Microsoft to slap Slack with Skype – reports A report – and a job ad – have popped up suggesting that in the wake of its aborted multi-billion-dollar Slack acquisition, Microsoft's gearing up to roll Slack-like capabilities into Skype. News that Skype will slack off broke at MS Power User. While The Register can't verify the details in that post, it's clear that …
Honestly, I'm still struggling to understand what people see in Slack.
I mean, I use it for a couple of personal projects, and it's not the friggin' Messiah of Chat. It does little than we didn't have on IRC, ICQ or MSN Messenger fifteen years ago. I can't help but suspect it's a beneficiary of the widening appeal of tech - it does nothing that we weren't already playing with years ago, but now it comes in a smartphone app so all the cool kids who wouldn't dream of sitting in front of a PC in the late '90s can use it without feeling like nerds.
I did an evaluation of a load of chat apps for work about six months ago - including Slack, Fleep, Spark and a bunch of others. I couldn't find a damn thing to recommend them over just building an open source IRC server on premises and rolling out a custom client.
"How about you don't need to spend resources building and maintaining a custom client?"
Have you seen what Slack costs for higher-end subs? Running up a tiny, 1998-spec VM to act as an IRC server and spending 3 hours customizing an off-the-peg open source client is rather cheaper than the $2 grand a month they wanted to charge us for our 150 users.
Agree. I don't think any company I have worked for has actually used the "enterprise social" software. It sounds cool to say that you are bringing social to the enterprise, but it doesn't really translate (or hasn't yet) from consumer to enterprise. Most stuff on social is totally worthless to you. If you are just browsing, that's fine, but no one wants to look through feeds to find what they need.
"It sounds cool to say that you are bringing social to the enterprise, but it doesn't really translate (or hasn't yet) from consumer to enterprise."
We use Yammer at work. The personal social stuff took a few months to go away as people initially treated it like Twitter or Facebook. Now it's mainly sales and marketing backslapping and high fiving with the occasional informative missive from on high.
"I mean, I use it for a couple of personal projects, and it's not the friggin' Messiah of Chat. It does little than we didn't have on IRC, ICQ or MSN Messenger fifteen years ago."
Wow! I skimmed the article and got to here before I realised this is NOT an article about integrating Slackware Linux into Skype!
Microsoft acquired Sunrise (a calendar app), integrated its features into Outlook and then discontinued Sunrise.
Same with Nokia. Hollowed out and fed to the Microsoft ecosystem/collective.
Now watch as Linkedin and Minecraft get 'assimilated' before our very eyes.
Microsoft should have been broken up back in the day, too bad the judges were bought and paid for by lobbyists and special interests.
True, most acquisitions tend to fall apart in a few years, regardless of the acquirer, but MSFT has had a particularly poor record. Yammer was a total bust (no one uses it anywhere). Nokia was a train wreck. Xamarin is in the process of being killed as MSFT tries to wrap it into legacy Visual Studio. Their purchase of aQuantive to compete with Google was a complete bust. Skype wasn't exactly a complete bust, but pretty close. When MSFT purchased Skype for a large premium, they owned video calls. Now people use Apple facetime or Google Hangouts (or, now, Google Duo), but I don't know anyone who still uses Skype. We'll have to see on LinkedIn. The initial strategy doesn't seem great. They are basically going to use it for CRM to beat Salesforce (or try to). When people realize they are signing up to be put in a CRM to an unknown group of companies, they might pull their profiles.... It would be a really good time for Facebook or Google to create their own version of LinkedIn, or some other start up.
Latest company to reinvent their own reinventions of IRC. Seems like chat has not moved forward in a meaningful way since the nineties. Every few years some company confuses the latest fad in UX with a need to come up with yet another proprietary, non federated chat protocol that implements some subset of what IRC has done for decades. Time to standardize this shit and move on instead of reinventing the wheel every two years. Mobile seems to have moved the field backwards with dumbed down UIs and nobody even pretending to connect to other networks even. The ONLY reason SMS lingers along is because the IM world is hopelessly fragmented. I'm active on at least half a dozen different chat networks and I still need to fall back to SMS with some people.
"I'm active on at least half a dozen different chat networks and I still need to fall back to SMS with some people."
For the same reason FTP is still around. And POP3/SMTP. They work and are still ubiquitous. Same applies to many of he "old" protocols. They work, everyone uses them, they aren't patent encumbered,
Almost without fail, any new "standard" will be propriety and be either completely closed or have to be licensed at some silly rate that makes it cheaper for others to just go invent their own new "standard" which they can try to also monetise with licensing.
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