Slack CEO: Microsoft is 'Unhealthily Preoccupied With Killing Us' (theverge.com) 108
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield claimed earlier this month that Microsoft Teams isn't a competitor to Slack. In an interview with The Verge, Butterfield has revealed that, inside Slack, the company feels that "Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us, and Teams is the vehicle to do that." From a report: Butterfield expands on why he thinks Microsoft is "unhealthily preoccupied" with Slack and compares Teams to more of a competitor to Zoom. Slack obviously has its own voice and video calling features, but it's not the primary focus of the app, and often, businesses integrate Zoom or Cisco's WebEx instead. Microsoft has been moving businesses from Skype for Business to Teams, which traditionally focused on voice and video calling. Ultimately, Butterfield thinks Microsoft is trying to force the Teams comparison because "Microsoft benefits from the narrative that Teams is very competitive with Slack. Even though the reality is it's principally a voice and video calling service."
You must be new ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slack CEO: Microsoft is 'Unhealthily Preoccupied With Killing Us'
Welcome to the club. :-)
Re:You must be new ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Slack took 90% of its feature set from IRC, tied it to an online account and a billing system, and trademarked a name. I can only imagine the amount of abject shock on the Slack CEO's face when he learned that turnabout is fair play.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy that MS is the company that did it (we use Mattermost in our office and are pretty happy), but Slack doesn't have much room to call party foul when 99% of their product is prior art.
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Slack took 90% of its feature set from IRC, tied it to an online account and a billing system, and trademarked a name. I can only imagine the amount of abject shock on the Slack CEO's face when he learned that turnabout is fair play.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy that MS is the company that did it (we use Mattermost in our office and are pretty happy), but Slack doesn't have much room to call party foul when 99% of their product is prior art.
Let's not bullshit ourselves. Damn near every software product created in the last decade is 99% prior art.
As if we really need to look any further than a sequel-riddled Hollywood to see just how lazy we've become with "innovation". We couldn't shit out an original concept if we grew a new asshole, and it wouldn't matter because someone out there is itching for a reason to release their army of bloodthirsty patent hounds on your ass.
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Re:You must be new ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slack took 90% of its feature set from IRC
I fucking hate Slack but I hate this fucking wrong ass summary more. Slack has IRC features like channels but IRC is missing a shit ton of the features that Slack has and it'd be great if IRC servers actually implemented them.
Here's a list of them in no particular order. Central document storage, indexed/searchable history with regex, pinning important messages in a separate area (no channel message is not the same), channel as a RSS feed, an actual decent command syntax, unread summary, markdown in channel, code pasting, the concept of groups (outside of the usual IRC channel/user), actual voting support, allowing said votes to be easily indexed so when you need to get the opinion of someone who dissented you can actually find that person, push notifications, channel reminders, and so on.
Now you might sit there and say, oh yeah well that's doable with IRC client ABC or you just need to use service ABC with client EFG to get all that. And that's entirely the fucking point. Slack puts all of that in a single client and adds on top of the usual protocol to support all that shit. There does indeed come a point when something adds enough to something that it is indeed a different thing altogether. Also your 90% is just wrong anyway.
And I want you to all understand, I really fucking hate Slack. It's a shitty product for the things that it does because it attempts to try all that shit and isn't really good at any particular one. IRC is really great at chatting, but it completely blows at everything that I just mentioned. You miss a chat, then you're fucked. And your indexing and searching is only as good as your client implements which is shit for pretty much every client unless you export your log and then grep it. But that is the entire point I'm getting at, nobody else adds grep to inline logging. Nobody implements MD for the IRC chatroom. No client does those things and that's what Slack shakes their moneymaker with. I personally don't care about those features, but somebody else does and they want to do it in a single interface without mucking with CLI and that's the point. And yeah, it may seem like a no brainer to put those things together, buuuuuut nobody else did.
