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IBM Businesses Communications Microsoft IT

IBM Picks Slack Over Microsoft Teams For Its 350,000 Employees (theverge.com) 68

Posted by BeauHD from the big-win dept.
According to Business Insider, IBM has chosen Slack over rival Microsoft Teams for its more than 350,000 employees. From a report: It's a big test for Slack, but it has been one the pair has been working toward in recent years. Internal teams at IBM reportedly started using the chat app as far back as 2014, and this has grown over time. "Going wall to wall in IBM -- it's basically the maximum scale that there is, so we now know that Slack will work for literally the largest organizations in the world," says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield in an interview with Business Insider.

While this new rollout makes IBM Slack's biggest customer to date, it has been the company's biggest customer for years according to Slack. "IBM has been Slack's largest customer for several years and has expanded its usage of Slack over that time," reveals an SEC filing from Slack, which appears to downplay the news.
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IBM Picks Slack Over Microsoft Teams For Its 350,000 Employees More

IBM Picks Slack Over Microsoft Teams For Its 350,000 Employees

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  • Work Distractions (Score:4)

    by aaronb1138 ( 2035478 ) on Monday February 10, 2020 @09:35PM (#59714154)
    They're both horrible work distractions and productivity destroyers. Teams (or Skype) is the lesser evil only because individuals are more reluctant to use it.

    Teams has just the right amount of friction to not be a huge hit to productivity. Slack is waaay too easy to bother individuals and channels with pointless bullshit. And with Slack, everything to quiet the noise is well hidden and often counterintuitive.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Funnily last time I worked for IBM (Contract ended in 2005) they used Sametime, which I was able to find a plug-in that allowed me to use the gnome chat client I was using at the time. Although Sametime didn't provide access to the feature, the gnome client would be notified the moment someone started typing a message to me, which was kind of handy. The gnome client also saved logs of chats forever, which on its own was already incredibly useful. It was even more useful when I started indexing my chats, ema

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yeah, it's either group chats where you are REQUIRED to watch all the alerts, or it is the eight PMs that you can have open at a time. Mouthbreathing idiots with drool coming out of the corners of their mouths, I tell you. I work in a big corporation, and there's a *really* good chance that I would have to look at my notes to recall someone's name. Once that name has been bumped off the stack, I literally have to go back to Outlook and try to find an email from that same person, type it in again in Slack, a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossz ( 67331 )

        It's not a distraction when you don't install the desktop app so you don't get pop-up alerts all the time.

        We need it in my office because I work with a team in Europe and it's a better alternative for group discussion than email. I can drop a message to my team asking for a code review overnight, for example.

        • Re:Work Distractions (Score:4)

          by gtall ( 79522 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @06:22AM (#59714928)

          Errr...you cannot send an email to a list of team members?

          • I can see the argument not to if it goes on for several threads. Messages tend to grow exponentially when people donâ(TM)t remove old forwarded messages and just hit reply and start typing. You get a team of 10 or 15 people all collaborating. And each person replies six or seven times throughout the conversation... If you donâ(TM)t start deleting some of the old messages out of your email shit gets crazy. A few different tools might work but I donâ(TM)t think email is one of them. A bulletin

          • Which email program is 'integrated' into a source code control system and an issue tracker to bring you directly to the review in question?

          • Errr...you cannot send an email to a list of team members?

            Not being able to send an email has nothing to do with email not being the best communication medium. The GP said "better than email for group discussion" not that he was unable to send an email.

            Send me a Teams invite and we can discuss in detail your reading comprehension skills.

      • Sametime died a slow death as Slack usage picked up. I stopped using it as my primary messaging client 2-3 years ago and last year stopped even bothering to launch it. It became a ghost town, only people in shared corporate services seemed to use it. Now even they seemed to have largely drop Sametime. It was just a matter of time before Sametime died entirely within the company.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rho ( 6063 )

        I started indexing my chats, emails (picked up via Imap into Emacs VM) and the source tree with the MIT Remembrance Agent

        That looks amazing. How well does it handle HTML email? Especially from jackholes that don't send a plain-text version.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      It's probably possible to tune both of them to fit a group's needs, but it's rare anybody knows how to do that right and orgs are too cheap to pay a real expert.

