One of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. A company with the premier LLM, asking companies to outsource the platform running all
internal communications. What does OP think we are all doing here in business? This is the Ycombinator community edition of Rodney King's famous "Why can't we all just get along".
Seems like a fantastic idea of OpenAI other than, like, why would anybody else go along with it? It would be like giving all our emails to an ad company or something.
I'd like to speculate, with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw, that perhaps IRC could be the future of AI-enabled chat rooms?
> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success.
Not sure if the author has used Teams.
But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.
Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives
Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often.
Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.
The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...
My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions
The hot takes are from people that have haven't touched Teams in 6 years.
Like everything Microsoft it was shit for the first few years, they slowly sorted it out, and now it's fine. Most non-tech-bro businesses successfully run the majority of their comms through it.
The main problem now is that it works fine, and the project managers on Teams need to create work for themselves, so just mess around with stuff that wasn't broken.
It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).
We are being forced to dump slack for Teams. The only people who like Teams is Sales and Marketing for some reason. Not a single engineer likes this, and it will break every engineering convenience that exists on Slack.
I use teams at work and it's okay. Not the best, not the worst, but okay piece of software. At least I have both the calendar and the videocall things in one app and see when the call starts, so I don't accidentally ADHD myself into missing it.
Anything that accepts webhook integrations will be able to do this. I've got the Google calendar and meeting notifications on Slack, but it would be trivial to replicate with any two systems that have APIs available.
My company would never let me expose my calendar data to Slack. That's why they like M365, all the integration is there with less risk of oversharing data.
I used it for about a year with a small team. It worked well for what it does, but the functionality is definitely stripped down and barebones compared to Slack. I don't remember any performance or reliability issues.
It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom.
On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function.
For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics.
It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway.
All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
Teams developers are like that obese guy in the seat next to you on the airplane, just… spreading out into your personal space.
For example, Teams likes to control system-wide audio settings instead of acting like any other application. I had to disable the “allow applications to have dedicated hardware access” feature in my sound card driver to stop it screwing around with my settings. I’ve never had to do this for any other app.
It also likes to “edit” system controls like right-click menus on the task bar. This not only breaks muscle memory, but they also put in a gap so that if you move the mouse onto the menu… it closes.
I have this problem with Microsoft software in general lately. Last time I had the Office suite installed on a Mac, it was constantly popping up focus-stealing (literally and figuratively) notifications that it was updating PowerPoint or whatever, even when I didn’t have any Microsoft apps open.
I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.
Teams suffers from one giant problem. There is a totally odd, but understandable from tech debt perspective, segregation between “chats” and “teams” which makes it practically impossible to find everything. It’s a fatal flaw. Slack is beautifully simple and effective in comparison. Also, the reminder feature on slack is extremely useful to me personally and I miss it dearly in teams.
The fundamental design choice of Teams teams channels makes channels unusable vs Slack channels.
The chat part (outside channels) is OK. I've seen the metrics for our instance (10k users), the teams channel part is basically unused.
Does this matter?
Yes, I think so for a chat first culture.
Let me clear my cache after logging in twice to get the OOM fixed so I can finally login to show you what’s wrong with it over a teams call and hope it doesn’t logout and reload randomly during the call.
I guess I'm in the minority but I haven't noticed a significant variance in quality and features on any chat app I've used in the past 20 years. It seems like a thoroughly solved problem. Slack's "killer feature" was that they really streamlined onboarding which is feels neat the first time you do it. Otherwise, chat is chat. The biggest obstacle has always been getting everyone you need to talk to to agree on which platform to use.
Slack would be a lot better if they supported clients via rest api or similar. I want to run it in a terminal window alongside IRC etc. I have no desire to put up with their ridiculous UI/UX decisions
Make a Slack clone, but have it perform way better than the original (less RAM, CPU usage), with a smaller storage footprint.
Also deliver on features faster than the original. And have those features be more tailored to what the users both want and need - and things they didn’t even know they needed as well.
But it's so unreasonably slow. It lacks basic features like syntax highlighting on ``` blocks. It's basically become a super expensive and painful to use while Discord continues to be a joy.
And the 'start a thread' nazis are just too much to bear. Prediction: they will add subthreads within 3 years.
Social issues can't be solved by technical means. Just slightly incentivised in some direction (like discord's "this is the third reply, would you like a thread instead?")
But for the resource usage, ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ already proved you can have a capable client which is super light and fast if you care. This was made by a single person and in many ways is better than the official client.
> Slack has been on a slow rachet up in prices and has struggled to introduce compelling new AI features
I can think of a few reasons that Slack could be improved upon. But a lack of AI features is not on that list. Slack is effective for async communication between humans. We don't need AI features to accomplish that, and most AI would just be annoying slop. If you are using Slack for something else, maybe AI features would help those other uses, but you also might be stretching the cases for which Slack is a good thing.
There are already a ton of slack alternatives. Slack connect is the main thing that is blocking a lot of people from moving off slack, otherwise chat is a commodity.
The real issue isn't whether OpenAI could build a Slack competitor — it's whether they should fragment their focus even further. They're already stretching into search, image gen, video, agents, and an app store. Every great platform company eventually gets the itch to become everything, and that's usually when quality starts slipping on the core product.
We use Slack at work, and everyone we work with uses Slack, and we all work together with Slack Connect. I suspect if we moved to a competitor that’s pretty much the main impact we’d see, and it wouldn’t be good unless everyone else work with moved too. I think that network effect is probably the only meaningful differentiation in that space.