So yeah a lot of people can be all salt and sand that they didn't do it first, but adding all that shit in there takes it a lot further than just IRC with some neat features because they've changed a lot of the foundation protocol to be something completely different. Because it's not just that MD gets sent into the chat room, the actual protocol indicates that MD is coming down the pipe and the client is requested to render that markdown inline or windowed. Just as an example.
Slack doesn't have much room to call party foul when 99% of their product is prior art.
Yeah but using your definition of "prior art", every car today is just a fancy Model T and that's just not correct. That is called massively over simplifying things.
And finally, fuck Slack, it's not good at any particular thing, it's more like a jack of all trades and master of none. But you know, that's what some people apparently want.
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That is something which is either rudimentary (Teams) or has been outright removed due to the infinite i
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Great insights!
To play Devil's advocate however though at one time Slack WAS compatible [slashdot.org] with IRC.
While Slack does MD it should be stated that Slack only supports some markdown.
i.e. Slack still can't do table markdown, something that reddit has supported for years.
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Slack still can't do table markdown, something that reddit has supported for years.
Yeah, exactly. Hence my whole thing about jack of all, master of none. It's like, "Here's this feature! It doesn't do anything useful, but here it is!" Not saying MD without tables is shit, but for some things it's like why even do it if you won't put in the last 20%? So oh my gosh, yeah, I feel you. And yeah, it was compatible with IRC once upon a time. They've moved on but it would be nice to see of those features that they did do get added in some way to IRC as a protocol, except not in the most s
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Not saying MD without tables is shit, but for some things it's like why even do it if you won't put in the last 20%?
Clearly it needs full Org Mode.
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Especially funny since it's actually just a plain old web service of JavaScript and HTML. Even the slack app is just an Electron/node.js style app - SSOs work just fine inside the app since it's just calling your organization's authentication service.
There is no reason why it can't support full markdown or even use the real markdown library since it's all web services - unless the markdown library is AGPL or something. But then again, there are so many alternatives that provide markdown like syntax...
And ye
Re: You must be new ... (Score:2)
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> Central document storage
FTP/SFTP
point being that not every piece of software needs to be a Swiss Army knife.
I use Slack regularly and I'm mostly okay with it but the main reason I dislike it (bloatware) are all the reasons you are claiming make it a superior product. They are also the reason why Slack is hording system resources. You're basically running several high memory applications when you use it regardless of whether or not you need those services at your fingertips.
I don't believe the cost is w
Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Devs (Score:2)
From my essay for 2016: https://pdfernhout.net/reasons... [pdfernhout.net]
As a summary, the main issues in using Slack for free/libre software projects include:
* Proprietary vs. Free; free alternatives exist like Mattermost and Matrix.org and others
* Sending the wrong message about free software communications out of convenience
* Reduces interest in free software and public standards for communications
* Changeable Terms of Service
* Arbitrary termination of access possible with no archive
* Online requirement to access your p
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Hey now that's unfair to Slack; they also slapped a web browser on the front of it.
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Slack took 90% of its feature set from IRC
The other 10% is emojis and weighty electron crap.
There's an extra 10% of millennial horseshit and grabass too. In the VC world they call that "stickyness".
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Did Slack also use it's near monopoly on corporate systems to destroy IRC? Because if not, then we are having very different conversations.
Microsoft has pushed Teams down everyone's throats with nag screens on all its operating systems.
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Will Microsoft try to "cut off the air supply"? (Score:2)
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And Paradox and Quattro Pro and Word-Perfect and Lotus-123 and almost Delphi, etc...
The "problem" is that MS has deep pockets from other cash cows to outspend competition at a loss to MS until the competition dies. MS wins the attrition game just by being big.
Thus good products or potentially good products (if in the game long enough) get slaughtered because they cannot go as long in the desert without water being MS is a 50-hump camel. Thus it's not healthy competition. You die
Correction [Re:Will Microsoft try to "cut off (Score:1)
Re: "not because you're product is bad."
Should be "not because your product is bad."
CEO says competitor isn't,shocking (Score:4, Insightful)
I hardly would expect Slack's CEO to admit there was overlap. Better for him if he can get Teams competing with Zoom instead. This is a pretty banal press release for /.