    • What are you smoking? We begged for slack! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @12:44AM (#59714574)

      They're both horrible work distractions and productivity destroyers.

      Everyone at my employer finds it to be the reverse. If you're finding it distracting and productivity destroying, you or your environment are the issue, not the tool.

      Slack is just semi-synchronous communication. It allows back and forth a lot faster than e-mail.

      The killer feature for me is being able to correct my misspelilngs. :)

      Look at it this way....I need info from you. Here are my choices
      1. march to your desk and interrupt what you're doing so I can ask you something in which your answer will most likely be a URL or source code...but hey, context switching is free, right? :)
      2. e-mail...in which my message gets lost in the literally 1000s of e-mails you got today...that's all good because you actually read all your e-mails from coworkers, right? :)
      3. schedule a meeting and force you to attend for 30 minutes to ask a simple question....who doesn't like a meeting on their calendar?!?!
      4. send a slack message in which you can answer at your convenience, have source formatting, corrected answers (I hate how in my texts 1/10th of my lines are me correcting typos and poor phrasing).

      For me, the nature of most questions I ask and answer involve source code, table names, URLs...things that are hard to communicate in conversation. Slack gives fast feedback and I often search my slack chats much later.

      Other considerations:

      1. My first answer is usually confusing because it made sense in my head, but not to another human being. I'll type an answer and realize I used ambiguous pronouns and unclear language....and then correct it to be more precise. I also correct answers to add source code links or more concrete examples as I think of them...so hopefully my answers will be a little more polished.
      2. Slack works on my phone, our previous corporate chat tool didn't. It's HUGE to be able to walk away from my desk or go home early and take care of work from another location....as well as to not have to time messages for before everyone else went home
      3. The group chat replaced meetings for us. We still have meetings, but far fewer if we can get all the questions answered in slack. This is very friendly to remote employees and collaborators across the globe (I collaborate with offices in Santa Clara, Chicago, Bangalore, Costa Rica, Krakow, Tel Aviv, etc). With meetings/webex, I have to schedule things at an insane time to get answers from Indian, Californian, and Israeli offices. With slack, people can answer as they can...and much more fluidly than e-mail. I'm always happy to not have to march into a conference room.

      While imperfect, I have used many communication tools and Slack is, by far, my favorite....also tuning the noise, to quote you, is very easy...I have no clue what you're talking about, but I've suppressed many channels that were just too noisy...its very easy (at least on macos) to tune which channels can deliver notifications.

      • It allows back and forth a lot faster than e-mail.

        Why do people say this like it is a good thing. This is the reason why it's so distracting! Now people who would have hesitated to send an email are Slacking you instantly!

        • I'm coming 4u would u prefer a visit or meeting? (Score:5, Funny)

          by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @09:33AM (#59715196)

          Why do people say this like it is a good thing. This is the reason why it's so distracting! Now people who would have hesitated to send an email are Slacking you instantly!

          Hey dude, I work for a big company, an embarrassing amount of my actual job that my superiors care about is me integrating with your system...which 90% of the time is not well documented. If I am slacking you, you fucked up in your documentation. You barfed a bunch of details on the wiki no one cares about, like the frameworks you used and then dumped a stupid diagram that provides no useful information...oooh, your server connects to another server?...I would have never figured that out if you didn't draw it out in gliffy!...the parts I needed, the API signatures and connection info and examples were the parts you spent 1/100th of the time writing the doc...50% of it drawing pointless swimlanes in gliffy.

