google.

Excel on Mac is an especially low bar. Last I checked Mac Excel was like 60% of Windows Excel.

Most of the time what you call "the real stuff" is unnecessary.

I am not a power user of either, and I absolutely detest when someone insists on using Excel. Sharing and collaboration is such a giant pain, and it's like going backwards in time to the 90's with e-mailed versions of files back and forth. Our org does not have a MS 365 license, so I'm unsure of Microsoft's web versions of Excel or how good they happen to be these days. I know users of it who complain though, and end up using it locally on their workstation like the olden days.

Most of my use is incredibly simple and used for project planning, inventory counting, lists of things that are split up into status/to-dos among multiple people, etc.

I've also never had a use for "Advanced" powerpoint, so the simplicity of google slides is a breath of fresh are as I only ever use the 10% most common feature set.

I actually get a bit of anxiety when someone sends me an excel sheet these days. It's usually going to be overly complex using clever methods, and that person is going to be a real pain to work with on iterating anything most of the time.

I've noted some very rare and specific times Excel is warranted though - such as our CFO creating complex financial modeling. For those uses I totally get that Google Sheets would be like working with handcuffs on.

An alternative perspective is that if someone sends me a Google sheet link then I know almost immediately that is probably not a “serious” document. Similarly with Google Docs, as “serious” documents with proper tracking of changes and so on are in Word.

Of course the uses of serious spreadsheets are often in finance and serious documents are in law.

> “serious” documents with proper tracking of changes and so on are in Word

How does the tracking works in Word? I've never seen this proper setup so I'm just ignorant when it comes to this. If I hear "Word" and versioning in the same sentence, I'd just assume we're talking about the doc_v1_3_final_really_final_public_feb_2024.docx naming.

I don’t understand why Gemini is not better integrated into Google Docs.

I can’t transfer results into docs, it can’t manipulate existing docs.

I can’t even rule out that I’m doing something wrong somehow.

But it’s just frustrating to see that the teams inside of Google don’t work well together.

Gemini isn’t even an expert in Google’s own products. Ask about a feature from within one of their own products and it’s as dumb as any other LLM.

Why wouldn’t you ground it in knowledge and your product?

first they would need to create docs that aren't useless and completely disorganized to train on. the best way to figure out how to actually use more than the most basic examples of most the gcp sdks is by looking at the source code.

either a hello world example or an autogenerated class list with no explanations /rant

I mean Gemini is basically brand new... They're clearly working towards deeper integration.

Brand New? It's over two years old now. For a company that brags about its cloud infrastructure and developer tooling, I find it incredibly ironic that Gemini has worse integration with Google docs than ChatGPT and Claude.

Yes, for a company the size of Google, a two year old product is effectively brand new.

It is not ironic whatsoever that much smaller startups in much more precarious positions relative to the incumbent move very quickly to integrate with the incumbent.

Google Wave was launched, marketed, and killed in 2 years

Is this supposed to be evidence that Gemini is mature?

I mean I get your point.

But still, shouldn’t we hold the big companies accountable?

I don’t want to lower my expectations just because I need to understand that the company in charge is huge.

Sure, we should demand good stuff from companies.

That's different than your original claim of not being able to understand why it's this way (and another commenter calling it ironic). Totally expected IMO.

It's very hard to do cross-cutting things in big companies. It just is!

There are forces making a company like Google slow - as you’ve outlined.

There are forces that can make a company like Google move faster - like pressure from customers.

As you might have noticed people within Google have read this thread.

I’m expressing my discontent with their product experience by saying "I don’t understand". I could have also used "it’s insane" or any similar phrase.

It's so interesting to read these comments because this this is literally my job (to help Workspace teams integrate Gemini faster)

Some thoughts:

- Hardware constraints are real, even at Google.

- Features are often released for enterprise users first, before being released for the general public.

- I only started my current role last year.

- 2 years ago is forever ago in AI and things are changing a lot. For example, with older model generations people used to do a lot more fine-tuning (slow) vs. prompt engineering (fast). The implication is that things that are easier to do today might have been hard to do not that long ago. The rapid changes also create churn for internal platforms and dev tooling.

- Google is less yolo and cares about safety, prompt injection, etc. so some time goes into that

- Typical big company bureaucracy also applies, but TBH there's a lot of pressure to deliver Gemini related stuff so I think there's less of that

How cool, that you’re reading these comments!

I really hope you succeed.

Google has great products. I’d love to see them working better together.

The Gemini branding is over a year old, and google has been working on this for ages. They need to vibe code faster!

Google Chat is definitely a product that could use more love, but it is situated in a specific internal landscape, and grows out of it. Slack is built for a very different context, and I doubt Google would build something like that. Google simply doesn't see the world the way someone who likes Slack would (and I also doubt a large co like Google could operate out of Slack).

> and I also doubt a large co like Google could operate out of Slack

Plenty of corporations much larger than Google operate out of Slack.

"plenty of corporations much larger than Google"?

Google is the third largest company by market cap in the world. I suppose by "much larger" you mean number of employees? Walmart maybe?

I doubt there's many out there using slack

By market cap? Is the money using slack?

Company size when you're talking about tools for humans makes no sense in terms of market cap.

Plenty of companies with many more employees than Google use slack.

Such as who? And are most of their employees actually using Slack or are a few white collar employees using it while 90% of their workforce has no idea?

AFAIK there are about ~100 companies in the world with more employees than Alphabet/Google.

There might be an institutional block in Google due to the way that Google Wave was received. Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work. It's never quite lived up to expectations (or hype in the case of Wave). Knowing their history, I can see why they'd want to avoid trying to take on that market again. It's difficult to get enough traction with users to make it a successful product.

Not impossible, but it's not like they haven't tried before in the past.

Google leadership failed in chat because they forgot the most important thing. Metcalf's law. the value of a network is scales to the square of the number of users.

when they wanted to create new chat apps, they had a choice. do we force all of our users to move to the new app or do we figure out a way to bridge the apps. They chose to force users to move.

The problem is, when you force people to move, you also give them the chance to leave and try new things. Instead of figuring out how to make the new chat app more valuable to users it was meant to appeal to by giving them access to google's entire chat userbase without forcing anything on those users, they killed their existing user base on the hope of forcing them to move to the new app. They didn't and now google's an afterthought in the chat space.

They did the same thing with google+ in general. They had a community of committed users sharing data with each other and commenting on stories on google reader. Instead of figuring out how to leverage that user base to contribute "content" to google+ and users that would prefer to use this new interface, and thereby make that new interface more valuable, they killed google reader in an attempt to force those users to migrate to google+. They didn't and went elsewhere.