Re:CEO says competitor isn't,shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
Slack repackaged IRC with some special sauce and is nervous because Microsoft could easily repackage IRC as well over a weekend and nuke them from orbit.
But inexplicably Microsoft, with all of its resources is whiffing on the simplest tasks. We used to use AIM in our organization because it let us have a chat, with history and multiple persistent groups. It worked perfectly. No complaints. Then AOL killed AIM.
So we moved to Slack. And it's pretty much the same. We now use Teams for calling because Slack calls blow. But the chat in Teams... omg so terrible. All they need to do is change the CSS to be a chat thread without 300pixels of margin between each reply and it would dominate... but no. It's been the top feature request for 2 years to have an IRC like compact threading presentation and Microsoft has been "working on it" for 2 years. How that's possible is mind boggling incompetency. We would switch tomorrow if Teams had a no-margin IRC like chat presentation. But nope. Maybe in 5 years they'll crack that impossible engineering challenge of changing the css to
ChatPost.Margin: 5px from 500px.
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When AOL killed AIM, we moved to an open-source XMPP-server (that's the OSS FB EEE'd into FB Messanger). It worked with the same free(beer) multi-IM client most people used with AIM, so it was transparent to most employees once reconfigured.
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I agree that Slack isn't some awe-inspiring amazingness that cannot possibly be replicated. However, Microsoft's had MSN Messenger, Lync, Skype and now Teams and somehow still hasn't managed to make anything even vaguely as usable. Whilst Microsoft has the raw materials, it appears to lack the refinery to make them into a nice product. And this is what Slack has done where no one else could: made a nice(ish) product out of some raw materials.
Teams is being given away (more or less) - and still, there's an
Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Coke wants to kill Pepsi.
Toyota wants to kill GM.
AMD wants to kill Intel.
That is the way capitalism works.
If Slack doesn't want to die, they should stop whining and focus on improving their product and keeping their customers happy.
Re:Competition (Score:5, Funny)
And we all know Microsoft is always aboveboard, and would NEVER try to eliminate their competition by doing anything underhanded.
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It isn't like Slack developed an architecture-agnostic coding language, and M$FT made their own incompatible version the default.
Slack made ICQ less ugly and Microsoft realized that people wanted real-time communications in their office communications. The value-added by Slack was UI and marketing. So meh.
Re:Competition (Score:4, Funny)
If Slack doesn't want to die, they should stop whining and focus on improving their product and keeping their customers happy.
Well, how much can you really expect from a bunch of Slackers?
Re: Competition (Score:2)
If Intel ever decided to get their shit together and stop with the incremental cow milking crap and produce a true next-gen cpu they'd bury AMD. They have lost the will to win.
And as an aside, why does autocorrect want to change "cow" into "CO2". Wtf, Apple?
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You forgot a major metric when it comes to purchase decisions: name recognition. When it comes down to it, the age old saying still holds true: Nobody ever got fired because they bought Intel.
On the other hand deserved or not if you buy AMD based machines and anything goes wrong the PHB's will be claiming it's because of those "off brand knockoff chips" (regardless of it that's true or not, which is almost certainly won't be).
I personally love AMD, and use them pretty much exclusively at home, but if you c
Re: Competition (Score:1)
Re: Competition (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it's the opposite.
AMD is the right size for Intel. Not in danger of going out of business, but not too big either.
Intel would prefer AMD stay that way - Intel does not want AMD to die. And Intel definitely does not want to kill AMD.
Why? AMD and Intel have an extraordinarily cozy relationship, especially with regards to patents. There's so much cross licensed that neither is paying the other anything for it.
Should AMD die, Intel will come under intense scrutiny - you think governments wouldn't want to check if there was any more anticompetitive behavior? Or worse yet, have more severe monopoly sentencing? The government could break Intel up, of all things.
And those patents AMD holds wouldn't go towards Intel - they'd be sold to everyone else - ARM, etc. who wouldn't enter into a cross licensing agreement because they don't have to. Thus Intel would have to pay to license those patents back.