          Your API docs are incomplete and out of date. You didn't explain the fields or why you're returning them....AND...you changed the API 3 months ago without updating the wiki...but I'm used to that and most modifications are easy enough to figure out....but more importantly, I need your help figuring out why your cert based authentication system you set up isn't accepting my certs in our zero trust environment....and then throwing a vague useless error....because security assholes think totally fucking useless error messages are more secure than helpful ones....and in the name of "security" you don't provide useful detailed examples of connecting to your system...particularly about which of the dozen or so certs provided by different groups in our company will unlock your shit service.

          So yeah....nearly every time I have to connect to another group's microservice, I need to talk to someone working on the project.

          I don't even hold it against you that your wiki docs are useless...most are, including several I wrote. You have no idea when you're writing it what the reader will need to know.

          ...but I am coming for you...it is my fucking job to get that info out of your head that you didn't bother putting on the wiki. I can't go home and see my kids until my shitty microservice connects to your microservice...

          So...what will it be? Do you want me camping outside your cube until you stop by? I WILL do that! I want to see my kids tonight.

          Do you want me to schedule a meeting? I will block your calendar if I have to! ...and if I do, managers will be notified and probably sit in and ask stupid questions.

          Do you want me to e-mail? Yeah...I know you do....but you ignored my first e-mail because you got 1000 e-mails today....we tried this yesterday...this is why I am coming for you...you cannot run, you cannot hide! Your shitty microservice...which connecting to should have taken 15 minutes has lost my team 2 days already....so yeah, we could have done this over e-mail, like civilized people, but you chose to go home early so you can see your family yesterday instead of do your job and respond to my email

          So final choice...we could slack...harder to ignore than e-mail, but gives you a bit of asynchronousity in the communication. Let's you queue tasks...yet satisfies my boss that I am being aggressive in contacting you since you produced shit documentation and ignored my e-mail.

          In my view, slack fixes mistakes people make in communication. If you write good wiki docs and actually read your e-mails and respond to them well, then I don't need to use it. However, I work for a profitable company, which means we have a few "comfortable" engineers...so yeah, I often have to do things I "shouldn't" have to do to get them to do their jobs so I can do mine. Slack was WAAAAAY better than jabber, our previous choice, or whatever garbage WebEx shat out (we replaced webex teams with slack recently). It's certainly less intrusive than me camping outside your cube with my coffee breath and forcing an answer out of you!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          Spending less time accomplishing a task is a bad thing to you?
          • I want to accomplish MY task, not have to tend to a constant stream of the tasks of others.

            • I want to accomplish MY task, not have to tend to a constant stream of the tasks of others.

              I get what you're saying! I even sympathize, but it's you or me, dude. I get 1 day....I send an e-mail to you or your mailing list on day 1. On day 2, my boss is camping in my cube with his coffee breath asking me why I haven't gotten an answer from you yet....and asking me to get it done today...which implies don't leave the office until this is resolved....so on day 2, I am camping in your cube with my coffee breath until you answer my question....or you can answer via slack and it's generally quicker

              • Some people are the ones that have to help everyone while doing their own jobs, and other people are the ones who need help in order to do their jobs. I guess we know where we each stand.

        • And you read it a day later, just like with eMail.
          What is your problem?

          Or you have dedicated brakes for it ...

          • If people send a slack they expect an answer in minutes not hours, certainly not a day.

            • Sure?

              I use slack usually in groups, the one who has spare time answers it first.

              I actually never got a personal slack/hipchat/blabla message ...

              If you get messaged personally, block the morons or try to get global block.

      • Re:What are you smoking? We begged for slack! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @10:34AM (#59715302) Homepage Journal

        If you are trying to solve the problem of email overload by moving to a Slack then you can expect Slack to be overloaded in short order too.

        The problem is not the platform, it's indiscriminately mailing crap to too many people.

        • If you are trying to solve the problem of email overload by moving to a Slack then you can expect Slack to be overloaded in short order too.

          The problem is not the platform, it's indiscriminately mailing crap to too many people.

