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Billionaire Brothers Want to Build a Cheaper Rival to Slack (bloomberg.com)
Saritha Rai, writing for Bloomberg: A teenage entrepreneur who became a millionaire by 20 before sharing a billion-dollar fortune at 36, Bhavin Turakhia isn't afraid to think big. Now he's putting $45 million of his own money into building a rival to Slack and other office messaging platforms. Flock, a cloud-based team collaboration service, has attracted 25,000 enterprise users and customers including Tim Hortons, Whirlpool and Princeton University. It's a market that has already drawn interest from global technology giants Facebook, Amazon.com and Microsoft. This time last year, few had heard of Bhavin and his younger brother Divyank. That changed when they sold their advertising technology company Media.net, with customers including Yahoo, CNN and the New York Times, to a Chinese consortium for $900 million. The all-cash deal catapulted the duo from mere millionaires into the ranks of the super-rich. "I want to make Flock bigger and better than anything I've built before," Bhavin Turakhia, wearing his signature dark Levi's T-shirt and Puma sweatpants, said at his Bangalore offices.
That's cheaper than slack
Indeed what we need is yet another communication/messaging platform. Preferably one that is closed/proprietary and a walled garden.
Hooray.
what would you need billionaires to help with?
OK. What is the difference between IRC and Slack. What makes people want Slack over IRC.
They are seemingly the same to me.
although it really needs the format converted to JSON and support for SCTP for doing voice and video applications with it.
What was the point of that article?
I'm glad that TFA granted the courtesy of letting us know what Bhavin was wearing, as this has very important technical relevance.
With Mattermost there is also an open source alternative to slack which companies can host on there own.
The pricing model for enterprise users is also very competitive.
Check Riot (Client) and Matrix.org
Discord already exists, and is free. It is a service meant for gamers first and foremost, but I, along with a lot of my colleagues, use it for a lot of non-gaming conversation, with Discord "rooms" for programming, organizing events, etc..
And then we'll cash out once you suckers feed us enough of that info.
I don't get it, why would large companies not control this kind of service themselves for security reasons?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
MatterMost is free, it looks and feels exactly like Slack. Problem solved.
I use Slack daily at work, and a self-hosted Mattermost instance daily for personal projects with other remote participants. I much prefer Mattermost.
At work I'll frequently make the mistake of trying to format my messages with markdown, because I'm so used to Mattermost offering this feature.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
What happened to Bob and Tom? TRUMP 2020!
There are three viable alternatives to Slack that are pretty much the same thing.
Rocket.chat even offers it's own hosting on a server basis, not a per user basis, making it significantly cheaper.
These guys didn't do any market research before they thought of their idea eh?
Oh, good. Because if there's one thing missing from the world, it's another messaging app.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
No Linux client? Would it really be THAT expensive? There are big companies, especially in the software development business, where engineering department runs Linux as their desktop OS. For such companies luck of Linux support is a deal breaker.
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Doesn't Microsoft pretty much give this to you to go along with all your Windows and Office licenses on your client machines, Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. licenses prevalent across most shops?
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Nobody ever heard about Matrix messaging - https://matrix.org/?
There are already a million other options: Hipchat, Mattermost, Rocketchat, Lets-Chat, Discord...
I still don't know what's wrong with the combination of email, phone calls, IM, and whiteboards. It seems that people keep on trying to reinvent the wheel without acknowledging that their problem may be a people problem and not a technology problem....
Its already there. Its called Mattermost.
It's a legit question; at my office, all communication is either done over email or face-to-face. What additional role does Slack fill?
We've already seen how Slack is a POS because it consumes resources like nobody's business - they just can't code crap.
I mean, I hated it because it consumed 30% of the CPU - both in the browser and the "app" (which was just a browser on its own), showing me they can't code for the web worth crap.
Doubly so when Discord I can have it open in a browser and it idles at 0%.
So all you need to do is make it friendly on lower end machines and consume few resources and you will wonder how Slack gets away with their cpu and memory guzzling web site.
Closed source, not even a Linux client this is clearly not targeting development teams ! Slack is not bad to kick-off a project. If you have infra, Mattermost or RocketChat coupled with some Jitsi-like video solutions may be your preferred setup...