AMD has hits and misses. They succeeded with the K-5 and Athlon, then suffered under Bulldozer. They have a hit with Ryzen, who knows what happens next. AMD making tons of money off Ryzen is a good thing - Intel knows it which is why they aren't really competing.
Intel could offer a bargain chip to compete, but they aren't, which likely means they intentionally want to give that market to AMD. Let AMD build up some cash so they can survive their next flop.
There are more strategic plays you know. AMD is in a good spot for Intel - not too big to threaten marketshare, not too small that they risk dying and giving lots of governmental grief and all that.
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AMD making tons of money off Ryzen is a good thing - Intel knows it which is why they aren't really competing.
That's comedy gold. Sure Intel might inflate prices to pad their margins rather than try going in for the kill, but having a better process has always meant more money for less. The reason Intel got stuck on 14nm+++ is because their 10nm process just didn't work and still doesn't work very well. The first 14nm Xeons shipped in June 2015 and Microsoft has still not launched any 10nm Xeons. It will not go unnoticed that nVidia just put two of AMDs 64-core Epyc processors in their flagship deep learning node.
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> I think it's "Intel wants to kill AMD"
No, Intel wants AMD around, just not a competitive/superior AMD like the last few years. If AMD disappears completely, then Intel is the defacto only source of x86/x64 chips, and that suddenly exposes them to a whole bunch of antitrust rules they never had to previously care about. But an AMD that makes some lower end laptop and niche desktop chips shows there's still competion in the marketplace. Intel just didn't expect to get suckerpunched with Ryzen especial
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Maybe you typed "CO2" more often than "cow"? AFAIK, autocorrect adapts to your usage pattern.
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"If Intel ever decided to get their shit together and stop with the incremental cow milking crap and produce a true next-gen cpu they'd bury AMD. They have lost the will to win."
I submit that they have lost the ability to win on technical merit. They've been trying. They've been failing. Intel was dependent on having superior process technology, which they definitely had for many years running. Now it's AMD CPUs being made with the superior process, AND the superior architecture. Intel has only volume and s
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Coke wants to kill Pepsi.
Toyota wants to kill GM.
AMD wants to kill Intel.
That is the way capitalism works.
If Slack doesn't want to die, they should stop whining and focus on improving their product and keeping their customers happy.
And what happens when Amazon wants to destroy Pepsi? And GM? And Toyota?
Microsoft will be legally allowed to destroy their competition through tax breaks and other massive benefits provided only to mega-corps, and there's not a damn thing Slack or anyone else can do about it.
Your fairy tale version of Capitalism died when Too Big To Fail destroyed competition.
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Microsoft wanted to kill Netscape, and almost got broken up because of it.
No worries here (Score:2)
Both are pretty awful products. Competition isn't improving either of them; they are both largely awful in the same ways. They are both extremely heavy weight Electron apps. Both lack decent feedback for errors or connectivity problems. Neither provide a great user interface. Neither look native. Both act unpredictable. Both follow trendy bandwagons instead of implementing what is proven best. Both are slow and unresponsive. I hear only complaints about both.
Re:No worries here (Score:4, Interesting)
Both are pretty awful products. Competition isn't improving either of them; they are both largely awful in the same ways.
Mediocre companies focus on their competitors.
Great companies focus on their customers.
That both Microsoft and Slack are trying to mirror each other's features rather than meeting customer desires, indicates that both are mediocre.
Instead of whining about Microsoft, Butterfield should talk to the customers he is losing and try to understand why they are abandoning his product.
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I wouldn't even say they are focusing on the competition. It's like they focus on a non-existent user that they think exists but doesn't actually exist.
It ain't done until Lotus 1-2-3 won't run! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not technology people mind you. But people.
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Excel is mediocre ...
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That both Microsoft and Slack are trying to mirror each other's features
Microsoft isn't. Microsoft is implementing a base line set of communication features and everything else is an attempt to embed the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem into the app. This is clever marketing. Don't give the customers what they want, sell the customers something that other companies can't replicate.