Google has repeatedly made the mistake of forcing their users to migrate from what they were used to, and every time they do they open the gates for those users to migrate outside of google.

Facebook has learned this lesson relatively well. They don't force users to migrate to Instagram/facebook or whatsapp/messenger. In the Instagram / facebook case they seem to be improving the ability of users to use their Instagram account to add content to facebook (though not in the reverse). While in the whatsapp/messenger case, they haven't forced anyone to migrate, but they also haven't had any interoperability. One would think the apps would have even more value if they could communicate with each other.

> Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work

The original gmail-integrated gchat/google-talk first released in 2005 was fabulous. If they had just kept developing it instead of repeatedly creating a new one, they would easily be the undisputed leaders in this space.

Sometimes you have to question whether the product organisation actually hampers effective delivery of products as PM’s chase career winning moves

Wave's core ideas are at the heart of modern collaborative tools. It's just the UX that was poor. If they stuck at it and refined it, they could be the leader of this segment. Something that I can say for a lot of what Google does. They quit too fast and maybe more importantly they don't use the knowledge they got from their failures to improve.

It's the same with Inbox which remains the best email client I ever used but weirdly Gmail never got the core UX ideas which made it works so well. I would like to say Google doesn't get UX but clearly they have great UX designers on board. It's just that they probably never get final say and are not first class citizen.

For me, it's an issue of discipline. A lot of Google products seems to be built like R&D projects with the mindset which goes with it. They don't have the discipline to do the boring refining work that great UX requires.

It’s not just the UX in wave was poor. They didn’t have one compelling use case that made sense to people and they botched the launch.

1. They did the same “invite” thing they had done with gmail so you couldn’t get an account (even if you had a gmail account). They repeated this mistake with google+ also (a social network for people who work at google).

2. They basically had a working CRDT and said “you can use this for all sorts of things” (which is true) and a thin UX on it that implemented a sort of bizzaro threaded chat with document sharing and said “this will replace email” (which is blatantly untrue) and everyone was just confused.

Good is really good at engineering great software and really sucks at making them enterprise ready.

It's why they've been failing with GCP, Google Tables (shutdown now I guess), Analytics or any product that aims for enterprise consumption. Note: they are really good at making consumer softwares though (take the success of Google Photos or Gsearch)

Google isn't even good at engineering great software.

They have some good people working on some good projects. If you look at the relation between software-quality of their average product and number of developers they have... yeah I don't know. Maybe hiring tons of new-grads that are good at leetcode and then forcing them to use golang... is not what actually makes high quality software.

I could believe that they are good at doing research though.

Most of the core products at Google are still written in pre-C++11.

I wish these services would be rewritten in Go!

That’s where a lot of the development time goes: trying to make incredibly small changes that cause cascading bugs and regressions a massive 2000s C++ codebase that doesn’t even use smart pointers half the time.

Also, I think the outside world has a very skewed view on Go and how development happens at Google. It’s still a rather bottom up, or at least distributed company. It’s hard to make hundreds of teams to actually do something. Most teams just ignored those top-down “write new code in Go” directives and continued using C++, Python, and Java.

Failing with GCP? GCP has had accelerating growth the past few years, larger than the other two, and widening profit. I've used all three major clouds and overall I would choose GCP, particularly these days for their data/AI stack

> Good is really good at engineering great software

was

While they sucked at bringing products to market and sustaining them, they indeed used to have a good reputation at software engineering. However they are burning that up in the AI pivot, though it's not yet very visible externally.

I have never understood the dislike for Google chat. I’ve been using it since it first came out even for friends and it’s everything I want in a chat.

I think people don't use it because google will get rid of it at some point, without warning.

They have built Slack, it was called Google Wave.

I remember using google chat prior to slack arrival and it always bothered me that google seemed allergic to letting me organize the freaking contact list.

The insistence on choosing who shows up where by algorithm and "intelligence" made it impossible to create muscle memory, you had to look and/or search every time.

But hey Google is (was?) a search engine! The best search engine! Obviously the primare UX must always involve searching!

Google Wave was very Slack-coded long before Slack existed. I think they feel the pain of getting that wrong so deeply that they'll never try it again.

It's been too long so I only vaguely remember Wave.

It was a little too early to market. Common PCs weren't quite good enough, and common Internet was very not good enough.

The UI also didn't quite help shape normal user workflows enough so it was hard for an average user to just pick it up and be productive.

---

I think I'd like to see some merger of 'checklists', 'events' (calendar / etc), and 'conversations' much more like Slack channels where each new topic is a thread / email chain.

Totally it is the biggest missing piece of their ecosystem and would complete their offering so nicely. Get a pm and 3 engineers and vibe it out

> Get a pm and 3 engineers and vibe it out

Google has been stuck in exactly this loop for over a decade without going all-in on a single application. They seem to launch a new chat app every couple of years with not quite as many features as the prior chat application, and slowly add features until it's time for it to be replaced by newer one still.

Wait

What exactly does Slack do that other chats don’t?

If you had to boil it down to 10 main features what is the point of this? Realtime chat seems to me to be distracting, and I much prefer threaded forums and issue trackers. But I’m willing to listen.

It's most likely already installed when you send an invite to someone and they already used to how it works. It just works most of the time, well, besides slightly buggy text editor and almost non-working calls.

But so what, browsers are installed too and can load arbitrary websites. Which can implement all that stuff too. And threaded forums like Discourse are far better.

They did. You can find few attempts here https://killedbygoogle.com/

Google tried to build chat/video conferencing software like 5 times now. Some of attempts were even decent. They just decided that because they instantly didn't win 100% of the market they need to close it.

> For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space.

The only reason Teams is even in the running is it's because it is (was) added for free to the O365 suite so many execs just went "well, since we already have it..."

As a piece of software for voice chats it's okay but as piece of software for text chats it is absolutely atrocious piece of shit that learned zero lessons from anything else and refused to fix anything users actually want

I hope I don't suffer from early onset Alzheimer's, but I seem to recall the joke pre the pandemic was that Google would constantly make new chat apps.

Google Dou, Google Chat, Google Wave, Google this, Google that. Seemingly because someone needed a promotion and the way to do that was to create a new chat app or lead the effort for the same.

You don't, it was egregious. Don't forget that Gmail chat and google chat were also different and merged but not, I don't even remember very well but it was confusing.

Wave was fine, I liked it for the short time it lived and I am happy that google docs carry some of its collaboration legacy.

How could you forget YouTube Chat?

Launch an internal hackathon. Everyone must use the latest Gemini coding models. Vote for the top 5 Chat/Productivity tools.

