Slashdot Mirror
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.
You can make a slack out of irc, but:
-Consistent server side log with conversation replay (you can kind of sort of do it with ZNC, but it's hokey, and you never know if the person you are talking to has seen or not seen what you said prior to them joining).
-Sadly, network security has settled on a magical decision that ports 80 and 443 are secure, but others are not necessarily so. It's nonsensical, but the reality.
-Consistent assumptions about how clients are/are not rendering your markdown or whatever, notably pasting things like images or weblinks will behave consistently regardless of who you sent it to
So the biggest benefit IRC has is federation, which frankly isn't that helpful for smaller communities, and in fact netsplits make it more aggravating than helpful. A solution like mattermost is I think the best slack alternative. All the fancy webification and such people crave, no netsplits, and no cost and still open source.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Slack is a push technology that operates even when you're offline. Coworkers on the other side of the world can post, and you can pick up the conversation when you get up. Conversations you start from home can be continued at the office, or en route (as long as you're not the driver).
Slack has nearly everything IRC has, except netsplits, and builds on top: persistence, search (it's not great, but better than IRC), rendering, sharing of multimedia directly inline (images, videos, etc.), voice calls, including group calls, ability to thread messages even inside a single channel. And I'm probably missing some stuff.
What you don't lose compared to IRC: channels, direct messages, slash commands, bots (it has an API you can use to write bots of varying interoperability), multiple servers connected simultaneously (I am connected to 4 slack domains in my slack client now, which is coincidentally also the number of IRC servers I'm connected to in my IRC client). Okay, so your existing IRC bots won't work as-is, but I don't treat that as a fatal flaw.
What I do miss from IRC when in slack, especially a large slack, is individual operator access on a channel-by-channel basis. I don't need op access to #corporate-messaging, but as the team lead, it would be helpful to have some level of op restriction to #my-team-dev-chat. Then again, I don't see nearly as much eternal-september-type trolling, so it's not been a huge problem so far.
Comment removed based on user account deletion