It seems to me that Slack is very vulnerable. Their core product isn't all that innovative and already has credible competitors who could probably beat their price. In fact, I don't understand how they beat HipChat so soundly. I wonder if their next tack will be to start digging a moat of proprietary tooling now that they have a critical mass of adoption.
We used Hipchat a lot back in the days. I remember the biggest frustrations for us was that there was no multi-team support, so co-workers were doing crazy workarounds with multiple copies of the same application on different icon and bundle ids. Additionally HipChat was down quite a lot from what i remember.
As someone who was a huge hipchat fan that got moved to Slack. It's integrations, bots, and a delightful UI. They figured out UI better than any chat. Sometimes it's just building the right product.
Aren't the bots and integrations of those already moat-like?
Even if a lot of those exist elsewhere and you're not using custom bots, hooking everything back up is a pain point. Along with having to export/import data, getting everyone to sign up and get used to a new service, etc. I think it's probably going to take something that's not just a little better, but significantly better and different.
I look at Slack and think, how hard can it be? Then I look at the graveyard of crappy competitors and think, ok maybe there's something special about Slack.
The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few particularly choice bits:
>"There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation."
>The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.
My point isn't that cloning is easy. More that it has already been done multiple times and Slack has very little lock-in. And enterprise software has less network effect. Our IT department could dictate use of Microsoft Teams next month and it would probably be fine.
It had been 'done' by IRC 20 years ago, Google had already been heavily in the space with their linking to Gmail and Hangouts and previous attempts with things like Wave.
Yet somehow Slack has come in and taken a massive share of the market in a matter of 5 years.
