No, I also think it's massively overrated. I hate the interface, how I have to login and create accounts for each channel and so on. I'd rather just use discord tbh, but IRC is simplest.
What in earth is some glorified chat room software going to do with enough money to have an impact on a small country's economy? It's insane.
Someone argued elsewhere in the comments that IRC and such is inaccessible for normal users. Sure, but who are the people that are using slack? Definitely not normal users. I don't think slack will last only catering to developers and such, because for example discord has a massive user base of average janes and joes and I honestly can't see what slack offers that's better.
> I have to login and create accounts for each channel
No you don't. It's per "team". Assuming that's what you meant: how many teams do you honestly use? Sure, it's not ideal for a bunch of little communities. As you said, Discord is good for that.
For a business, I haven't seen anything that even compares with Slack. I'm not sure what you consider a "normal user" (I'd argue that there is no such thing). If you mean non-technical users, then there are plenty of non-technical users in a business that need to communicate. For most businesses, they outnumber the technical people and rely on good communication tools more.
For work, Discord would be terrible for me since I can't have more than one username (to my knowledge). I want to keep my personal chats/username/status separate from my work ones.
Different people need different solutions.
BTW I'm focusing in on the business use case as that seems to be who Slack targets. They are trying to sell to people that have used Skype and Lync (or whatever they are calling it this week) and hated it.
EDIT: also, building a decent chat app is a very difficult problem. I imagine they will use that money to maintain the various clients they have and try to keep adding communication features (as they have been doing).
>What in earth is some glorified chat room software going to do with enough money to have an impact on a small country's economy? It's insane.
Not when you consider who they are going to be competing with. Microsoft and Google will make their products essentially free as part of their Office Suites.
I don't use MSFT teams, but I've seen a demo and it looks far superior to Slack. I imagine they'll be using some of those funds to shore up feature parity with MSFT.
I wouldn't be too worried about Google. Hangouts and Chat are by far the worst products I've ever used. I can't think of a single piece of software I loathe more than Hangouts.
They're supposed to be significantly improving them both - we'll see. I think it would be hard for them to justify spending something like $10b for Slack when it doesn't help move the needle on competing with Facebook.
What in earth is some glorified chat room software going to do with enough money to have an impact on a small country's economy? It's insane.
Someone argued elsewhere in the comments that IRC and such is inaccessible for normal users. Sure, but who are the people that are using slack? Definitely not normal users. I don't think slack will last only catering to developers and such, because for example discord has a massive user base of average janes and joes and I honestly can't see what slack offers that's better.