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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?
although it really needs the format converted to JSON and support for SCTP for doing voice and video applications with it.
I'm glad that TFA granted the courtesy of letting us know what Bhavin was wearing, as this has very important technical relevance.
It was to let you know that when you're a rich douchebag, nobody cares if you wear sweatpants every day.
Breakfast served all day!
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*
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.
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.
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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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
Yet another instant messaging client. I give slack 2-3 years before someone convinces us all that their new protocol and color scheme is better.
Yes. It is super cool. https://riot.im/app/#/room/%23...
There are already a million other options: Hipchat, Mattermost, Rocketchat, Lets-Chat, Discord...
Bob retired in 2016. Now its Tom and Chick.
As much as I recognize the improvements slack provide, I'm right there with you with 'oh look, *another* messaging platform that thinks they'll not have their lunch eaten by a cheaper alternative'.
Chat has never been a particularly healthy area for long term commercial viability.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Slack has emoji!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.