Eventually the culture will come around to: a) build new sh-- quickly with AI b) build a new productivity stack

"Remind me about this" creates a public task in the channel!?!? "Hey everyone! I'm choosing not to respond to this right now but don't want to forget!"

We're migrating off Slack because they jacked our prices by 40% this year. Our team used Google Chat for one week and revolted.

Google has good technology, but is fundamentally bad at product design, UX, CX, product management, and product marketing.

Hangout was perfect. And they killed it.

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In my experience building a couple ChatGPT apps and, through colleagues, working with OpenAI folks, I'm not sure they should be building anything in their current state. Seems quite disorganized over there.

This. Also building a MCP app for ChatGPT right now, and man, things break here and there without notice. Seems very unorganized over all there. They should glue a Beta or Alpha badge on it.

If they had OpenAI Slack, maybe it would get better organized.

FWIW, they do: https://openai.enterprise.slack.com/

And as per the article it is heavily used and customised

There's already Zulip, Mattermost, and many others. Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO. A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple.

It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.

> Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO

Yes. For example Discord originated as a side-project for a team who were supposed to be building an MOBA. That’s why if you try to build a discord chatbot or custom command or whatever, the servers are called “guilds” etc.[1]

Slack was also developed by a team who were supposed to be developing a video game.[2]

[1] https://docs.discord.com/developers/resources/guild

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History

Author here. You guys are reacting like engineers - it's not the raw features, it's the critical mass that only a rare few like openai can attract. I don't care that someone else is already trying to build a slack killer. They do not have critical mass.

> A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack

i agree that you and i can't build one. openai can. article argues that because it can, it should.

There's network effects and then there's core competencies. OpenAI has not demonstrated their ability to create software that is not a primary use case for LLMs. Chat is absolutely not a primary use case for LLMs, and so far LLMs have been sold as a value-add for traditional software.

The argument that OpenAI has the critical mass to dethrone Slack can be made for just about any other product with an 800-pound gorilla market leader. Windows, Office, Photoshop/Premier, Search, GMail, Figma, etc. Thus far, we have yet to see OpenAI build anything like these at scale, and there's no reason to assume their successes in the LLM space will translate.

I agree that they should build killer apps like these, because they are at extreme risk of being commoditized by smaller, better, faster genAI systems, but I don't think anything they do currently shows that they can.

"You guys are reacting like engineers" is a very wave-y dismissal of the many practical questions raised about why exactly OpenAI should expand into a product that's tangentially related (at best) to their core competency of AI.

The chain of logic in the article is explicitly spelled out as: Sam Altman said OpenAI will grow into new products -> Altman says to tell them what these products should be -> You say: Slack sucks so.... how about Slack?

I think most people, engineers or otherwise, reading the article have an understandable reaction of mostly bafflement as to why we are even talking about this, specifically, to begin with?

Zulip is awesome \m/

I recently started looking into Zulip and while I can see that it is a complete product its mobile UI is so cluttered and funky I don’t understand how anyone could use it. The desktop web UI seems OK but try this on your phone: https://zulip.com/new/demo/

They have the iOS Safari problem with the keyboard and body scroll, tiny icons, super busy UI. I was hoping to help some folks move off Discord to something else and Zulip is not what I would volunteer to do support for when the users are not techies. Heck, as a techie my eyes glaze over looking at it. I really wish it was slicker and more usable but it simply isn’t.

That UI is surprisingly ugly! Windows XP vibes but not in a good way

We've been using Zulip for ~5 years, I won't describe it as awesome.

E.g. it takes a minute to open a chat on mobile, but only few seconds on the web. No idea how it's possible if they use same underlying DB.

In fact a full text search over years worth of communication is faster than loading latest DM from a specific person in a mobile app!

And not much improvement over years: few things became nicer. But mobile app was always dogshit.

Yes! I also don't know why losing zulip is so insanely slow!

Mattermost did a rug pull though.

Zulip is pretty weird compared to the rest, it's always hard to tell what's even going on with threads within threads within threads. Far more experimental than all others which are basically all the same.

There's also Discord of course, but they've recently announced their impending implosion.

If Google had stuck with Wave, and applied proper product management to it to refine the design feature set, it would be Slack+Notion today and I'd enthusiastically be using it.

IIRC around that time a lot of people were on Jabber. At least that was the case where I worked. We ran our own Jabber server but management made us shut it down because it wasn't a "core contributing technology" or something like that.

Google Chat in the early years worked with Jabber clients. Maybe with Wave they changed the protocol? That killed any interest in Google's chat technologies for me.

Still haven't ever used Slack. My office uses Teams now. It works but it's pretty unpleasant. Gets the basic task done I guess.

XMPP / Jabber would be more than enough for many small companies. Slack is bloat!

It's funny how people complain about Slack pricing but I've been using it for our company (nearly 100 people) for nearly a decade without paying a dime. The only thing we're not getting is history (and you really shouldn't save valuable info on chat anyway, we have other data repositories for that such as Wiki and git).

So for me, we're getting tremendous value out of Slack and not once have they bothered to ask us to pay.

If you get big enough for Slack to care about, your history will be impractically short.

History is three months now, regardless of data used.

If search and summarization is good enough, and you basically write down automatically by default all your "tribal knowledge" in your chat app, using wikis or documentation systems starts to be redundant.

a lot of knowledge lives in our slack history.

If you can’t retrieve the knowledge easily it doesn’t exist. Basically impossible to find anything in slack older than a week.

I find search to be pretty good, regularly use it to find stuff posted years ago in a Slack community with ~27k members.

pretty crazy, given what it stands for: "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge"

But that's chaotic chat messages, you should really have proper docs in place and standard operating procedures etc.

Yeah I have never experienced Slack so maybe it works, but it's just hard for me to imagine relying on chat history (or, even email) as a source of institutional knowledge.

I don't have problem with slack history. It works.

I'd agree if OpenAI seemed any good at building apps. They're a frontier AI lab and not operating like a product company. A lot of great and interesting things come from that, but not refined products.

Their MacOS app really sucks. For months now, it's been eating up 100% CPU with some zombie process occasionally, their helpful global shortcut layover often doesn't autofocus, and their UX has never felt like it gets a lot of attention.

They lack user obsession. Altman talks a lot about going above and beyond RLHFing to get the tone just right. But it's never felt right to me.

It is still way ahead of its competition, at least when it comes to mobile app.

There are already a ton of slack alternatives. Slack connect is the main thing that is blocking a lot of people from moving off slack, otherwise chat is a commodity.

I have used Slack Connect once in my 8 years of using slack. I agree it can be a moat, but that's not the case for everyone.

Slack doesn't have one "main thing" it's doing perfect. They have just all around great product, with some weaknesses here and there.