          Agreed! There are some problems that are tech problems....but most of my day as a professional software engineer are fixing people problems...I should be writing code, but instead and sleuthing whatever nonsense someone else barfed into git...trying to reverse engineer the undocumented intent of the last guy. The more time I spent on slack, the more it represents a breakdown in communication.

          Let's be real, my job is really f-ing stupid. Like 90+% of working software engineers, all I do is pump data in

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rho ( 6063 )

        While I get where you're coming from, Slack and the other IRC-alikes suffer from the same problem. You tend to think in sentences. Email has an advantage as a long-form medium in that if you use it properly, you tend to think in bigger chunks.

        The Slack way works if you need a string of question-answers, which makes it more like an asynchronous phone call. That's definitely a good thing. But if it takes over as the default communication--and it will, because it's way more fun and informal than email--you los

      • Slack is just semi-synchronous communication.

        Slack desktop, Teams, IRC, ICQ, etc are "semi-synchronous communication" the way a cat that won't get off the keyboard for one minute and let you finish this thought is a semi-synchronous notification that it's feeding time.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah I'm surprised they've gone for Slack (then at the same time not surprised because it's IBM and they're the masters of irrelevance), the biggest problems I found with it are as you say, Slack just harasses you by default, whereas if anything Teams doesn't harrass you enough by default (because it doesn't automatically subscribe you to notifications from channels you join).

      But also Slack is way more expensive, by the time you add the addons you need it costs a small fortune compared to Teams.

      I can only g

    • Teams has just the right amount of friction to not be a huge hit to productivity.

      Just to chime in with a data point: people at my company are forced to use Teams. They uniformly hate it. They also uniformly all created Slack channels, which they use to exchange (among other things)

      • - rants about how awful Teams is and how out of touch management is to force it on them
      • - data they have to exchange to work when Teams goes down (happens a surprising amount), and
      • - data they don't want management to be able to trace.

  • No Lotus Notes? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Monday February 10, 2020 @09:46PM (#59714186)

    Lotus Sametime had all slack features back in ~2007. At our Fortune 50 saddled with Lotus we were sharing Gifs and our desktop back then. You could even have group chats and everything.

    • Re:No Lotus Notes? (Score:5, Funny)

      by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Monday February 10, 2020 @09:48PM (#59714194)

      VAXnotes

      (get off my lawn)

    • Re:No Lotus Notes? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BitterOak ( 537666 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @12:38AM (#59714556)
      In some ways, Lotus Notes was way ahead of its time, but its biggest problem was that it didn't scale. I worked at a medium sized organization, and Lotus Notes was really maxed out. The guys who worked on the server side always complained that it was a big monolithic thing that used flat file databases and really choked when the user base reached a certain size. Otherwise, it was a really cool product. It's time has passed, however.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      The Lotus suite has been sold from IBM to HCL, thus all uses of Lotus will be phased out at IBM, including Sametime, Notes and all the small Notes databases that have been amassed during the decades.
    • Except the fact that all other competitors on that time have the same features (and more), and Sametime eats all the machine RAM and it was fucking slow, when not crashing.

    • Longtime IBMer here... we did this before Lotus Notes... it was called PROFS and ran on the mainframe.

  • Who cares? (Score:3, Informative)

    by mschaffer ( 97223 ) on Monday February 10, 2020 @09:55PM (#59714214)

    Both are horrible choices.

    • I thought teams was bad at first. It's a really good GoToMeeting replacement. Otherwise it an IM/IRC replacement.

    • Both are horrible choices.

      Compared to what? That is the fundamental problem in most workplaces. These tools provide an integrated environment for communication and work. Both are horrible but both are better than a hodgepotch of garbage we do currently with traditional methods for many specific tasks.

