I'm not a user of Slack (solo dev) so I guess I'm not the target audience for this. But I am I wrong in feeling that this comes off as completely lame?
To me it reads as weirdly premature desperation conveyed in a condescending tone.
Yeah, it's really weirdly passive-aggressive and lame. Condescending is a good way to describe it.
I use Slack in a small 5-person company and generally dislike it. The desktop app is horrible. Why does a chat app need 400MB of RAM anyway? It also doesn't let me customize the font—or really much of anything—not a dealbreaker, but a bit annoying. So basically I use Slack in a browser, which is at least usable. Entirely and easily replaceable though.
Slack = Dropbox. They don't own the stack. Their chat app is worthless to all the real companies, i.e., non-SV funny money (which btw is 99.9% of the world's purchasing power), who are living in msft or google products and don't want to click into some incompatible app they won't be able to rally others around because it's not recommended by IT.
i think it's funny their final point was "slack is here to stay".. as if their explosive growth over the last year - which involved many companies switching out their existing chat service for slack - could not be repeated next year to another destination.
I'll admit that i don't use slack...but it would have come across as more respectable if they hadn't injected a tad bit too much passive aggressiveness. I mean if this was written in the late 90's/early 2000s, perhaps I might have agreed with them. But have they seen what microsoft is up to? I mean, microsoft is working with linux...working. with. freakin. linux! Microsoft. with. linux! ;-)