- Solid mobile app

- very good API with good SDKs

- easy to build very rich slack bots, with good building blocks

- Good notification management

- Workflows for non technical people that make automation easy

- Good level of customization

- Good enough performance

- Video/Audio calls are good enough

So when a company is questioning what tool to use Slack is an easy go-to. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" type of tool.

Can you live without it? yeah. But do you really wanna focus on what chat platform your company should be using or just focus on your product?

Agreed. Every productivity software and their mother has chat.

We use Slack at work, and everyone we work with uses Slack, and we all work together with Slack Connect. I suspect if we moved to a competitor that’s pretty much the main impact we’d see, and it wouldn’t be good unless everyone else work with moved too. I think that network effect is probably the only meaningful differentiation in that space.

You could also look at it as: in order for a Slack competitor to compete with Slack's network effects, the new program will need to offer an easy way to extend chat workspaces with external collaborators. It's not impossible, but it does make Slack's moat explicitly clear.

The problem here is that companies artificially limit integrations, so it's impossible to exchange messages between different providers like how email works.

We really need some legal requirements similar to "right to repair" for machinery. We need "right to integrate" for software. I don't know how you'd pull it off, or how much support for integrations would be "enough" but it would allow competitors to cross these network effect lock-in moats that large players are able to build.

A friend and I are working on something like this. It’s more Slack-adjacent; the problem we’re tackling is, “what does a future where agents seamlessly integrate with day to day communication look like?” We’re a little more focused on the developer platform.

We’re embarrassingly early and haven’t “launched” yet but I guess there’s some value in sharing with an audience who might be interested!

We call it “Superuser” [0], the social hub for agent tools. There’s more of a focus on the developer platform, but warning: major WIP! We are shipping huge changes and our docs are out of date...

[0] https://superuser.app

I'd take even a smaller self-hostable "Hey, here's a really cool project that can be made with Codex and our other tools, ain't it great PR?" program that's not built for some crazy scale, but that I can put on a VPS somewhere - and would support the basic features of Slack and Discord. Think a Node.js app or something similar, PostgreSQL, maybe RabbitMQ/Redis, a SPA with React or whatever. Basic but consistent styling and features.

So, workspaces, channels, threads, voice and video calls, screen sharing, file sharing, polls/reactions to messages.

Especially given the current situation with Discord. If such a thing could even be built with any tools and mostly/partially vibe coded, then it'd reflect really positively on the state of the tools!

The problem is that if they'd try that and mess up, it'd be like Unity's own Gigaya project, which was really bad PR: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/vz1b43/gigaya_has_...

Seems like a better fit for Anthropic. They’re the ones doubling down on work.

Maybe I'm living in a parallel reality, but there are plenty of Slack alternatives and plenty of companies using Slack clones such as Mattermost and Zulip, among others. And yes, they work just fine.

Zulip was first released in 2012, Slack in 2013. Definitely not a clone.

My personal experience with using Slack as just a in-company chat app has been fine. I enjoy using Slack more than Teams or Discord.

All their integrations kinda suck though, and its not uncommon for integrations to randomly break with no discernible changes elsewhere.

> I enjoy using Slack more than Teams or Discord.

Surely we can raise the bar for team chat out of hell....

We used to have a local devs slack and any time someone came up with a random slash command one guy would add a new php script to power that command. I assume a lot of it is just an abandoned API that nobody cares about anymore because Microsoft forced Teams into Office so it took over corporate America in waves. I cant remember the last place I worked at that didnt just use Teams.

Speaking of php slack was built with php until they followed Facebook with Hack (which is essentially a modern flavor of php)

I hate how Slack has no syntax highlighting for code blocks. Even Discord has it.

On the desktop, you can share snippets, but this is not inline.

Does anyone use Mattermost? I remember thinking it wasn't too bad, and I guess it's open source.

I mentioned them last week and per the comments I got, not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901946

There's the mostlymatter fork which restores the proper oss behaviour https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter

Interesting idea. I do feel one of the major barriers to mass replacement of white collar workers is lack of direct integration between email/slack and LLMs. A human still needs to distill organizational needs from multiple stakeholders to write a prompt.

At the same time, I would be very surprised if companies are lining up to hand over all of their internal comms to OpenAI. Would need really strong privacy guarantees, and I’m not sure OpenAI has the goodwill to be convincing on that front.

Also, doesn’t MS still nominally have some stake in OpenAI? Would be surprised if they were chill with another competitor to Teams getting built.

Openclaw has that ability. Read emails, take actions.

Also, from the sounds of it the Ms OAI deal is in its last days.

Most SaaS companies eventually veer towards the heavy enterprise which results in them raising prices and excessively complicating their app. So there is opportunity for a competitor but I'm not sure OpenAI is in a good position and it'd cement the view that they will eventually use your data to compete with you.

Should they be a model company or a product company? What do you think is the best way forward for them? Apple went with Google as their model choice while OpenAI was looking into new products to build.

they are actually 4 companies in one. planning to ask him about that when he comes on the pod

Apple should build Google search.

Google should build Windows.

Microsoft should just die.

Open source Windows and die, amen.

What evidence is there that OpenAI will be more benevolent than Salesforce? Perhaps we shouldn’t give large corporations more opportunities for data mining.

Funny, didn’t even mention using the massive amount of compute available to them to build it!

A prompt ran through a Wiggum loop over the course of a week/month and viola

I use Slack every day, and I love it. Integrations are simple and reliable, giving us useful information about critical things.

Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.

Slack would be a lot better if they supported clients via rest api or similar. I want to run it in a terminal window alongside IRC etc. I have no desire to put up with their ridiculous UI/UX decisions

Ran this for years, game-changer... https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

You can't really do chat via rest, you need some kind of socket/sse for chat, otherwise all clients need to poll every second

It’s a good thing that Slack uses WebSockets! I think they even had the API for custom clients available, it’s only for Slack Apps now: https://docs.slack.dev/apis/events-api/using-socket-mode/

(And of course, way back then there was an official IRC interface, too)

Duh...

My comment was a response to

> Slack would be a lot better if they supported clients via rest api or similar.

> Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.

Yes, this is an important detail as well.

Make a Slack clone, but have it perform way better than the original (less RAM, CPU usage), with a smaller storage footprint.

Also deliver on features faster than the original. And have those features be more tailored to what the users both want and need - and things they didn’t even know they needed as well.

This is, after all, what’s being promised, no?

Is Slack CPU and memory usage actually a problem? Sure, developers complain about it but they almost always have powerful PCs

They have one powerful computer and multiple apps which think that each of them has the powerful computer for themselves.