It's mediocre from out point of view, but try telling that to the CTO/CIO who only hears about the amazing integration in the existing "ecosystem". Throw in an AI buzzword or two and power it by blockc
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I hate electron apps so much. If you insist you want to make a webapp, just say 'use the browser' and don't pretend to make a desktop app that is in reality just a webapp with a bundled browser. I know you can make never-online electron apps, but then why?
For Slack and Teams, I could actually go with the 'no application warranted' stance. For things like text editors it would be stupid to be an app, but for a chat application that has zero value offline anyway? Sure, knock yourself out.
Blah, blah, blah (Score:2)
One company engages in misdirection over a product who's capabilities overlap those from others. In truth, they all compete to some degree as long as the features of each are something that the customer uses.
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft competes with Sandia Labs. Because both make bombs.
Competition doesnâ(TM)t kill you (Score:1)
Shit products and poor management kills you. Whatâ(TM)s stopping Slack from retaliating with even more feature rich, stable and secure product to make Teams look terrible? not that Teams looks any good at the moment anyway.
Re: Competition doesnâ(TM)t kill you (Score:1)
And Slack have already lost (Score:1)
And Slack have already lost as they try to paint their competition as "unhealthy"
Slack CEO is scared, also he is wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Teams is exactly like slack and 100% a direct competitor in that market. It is not really a zoom competitor in anyway. This guy is just scared.
The scariest part, I prefer Teams to Slack.
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Teams is full of nonsense like giphy and tagging posts, there's too much fooling around
Switch GIFs off then.
Says the guy who killed HipChat (Score:2)
Sounds like projection to me. Slack "embraced" then "extinguished" HipChat. As long as Microsoft doesn't buy Slack, the only thing they need to do is fairly compete. ...and only an idiot thinks Slack and Teams are direct competitors. Teams has replaced a lot of Slack (and before, HipChat) deployments. It may need more refinement, but Teams handles enterprise communications just fine.
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Of course, I meant, "...only an idiot thinks Slack and Teams are NOT direct competitors"
Ugh.
I don't really agree (Score:2)
The comparison made by Slack is true though;
- Skype for business was primarily focused on audio/video
- Team integrates chat more elaborately but I still think Slack does a much better job in chat.
Regardless, I think Butterfield should consider MS a compet
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MS tried to buy Slack in 2016, then they announced Teams, he might have a point
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Slack is a dumpster fire and so is your opinion
Says the anonymous coward.
In my experience, scrumbags that throw out there an insult without backing it up are exactly what they are: scumbags!!
Reeeee (Score:1)
I wonder how many people here would jump at the opportunity say Microsoft is bad at whatever it does, yet defend any criticism of Trump with " orange man bad" (or vice versa)
Fixed the Headline (Score:2)
No, not directly (Score:2)
MS is obsessed with continuing to be the one software vendor upon which business remains dependent.
The shift to SaaS meant MS cannot continue to be that while dealing operating systems and office suites.
Slack is the new Lotus Notes... or, insert anything else MS has trampled over the past 30 years.
Dont worry... (Score:2)
Microsoft's best contribution to mankind (Score:2)
Microsoft's best contribution to mankind: killing shit that does not deserve to exist. Slack is a total waste of time. I hope MS kills it, and then, after a few years, cancels Teams as well, because it's a piece of shit also.
Teams is an absolutely mess (Score:2)
No Office 365 so, no problem (Score:2)
Not going down the awful rabbit hole of Office 365 at my company, so we don't have to worry about all those phishing attempts, constant software lease payments, etc. So I won't be doing MS Teams, nope, no thanks.
In what way isn't it a direct competitor? (Score:2)
Teams and Slack both offer calling functionality and a plethora of integrations to pull in notifications across a range of tools. I would say this makes them more or less direct competitors. The only difference with Teams is that it also provides Zoom-like functionality. I prefer Slack, as this is what most open source projects I engage with use, but there's no denying that Teams is going after Slack's market share and is more directly palatable in the enterprise due to being forced on all Office 365 users.
