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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Google has been stuck in exactly this 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 nearly as many features as the old chat application, and slowly add features until it's time for it to be replaced by the new one.
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.
We're migrating off Slack because they jacked our prices by 40% this year. Our team used Google Chat for one week and revolted.
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.
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]
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...
https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/01/13/sl...
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?
(And of course, way back then there was an official IRC interface, too)
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).
And the 'start a thread' nazis are just too much to bear. Prediction: they will add subthreads within 3 years.
Along with syntax highlighting.
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.
Well, this was my prediction pre-easy-to-use LLMs, anyway.
All their integrations kinda suck though, and its not uncommon for integrations to randomly break with no discernible changes elsewhere.
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.
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...
You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.
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)
Let applications do a thing. The more we duplicate the crappier the original and the duplicate get.
Slack has more mindshare
Yeah great for in person and email companies.
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 :(
Business instant messaging is electric shoulder tapping and that makes me want to punch people.
I literally feel Slack drains me every day.
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
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.
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.
They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.
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.
It works well and there’s nothing I can think of that I want in it. It’s just a video and chat app.
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.
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.
For example, Teams likes to control system-wide audio settings instead of acting like any other application. I had to disable the “allow applications to have dedicated hardware access” feature in my sound card driver to stop it screwing around with my settings. I’ve never had to do this for any other app.
It also likes to “edit” system controls like right-click menus on the task bar. This not only breaks muscle memory, but they also put in a gap so that if you move the mouse onto the menu… it closes.
I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.
Does this matter? Yes, I think so for a chat first culture.
A prompt ran through a Wiggum loop over the course of a week/month and viola
It's extremely against company interests to federate.
it doesn't work irl, and if you don't understand that then keep asking this question in 10 years, or even 100 years.
Is that what the top says?
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.
That is a fascinating observation. We supposedly just unlocked the prometean fire, why aren't everyday things everyone uses getting better?
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.
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".
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.
What? What API costs is the op talking about?
> 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