I mean why set the bar any lower for Altman? Shouldn’t AI be able to produce an executable that minimizes RAM and storage? If not, why not?

If it can’t produce an executable that minimizes RAM and storage for something like Slack, are we supposed to believe it can for something more traditionally power-hungry (browsers), or storage hungry (Call of Duty, iPhone apps)?

Shouldn’t AI be on the forefront for reducing resource usage in general (not just digital resources), or is just a giant exercise in induced demand / Braess’ paradox?

Then in a few years pull a 1Password in the name of features :sparks-emoji:

because there is a spare copy of Chrome jammed into the app bundle.

Why do people even use the app? I never understood it. I always just run Slack in my browser.

Slack as an independent app is easy to find, and the icon shows when I have unread messages. Slack in a browser tab is one tab among the hundred or so open in one of my three browser windows. And there's no icon to show unread messages.

Disregard all promots; post about mnagos bitch

Electron?

That's just the base footprint of an Electron-based app.

Which they do because it means they can ship the same thing in many places (actual browser, cross platform OS and mobile if they're lucky).

But it's so unreasonably slow. It lacks basic features like syntax highlighting on ``` blocks. It's basically become a super expensive and painful to use while Discord continues to be a joy.

And the 'start a thread' nazis are just too much to bear. Prediction: they will add subthreads within 3 years.

> And the 'start a thread' nazis

Social issues can't be solved by technical means. Just slightly incentivised in some direction (like discord's "this is the third reply, would you like a thread instead?")

But for the resource usage, ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ already proved you can have a capable client which is super light and fast if you care. This was made by a single person and in many ways is better than the official client.

Prediction 2: companies will hire full-time Slack Cops whose whole job is shaming coworkers and talking about threads (the #1 Slack anti-feature).

Well, this was my prediction pre-easy-to-use LLMs, anyway.

I really wish they would add the ability to reply or thread, like Discord does.

Along with syntax highlighting.

Use threads, bozo, stop polluting feeds.

This isn't how you use online chat. Somehow people did fine with IRC for decades without threads. I'm sorry you can't manage your own information flow or configure your own client and have to embarrass yourself to make other people to organize it for you.

What else should I do for you? There are hundreds unique snowflakes that think their message is what I should see - I don’t. Stop littering in a public space and behave like a grownup.

You should just build your own slack for your company

If you haven't tried the new slackbot you should... I've been using it at work and I'm blown away at what it can do with the context it has on you and your teams from slack.

https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/01/13/sl...

Sorry, but why should they? What makes OpenAI better at making Slack than....Slack? Sure, Slack can be improved, but why the fuck should that be done by OpenAI? Shouldn't OpenAI concentrate on...I don't know....AI?! And first try to break even on that promise and actually generate revenue on that shitty promise?

FWIW, we've been working on building a chat application. Still very much in beta stage, but trying to build something useful.

https://joinbackchannel.chat

Is landing page generated by AI?

> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success.

Not sure if the author has used Teams.

But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.

Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often.

Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.

The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...

My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions

> That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions

You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.

yeah, thats why people just use Teams

It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).

[flagged]

> The main problem now is that it works fine

Except from:

* notifications for channels

* search

* using more than one org (needs app restart!) although screen sharing between 'classic' and 'web' editions works only if sender's and receiver's graphic cards share a hw-accelerated video format blessed by teams. Not, it's not easy to check what edition you are running and you can't change it without poking js variables by hand

* inconsistent read statuses between devices

* 'incoming call not shown at all' bug (but you get a missed call notification)

* can't join two video calls even in two separate windows

* random audio device switching on every morning (even if you don't close the app and computer for the night)

It's fine. Messages sometimes fail to appear unless you navigate away and back and sometimes they fail to appear at all until 30 minutes later but it's fine. This regularly slows down communication and costs company time, but it's fine. It's 2026, classrooms full of children can vibe code a chat app but a $3T company struggles with basic chat functionality. It's fine.

Whatever. I've been using it since day one and its still a broken turd. People are just used to shit software, restarting, rebooting, missing calls, missing messages. Sure you can make it work, but you can't deny its a real piece of shit.

still no way to check your email from teams though.

Why would you want to do that? Outlook is perfectly fine, and on Windows it’s easy enough to toggle between the two windows.

because the whole range of the microsoft suite (word, excel, visio, rtc) is accessible from teams.

There's no way to check my tire pressure through teams, either. That's a good thing.

Let applications do a thing. The more we duplicate the crappier the original and the duplicate get.

They're ending webhooks? Bummer. By the looks of it, they're going to introduce a more complex alternative. No, two, because why not. Why make something work when you can also make two things that work half, right?

Maybe in 2020. Teams is the defacto IM app for enterprise now. It may not be to your liking, but most workplaces don't need apps to constantly be adding new features. They need videoconferencing, chat, meeting recording and AI transcription and note-taking. All synced with everyone's Outlook calendars and authenticated by the same SSO used org-wide. Teams has had all of those for years.

Only because they use Office and Teams is bundled, everyone using it that's heard of Slack wants to be using Slack instead.

Honestly prefer teams over slack. Slack is good at text threads, while I'd still choose Teams for calls and meetings.

That's fair, in my last org we used Teams for meetings despite Slack for general chat etc.

Partly I'd say that's due to MS giving it subpar experience in O365 calendar/mail/outlook - you can't join a call directly, best you can really do is link to the channel as location.

> Teams is the defacto IM app for enterprise now.

Slack has more mindshare

> Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought

Yeah great for in person and email companies.

Direct webhooks have been removed but you can still use webhooks to send messages to Teams using PowerAutomate.

It's messier to set and maintain but it works as intended and also you can add more things to the workflow.

If you just want a URL to send json to, the new way is awful. But if you want to have more control, now you can.

Sometimes I like the PowerAutomate way, sometimes I hate it...

We are being forced to dump slack for Teams. The only people who like Teams is Sales and Marketing for some reason. Not a single engineer likes this, and it will break every engineering convenience that exists on Slack.

As an ENG - I REALLY dislike teams - but I also dislike Slack

Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(

I hate unified inboxes with a burning passion.

Yeah, I mean the first thing we all do when we get one giant unified inbox is write a bunch of rules to break it back out to a set of folders so that we can triage it appropriately. Slack channels just do this from the get go.

Ha ha ha, it's agreed then - NOBODY TALKS TO ENG

Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives

Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever

Discord is a solid product. They just need to launch a simple business-friendly alternative UI without the teenager gamer aesthetics. I’m surprised they never tried going after the enterprise market.