From the........ (Score:3)
Slack, the company feels that "Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us"
From the "No Shit" Department, I presume.
Slack is preoccupied with killing my desktop (Score:1)
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Electron based JS apps have a nasty habit of doing that ....
Teams is just as much an electron based app.
There's a lot of division on this... (Score:1)
Good (Score:1)
Previous employer used Slack .... (Score:2)
Initially, I thought it was the dumbest thing I ever heard of ... commercializing IRC chat with "yet another proprietary GUI and client". But it was positioned in the right place, at the right time, to get corporate America to adopt it. I mean, you had a pretty decent client for Android and iOS devices, including some customization to make use of the larger screen on an iPad. You had the ability to sign in on multiple machines at the same time, so it wasn't getting in your way if you left it running in the
What? (Score:2)
Anyone who thinks Teams is "primarily a voice and video calling service" hasn't used teams.
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It's what Microsoft sell it as, but they also sold Exchange as a messaging service that could also do internet mail
Wait, I thought it was email Slack was going for (Score:2)
Just last year, this same CEO was going around telling everyone that Slack was going to replace email. Why is he suddenly worried about MS Teams? Keep going after email, dude! Microsoft doesn't own that!
https://www.ccn.com/slack-ceo-... [ccn.com]
David and Goliath (Score:2)
It is the modern "David and Goliath" story. If Slack does not slack off (pun intended), they can actually give Microsoft run for their money. Microsoft had a significant headstart with Skype, and their previous shared workspace solution like Sharepoint and several Office based systems. However they have not nurtured any of them to the Slack's current quality level.
Blockbuster had more money than Netflix, Tesla was the new kid on the block, and always one step away from bankruptcy, heck, even IBM was belittl
Unhealth6y preoccupation? (Score:2)
Microssoft owns Skype software and s office. Paying close attention to a competitor, and even driving them out of business illegally, is what Microsoft has been doing since Bill Gates was president and attacked Netscape and DEC.
Really? How narcissistic of him. (Score:2)
a) that sounds way paranoid, don't 'cha know? and
b) what makes you think that it's only YOU? Why are you so special?
Re: Really? How narcissistic of him. (Score:1)
EEE has always been part of MICROS~1 culture.
Should we short Slack stock? (Score:2)
kill the damned slack robot (Score:2)
Can someone please kill/terminate/destroy/eliminate/make no more, the damned slack robot?
That's fucking annoying shit.
Remember Netscape? (Score:2)
It would not surprise me at all if Microsoft Teams is integrated into Windows 10 and Surface devices. No need to load Slack and Zoom.... it would all be right there.
The more things change, the more they stay the sa
Borrow from Discord (Score:2)
In many ways while Slack is a good platform, it just does not seem to be evolving to match or beat features of alternatives. For one organisation (anime convention) we went with Discord because it had the notion of roles, and had good voice and video support. Sure Discord’s identity system (nicknames shared across guilds) isn’t appropriate for most organisations, but their feature set feels like a vast improvement.
If Slack wants to survive they need to improve the platform beyond cosmetic change
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Some things I see are needed (if they haven’t been added recently):
- linking with firm SSO systems such as SAML or OAuth
- roles and an API to control them
- provide voice and video support
- They do have a pretty impresive SSO integration.
- They also have API that work pretty good. At least with Atlassian, New Relic, PagerDuty that I know of.
Who said EEE is dead? (Score:1)
Maybe toned down scince the 90s, but Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish is still there.
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Like if M$ weren't always preoccupied with killing everything in reach with fire.
Exactly, mod parent up.
Microsoft has always been rapacious, killing off anything that came into sight. Microsoft would see a new product appear and immediately gin up a competing imaginary product that was going to be "So much better. Way way better. Trust us, we're Microsoft!"
The MS 'product' (vaporware) would be given tons of press and the potential buyers would end up waiting for the MS product, which had the intended effect of starving the other company out of business.
And of course Microsoft never deli