  • memory (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Monday February 10, 2020 @09:57PM (#59714220) Homepage

    The only issue I have with slack is their client is a very large memory hog on Linux (and windows for that matter). I think it may even beat Firefox on memory usage in some cases. That is saying something. If only they kept the IRC link

    • I always assumed from the memory footprint that it ran inside its own Chrome instances, 1 per channel or PM thread.

    • Re:memory (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Spasmodeus ( 940657 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @03:06AM (#59714746)

      It's an Electron app, which is the latest cross-platform hotness, which means it's basically a web app that has been wrapped with its own instance of Node.js and the Blink (aka Chrome) engine, which is the stupidest thing since Do-it-yourself brain surgery.

      If you already use Chrome/Chromium, you can save a shit-ton of RAM by launching Slack like so: /usr/bin/chromium --app=https://mydumbcompany.slack.com

      This will give you a separate window with no menus or toolbars that runs Slack with almost exactly the same functionality as the standalone app, except for a tray icon. Depending on your window manager, though, you may be able to configure it to show as a tray icon (that's what I did).

      I also created a .desktop file for this so I can just launch it with a click.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        It's an Electron app, which is the latest cross-platform hotness, which means it's basically a web app that has been wrapped with its own instance of Node.js and the Blink (aka Chrome) engine, which is the stupidest thing since Do-it-yourself brain surgery.

        No, it's not that, surprisingly. Because if you use the webclient, your web browser suddenly consumes a ton of RAM and CPU cycles as well. It's not Electron, it's the damn page itself!

        There are plenty of other apps using Electron that do similar things th

      • Does node.js ever run anything well? Admittedly, Slack seems pretty fine on my machine and phone, but given the amount of users/revenue, it can't be that hard to write a native client for their main platforms.

        I am genuinely curious if slack could run more efficiently by dumping node for a native platform...it's mostly a bunch or REST calls. It's not that hard to do. I know that VSCode is horrifying, performance-wise. It reminds me of coding in the 90s on Pentiums with 64MB of RAM...back when I was so
  • I'm curious about IBM's best practices. We use slack at work, but there are no ground rules, no training, no cultural norms. Which means it's very hard to figure out how to find the channels you are interested in, the experienced users have to keep explaining to noobs how to use threads, and so many people (mostly in the executive ranks) feel that it's important to repeat all their slack posts on huge email distributions. Hopefully IBM has solved a lot of these problems in preparation for going company-wide

    • We have corporate-written best practice write ups which the newbies quickly get pointed to. They answer a lot of the questions such as how to handle confidential info, channel sharing, naming conventions and such. There is a shared slack channel that I believe all users have access to for common questions on slack usage. It gets used a lot and is actively moderated to give guidance on thread usage and etiquette.

      The challenge is with all the workspaces. Typically we have a dedicated project-specific workspac

  • Sametime replacement (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Monday February 10, 2020 @10:55PM (#59714374)

    They are essentially moving everyone off of Sametime and pushing everyone to use Slack instead.

    Sametime is a -- well, not good, but tolerable -- instant messenger, with some half-assed support for chat rooms. My initial impression after a couple months is that Slack is a reasonable platform for chat rooms, with some half-assed support for instant messaging.

    Since over the last twenty years everyone has gotten used to a workflow revolving around instant messaging, the result has been a lot of pain.

  • Goodbye Slack (Score:4, Funny)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @08:33AM (#59715082)

    When did IBM last back a winner?

  • IRC was perfect. I could configure it to be as alerting or non-alerting as I wanted. We could invite and kick those we need to channels. And most importantly, you can ignore and ban people. I shouldn't have to continue receiving messages from the guy we shipped off to Texas to get rid of him, but still has a job because he's friends with the CEO, but otherwise is totally useless.

  • Wouldn't have to be very good to beat teams. I mistakenly installed that. Went on easily. Then the trouble began. Sometimes I'd fire up the machine and 3 processes would go to 100%. CPU fan would come on, burning up that processing doing who knows what.

    De-install. Burn in hell Teams.

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