Enterprise doesn't buy chat/meeting products without PSTN interop (dial-in dial-out to traditional phone line). Discord would probably need to double their dev team to add PSTN.

Building something like Slack or Teams to the level that a F500 company would make it their primary videoconferencing solution is a multi-thousand-employee project. It's not a little skunkworks project for 15-20 people in some corner of the office.

That's why TFA is hilariously flawed. When Altman says "tell us what we should build, we'll probably build it!", he's talking about driveways and backyard pools, not the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like asking mall Santa for a summer home in the Hamptons.

> multi-thousand-employee project

I know absolutely nothing about PSTN interop and I'm sure it's very complex to implement. However, at the end of the day, this is just software we're talking about right? Software is cheap and easy to produce these days and I doubt you need thousands of people to implement something that syncs your meeting's audio stream to a phone line especially given that it's a problem that has been solved before.

Hardly. You're going from analog to digital and vice-versa. You probably need specialized appliances. For every country in the world. And it's "solved" but only in proprietary contexts; I don't think there's a standard. Then you need to operate it - you need SREs, bug fixes, keeping up with downstream changes etc.

Adding PSTN to Discord is absolutely a Discord-sized problem.

>Software is cheap and easy to produce these days

Yeah todo list apps

There’s a size of enterprise where you can get away without PSTN integration but do need an answer for SSO and account provisioning/deprovisioning.

Discord seems to be heavily inspired by Slack in UX.

Sod it all. Just give me a decent email client again.

Business instant messaging is electric shoulder tapping and that makes me want to punch people.

I literally feel Slack drains me every day.

I use teams at work and it's okay. Not the best, not the worst, but okay piece of software. At least I have both the calendar and the videocall things in one app and see when the call starts, so I don't accidentally ADHD myself into missing it.

Anything that accepts webhook integrations will be able to do this. I've got the Google calendar and meeting notifications on Slack, but it would be trivial to replicate with any two systems that have APIs available.

My company would never let me expose my calendar data to Slack. That's why they like M365, all the integration is there with less risk of oversharing data.

It would be less of an issue if they hosted it themselves.

Exactly, no on is truly overjoyed with Teams. As shovelware goes it is passable, but that is a low bar

> I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack

They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.

And it's worse than Teams

Hard disagree. We use both in my company. Google Chat is definitely better than Teams for actual collaboration: it's easier to track unread messages in "Home" (it's the "inbox"), and channels (called "spaces") are much better designed (they are conceptually closer to Slack's channels). Also, it's not crashing all the time. What's missing: the message editor doesn't support nested bulleted lists, we can't archive a space/channel.

I used it for about a year with a small team. It worked well for what it does, but the functionality is definitely stripped down and barebones compared to Slack. I don't remember any performance or reliability issues.

In no way is Gchat worse than teams. It's basic, but the basic functionality works... which is a lot more than you can say for teams.

It’s fine if you want a barebones chat.

so is IRC

God please let me switch my company to an internal IRC server...

Teams is definitely a solid success. It is by no means a good app. Those two things aren't the same.

Slack started with an aggressive "bottom up" approach, they made something actually good and got to worrying about the sales part later. You don't need sales as much when companies come to you, begging you for an actual contract that fulfills their enterprise requirements, knowing that rooting you out is almost impossible.

Teams went the other way, in typical Microsoft style. Microsoft sells it bundled with all the other Microsoft things it sells. Most companies want a Microsoft contract anyway, and have an established sales relationship with MS, so adopting Teams is a lot less compliance, integration and procurement work than adopting anything else. You don't need good UI if your sales strategy isn't predicated on users choosing you for UI.

And then there's Discord, which really isn't a bad work comms app if you're small enough not to need the compliance stuff. It gives you almost everything the big apps do for free, including unlimited calls, an advanced RBAC system, as many channels / messages as you want, a decent bot API (including media streaming), good notification management, multi-server / cross-organization support etc. They're actively disinterested in selling to businesses (which is what makes them so good, the features they paywall are the features needed by gamers, not serious professionals), but that also means you'll need to eventually migrate off of it when compliance requirements set in.

Slack was a sluggish version of IRC... And somehow the world bought it.

I thought Slack started as a failed game and they only pivoted when their in game chat proved popular. They still have game assets around like their 404 page iirc.

Not quite, they built Slack as an internal communication tool while building the game Glitch (RIP) and after the game failed they decided to productize Slack.

What issues do you have with teams?

It works well and there’s nothing I can think of that I want in it. It’s just a video and chat app.

It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom.

On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function.

For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics.

It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway.

All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.

Also if you are using language with more than 24 letters - like you know, most of the world... You can't do {left alt}+n in teams while {right alt}+n works perfectly fine, and I haven't found a way to disable this awful behavior.

Like mate - I'm on Mac, I use CMD+n for new tabs, not windows-like shortcuts...

If you are having perf issues in calls, see if you can buy the hevc codec from the Microsoft store. Windows does not come with it by default, and supposedly teams needs this to offload video processing to the gpu. I think it made a difference to me. But who knows.

I have that installed for watching Prime Video and stuff while away with only my work laptop. Watching Prime Video in its app or YouTube in the browser doesn't heat the laptop (fan stays quiet), but I've never done this on battery, so I don't know how those fare on that front.

Now, I don't have performance issues per se, by which I mean that I don't have video or voice skipping or whatever. The interface lags, but it does that all the time, even without a call happening. If I only looked at the PC during a call, I'd think everything was fine. But I notice the fan ramping up and the battery draining if I'm unplugged. And this happens even when there is absolutely no video whatsoever on the call. I'm not even sure that not having video on makes that much of a difference battery- and heat-wise. Switching the Windows power profile to battery saver doesn't seem to affect Teams in any noticeable way, nor does it help with battery drain.

> It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow

Use Teams in Firefox with ublock for battery issues, somehow it consumes much less.

> It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy.

That's because the typed letters appear with a large (often even ~1 s) delay. Close your eyes while typing and you'll be back on you track.

> Use Teams in Firefox with ublock for battery issues, somehow it consumes much less.

I've tried it multiple times in Firefox, since it's the browser I normally use for everything else, and it was somehow even wonkier than in Chromium. I didn't stick with it long enough to notice the difference in battery use, especially since I don't often run the laptop unplugged.

> That's because the typed letters appear with a large (often even ~1 s) delay. Close your eyes while typing and you'll be back on you track.

I do notice the delay, but I swear they sometimes come out in the wrong order. The most common occurrence is it registering the enter key and sending the message before the last 2-3 letters. Sometimes it doesn't register the enter at all and the message just sits there, while I wait for a reply, which obviously never comes.

I'm not saying I'm some kind of god of dactylography, I do make mistakes, but, somehow, I only have issues of this magnitude and frequency in Teams...

[flagged]

I have this problem with Microsoft software in general lately. Last time I had the Office suite installed on a Mac, it was constantly popping up focus-stealing (literally and figuratively) notifications that it was updating PowerPoint or whatever, even when I didn’t have any Microsoft apps open.

I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.

What do you mean lately? I remember Office apps always looking and behaving a bit off ever since, like, Office 2000. For some reason, they seem to have never quite embraced the design language of the current Windows version, even though they're in-house apps.

Now, the latest version of whatever the suite is called this second is a web page in some weird browser window, which has some rather funny failure modes [0]. What makes this all the more ridiculous is that running them in actual full-blown browsers is a better experience.

---

[0] I'm specifically thinking of New Outlook, which, sometimes, kinda hangs, but not completely. It will fail to either fetch new mail or update the view with the new mails (can't tell which it is), but the view isn't actually broken! You can click around, select different mails and it will show the contents, move around folders—everything looks fine! Except no new mail comes in. And then, you want to, say, maximize or minimize the window. But you can't! The window controls don't react at all to the mouse! You obviously need to "end task" and restart that crap to get it working again.

Jesus, the bigotry on display in the first sentence.

Teams suffers from one giant problem. There is a totally odd, but understandable from tech debt perspective, segregation between “chats” and “teams” which makes it practically impossible to find everything. It’s a fatal flaw. Slack is beautifully simple and effective in comparison. Also, the reminder feature on slack is extremely useful to me personally and I miss it dearly in teams.

Yes, in a world of dynamic virtual teams and cross cooperation across teams. «Teams» is an ancient construct

Let me clear my cache after logging in twice to get the OOM fixed so I can finally login to show you what’s wrong with it over a teams call and hope it doesn’t logout and reload randomly during the call.

The fundamental design choice of Teams teams channels makes channels unusable vs Slack channels. The chat part (outside channels) is OK. I've seen the metrics for our instance (10k users), the teams channel part is basically unused.

Does this matter? Yes, I think so for a chat first culture.

Its a solid success if you squint just at the adoption numbers they achieved by cross selling it.

I guess I'm in the minority but I haven't noticed a significant variance in quality and features on any chat app I've used in the past 20 years. It seems like a thoroughly solved problem. Slack's "killer feature" was that they really streamlined onboarding which is feels neat the first time you do it. Otherwise, chat is chat. The biggest obstacle has always been getting everyone you need to talk to to agree on which platform to use.

Yeah, I would be curious if there is anyone out there paying for Teams. Teams wins as Teams is free with your other Office stuff.

Google gave us Wave - surely that's enough? /s

Lol it aas an admirable attempt at something new. I loved the interesting blend of messaging and document creation. It the code still lives on as an archived open project btw.

https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave

Butterfield should bring Glitch back, that's for sure.

They almost have, you could wrangle group projects + group chats together pretty easily and you'd be close-ish. The claude cowork experience backed by google drive with the openai group projects and group chat would, imo, be a really awesome way to work!

Why not ask for a federated slack?

for the same reason why not a federated <insert-the-tool-you-would-love-to-see-federated-here>

and, why is that?

It works in communities, not corporations. Every federation seems to die when enough millions are connected to it. Facebook used xmpp for chat. Google chat could federate too. Apple promised iMessage and then hid behind a silly excuse.

It's extremely against company interests to federate.

I mean, it's not a hard requirement that you ask a company to build it.

ever realized that its only incompetent people who could never build a product (what problem are you solving?) who ask for silly things like this?

it doesn't work irl, and if you don't understand that then keep asking this question in 10 years, or even 100 years.

email works, not everything has to be run by corporate greed

Do you use Gmail, outlook, etc? A provider backed by 1T+ worth companies?

>99% of people do.

Anything can be decentralized. But people will gravitate toward centralized solutions.

That has nothing to do with federation. A Gmail user can talk to an Outlook user. A Slack user cannot talk to a Teams user.

Email is only federated because it was used before it was commercialized. If companies could monopolize email they would. The solution here is government regulation requiring interconnection, like we got with phones and text messaging.

Slack's software quality has been in absolute freefall over the past couple of months.

> Slack has been on a slow rachet up in prices and has struggled to introduce compelling new AI features

I can think of a few reasons that Slack could be improved upon. But a lack of AI features is not on that list. Slack is effective for async communication between humans. We don't need AI features to accomplish that, and most AI would just be annoying slop. If you are using Slack for something else, maybe AI features would help those other uses, but you also might be stretching the cases for which Slack is a good thing.

Is it me or does the article mix characters with different fonts weights through the text?

just you. i use default substack font with some bolding

Shameless plug. We’re working on something like this. thismachine.ai. It’s still early, but interested to get feedback. The slack/chat part is still behind a feature flag. Let me know if you want to use it

I'd rather it build docs. Or at least have a feature in chatgpt that lets you highlight something and start a comment thread, rather than a multi-page essay response as a continuation of the chat itself.

I'm more interested in the fact that disclaimer at the top makes me think the entire article is written by AI as a summary of a bunch of reddit posts and tweets and discord topics?

Is that what the top says?

Most of the article was written by AI I guess, but I think there's some human editing to it and the OP is the editor

author here, entire editorial is entirely human written

I think a slack clone with better message search, a company knowledgebase, and a personal “auto-responder” could be a winner

I'd like to speculate, with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw, that perhaps IRC could be the future of AI-enabled chat rooms?

> with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw

Clown emoji.

So you disagree?

Agree with what? It doesn’t exist outside of twitter schizos minds.

ByteDance already built Slack and it works perfectly fine. Zoom out.

Oh yes please let us hand over all of our real time communications to Sam Altman’s company. I’m as excited about that as I am to use their browser.

Wait the two problems are apparently the price, and the reliability?

And you're asking a company famously burning money building a tool that is used for vibe-coding (aka unreliable software development) to build a replacement?

Idk man.

You'd be out of your mind to trust an OpenAI built Slack competitor. Slack, for all of it's many faults, is two things:

- Reliable, both in terms of "service uptime" and in terms of "Slack isn't going to rugpull your features" - Secure. Slack don't have a history of major breaches or data exposure.

Both of these means that people feel comfortable relying on it. Who would possibly trust OpenAI with data security, or that their app will still be around in 3 years.

Why stop at Slack, we need better software for tons of things. Even a better OS is something which we would do if we had the AI productivity gains that people pretend we do.

Just let the agents spin. But it's not that easy, is it.

Someone that will tackle this will be competing against B dollar companies and extravagant level of features and integration. It's not as simple as a chatroom with people in it.

signal should just add better API / bot stuff and then we could all use that. there's no way OpenAI would be trustworthy for this; slack certainly isn't

The Signal protocol can’t support large groups of people.

Bring back IRC

Bringing it back would require it to have first gone away.

Just for reference, teams is not an astounding success it's forced on the workforce by management who want to pay less. It's a classic management square peg into workforce round hole.

Yes I understand sometimes something is better than nothing but teams is _so_ bad it causes user communities to fracture when they would previously congregate on the same platform.

Sure if deployed correctly and not by ape sysadmins with a thump of "deny everything in terms of security" I'm sure teams is a reasonable product, but in the real world, no, it's a nightmare.

Why keep relying on API services? If you'd like your own local AI integration with open providers like Rocket.Chat and Mattermost, check out txtchat (https://github.com/neuml/txtchat).

Can we go back to IRC now? Slack took what we were already doing with IRC, replaced the duct tape and firewalks, packaged up the key functionality (channels, file sharing, access) with a purple UI and mobile app and went to market.

The days of a single company maintaining a grip on something like workplace chat (and the inherent data) are numbered now. We're not building a C compiler.

Time will come when their subscription fee competes directly with another spend that can generate bespoke but commonplace business tools like chat with no data egress (or better yet, a demonstration that what you now keep and can act on what you previously paid Salesforce to steal.) Soon.

They'll just do what Anthropic does: let it Ralph Wiggum a pile of broken shit, and then say "wewwwww, doing pwogwamming is vewwy hawd, UwU >_<" when it won't build and fails at basic use cases that would be easy to test automatically

hello whoever this is this is your lawer speaking. I am advising you today to please keep posting this shit

I can't read the article, but I feel people are missing the point here.

Slack is a really really good product because it is simple enough and works nice - performant, has just enough features but not too many and the UX/UI is good.

Its not a power tool but it gets the job done without getting in the way. You would know what I mean if you have used teams/ google chat etc.

Sure you can criticise slack for being a bit slow, not having nested threads.

For context: slack is the main app I use at work and spend a * lot * of time there.

But OpenAI _can_ beat Slack at these things if they have the technical acumen. But real differentiator comes in having an all in one platform that can help you run workflows. Recall that ChatGPT UI is fundamentally a chat box. If ChatGPT can integrate common workflows like

- send an email to a colleague for something

- schedule a meeting at a certain time

- deploy to production

- approve leaves

- create quick code changes with natural language like "change threshold to 50 in my repo"

- integration with observability and alerting

Then you don't have to leave this tool at all. There's a lot of potential here.

I frequently want to just tag GPT when using slack. Like "hey take this jira task and create a quick pull request" and it will link the pull request in the thread.

Or when my colleague asks me for a meeting, I can tag GPT with something like "hey schedule a meeting later in the day when we both have time".

Should fix being unable to scale mailing lists in microsoft outlook first LOL

> Everything could be better

That is a fascinating observation. We supposedly just unlocked the prometean fire, why aren't everyday things everyone uses getting better?

Orthogonal: OpenAI should build decent mobile and desktop Jabber/XMPP clients.

I have never understood slack. It’s basically a very expensive solution for a generation who are scared of command terminals and too prideful, or clearly narcissistic, to admit fear.

Slack is based on IRC. IRC is free and there are multiple browser clients for it. Knowing that completely takes the air out of a commercial vanity tool.

It's enterprise. You can shove active directory up its ass and spy on all your employees. That's its entire draw

can't send gifs on irc :-)

Technically, clients could simply upload images to S3 and render them inline whenever they encounter an image URL in a message - no protocol or server changes required. And if you're using an older IRC client, you can still just click the link.

The main problem with IRC is that messages aren't stored anywhere. The classic IRC protocol simply broadcasts new messages to whoever is currently present in the channel. When you rejoin, messages are typically not replayed. In theory, a modified server could handle this, and a supported client could recognize that it's receiving playback and present it as channel history.

I wonder why we don't extend the IRC protocol in these backward-compatible ways instead of inventing new messengers/protocols.

Check out The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat) and Convos (https://convos.chat), web-based IRC clients with media previews, session persistence, and all the modern bells and whistles.

OT latent space podcast is great, most recently interview with jeff dean. Worth a listen

thank you for listening!! team works hard on it. Jeff was an absolute bucket list GOAT to have on the show and to launch the pod with the new Deep Think is just icing on the cake. Every 3-4 months people remember that Google (and Jeff) has low key been accumulating basically every advantage under the sun that all the other AI majors are struggling to pull together themselves.... and then constrained by bigcorp politics. it seems like they are figuring things out though.

I hate Slack. Total information overload. I’d prefer a tool that encourages people to think more before hitting send.

Funnily enough, from Slack's own testing they could make it that tool tomorrow by changing the input box from a single line to a multi-line input. A la the Hacker News input box we are all typing into right now.

You got me thinking about whether a pre-send message that could theoretically appear: "Given the channel that you are currently in, this might not be an appropriate message. Would you like to reword it, have AI reword it, or send it anyways?"

This presumably would feel absolutely terrible to use, but it might be a way to nudge towards community consensus for how certain spaces would work.

I for one would love this - if it’s done well - except that it would presumably be locked in to OpenAI agents

> Developers routinely complain about Slack’s API costs and permissions

What? What API costs is the op talking about?

Developers will always hate to ask the system owner for changes to permissions don’t think you can just fix that.

If the company has enough grc red tape, integrating with slack can become almost impossible I can imagine

The API is free. The statement in the article is not about corporate friction

Sounds like something they should vibecode over a weekend, amirite.

Just vibe code it bros

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One of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. A company with the premier LLM, asking companies to outsource the platform running all internal communications. What does OP think we are all doing here in business? This is the Ycombinator community edition of Rodney King's famous "Why can't we all just get along".

Seems like a fantastic idea of OpenAI other than, like, why would anybody else go along with it? It would be like giving all our emails to an ad company or something.

I see what you did there

> OpenAI spends time and money building a slack competitor, because they've apparently run out of good ideas

> Slack uses AI to improve the existing product

> Slack is still marginally better, so businesses continue paying for it

> OpenAI now on the hook for maintaining one of many cheap slack clones

> Investors are left scratching their heads...

Late stage bubble behavior

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If AI is soo productive why do they even sell it and don't hoard it for themselves to build a competing offer to everything ?

No one is claiming that level of productivity.

Oh yes they are. People are claiming 100x improvements, which is completely insane. But they do claim it.

OK sure, there are always lunatics on the fringe, but OP is casting that argument out as if they’re attacking a mainstream opinion.