I'd rather it build docs. Or at least have a feature in chatgpt that lets you highlight something and start a comment thread, rather than a multi-page essay response as a continuation of the chat itself.
signal should just add better API / bot stuff and then we could all use that. there's no way OpenAI would be trustworthy for this; slack certainly isn't
What evidence is there that OpenAI will be more benevolent than Salesforce? Perhaps we shouldn’t give large corporations more opportunities for data mining.
It works in communities, not corporations. Every federation seems to die when enough millions are connected to it. Facebook used xmpp for chat. Google chat could federate too. Apple promised iMessage and then hid behind a silly excuse.
It's extremely against company interests to federate.
We used to have a local devs slack and any time someone came up with a random slash command one guy would add a new php script to power that command. I assume a lot of it is just an abandoned API that nobody cares about anymore because Microsoft forced Teams into Office so it took over corporate America in waves. I cant remember the last place I worked at that didnt just use Teams.
They almost have, you could wrangle group projects + group chats together pretty easily and you'd be close-ish. The claude cowork experience backed by google drive with the openai group projects and group chat would, imo, be a really awesome way to work!
Wait the two problems are apparently the price, and the reliability?
And you're asking a company famously burning money building a tool that is used for vibe-coding (aka unreliable software development) to build a replacement?
They'll just do what Anthropic does: let it Ralph Wiggum a pile of broken shit, and then say "wewwwww, doing pwogwamming is vewwy hawd, UwU >_<" when it won't build and fails at basic use cases that would be easy to test automatically
One of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. A company with the premier LLM, asking companies to outsource the platform running all internal communications. What does OP think we are all doing here in business? This is the Ycombinator community edition of Rodney King's famous "Why can't we all just get along".
Seems like a fantastic idea of OpenAI other than, like, why would anybody else go along with it? It would be like giving all our emails to an ad company or something.
I'd like to speculate, with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw, that perhaps IRC could be the future of AI-enabled chat rooms?
> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success.
Not sure if the author has used Teams.
But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.
Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives
Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often.
Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.
The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...
My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions
The hot takes are from people that have haven't touched Teams in 6 years.
Like everything Microsoft it was shit for the first few years, they slowly sorted it out, and now it's fine. Most non-tech-bro businesses successfully run the majority of their comms through it.
The main problem now is that it works fine, and the project managers on Teams need to create work for themselves, so just mess around with stuff that wasn't broken.
> That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions
You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.
It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).
> Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought
Yeah great for in person and email companies.
We are being forced to dump slack for Teams. The only people who like Teams is Sales and Marketing for some reason. Not a single engineer likes this, and it will break every engineering convenience that exists on Slack.
I use teams at work and it's okay. Not the best, not the worst, but okay piece of software. At least I have both the calendar and the videocall things in one app and see when the call starts, so I don't accidentally ADHD myself into missing it.
Anything that accepts webhook integrations will be able to do this. I've got the Google calendar and meeting notifications on Slack, but it would be trivial to replicate with any two systems that have APIs available.
My company would never let me expose my calendar data to Slack. That's why they like M365, all the integration is there with less risk of oversharing data.
Exactly, no on is truly overjoyed with Teams. As shovelware goes it is passable, but that is a low bar
> I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack
They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.
And it's worse than Teams
I used it for about a year with a small team. It worked well for what it does, but the functionality is definitely stripped down and barebones compared to Slack. I don't remember any performance or reliability issues.
It’s fine if you want a barebones chat.
Its a solid success if you squint just at the adoption numbers they achieved by cross selling it.
What issues do you have with teams?
It works well and there’s nothing I can think of that I want in it. It’s just a video and chat app.
It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom.
On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function.
For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics.
It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway.
All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
Teams developers are like that obese guy in the seat next to you on the airplane, just… spreading out into your personal space.
For example, Teams likes to control system-wide audio settings instead of acting like any other application. I had to disable the “allow applications to have dedicated hardware access” feature in my sound card driver to stop it screwing around with my settings. I’ve never had to do this for any other app.
It also likes to “edit” system controls like right-click menus on the task bar. This not only breaks muscle memory, but they also put in a gap so that if you move the mouse onto the menu… it closes.
I have this problem with Microsoft software in general lately. Last time I had the Office suite installed on a Mac, it was constantly popping up focus-stealing (literally and figuratively) notifications that it was updating PowerPoint or whatever, even when I didn’t have any Microsoft apps open.
I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.
Teams suffers from one giant problem. There is a totally odd, but understandable from tech debt perspective, segregation between “chats” and “teams” which makes it practically impossible to find everything. It’s a fatal flaw. Slack is beautifully simple and effective in comparison. Also, the reminder feature on slack is extremely useful to me personally and I miss it dearly in teams.
The fundamental design choice of Teams teams channels makes channels unusable vs Slack channels. The chat part (outside channels) is OK. I've seen the metrics for our instance (10k users), the teams channel part is basically unused.
Does this matter? Yes, I think so for a chat first culture.
Let me clear my cache after logging in twice to get the OOM fixed so I can finally login to show you what’s wrong with it over a teams call and hope it doesn’t logout and reload randomly during the call.
Yeah, I would be curious if there is anyone out there paying for Teams. Teams wins as Teams is free with your other Office stuff.
I guess I'm in the minority but I haven't noticed a significant variance in quality and features on any chat app I've used in the past 20 years. It seems like a thoroughly solved problem. Slack's "killer feature" was that they really streamlined onboarding which is feels neat the first time you do it. Otherwise, chat is chat. The biggest obstacle has always been getting everyone you need to talk to to agree on which platform to use.
Google gave us Wave - surely that's enough? /s
> OpenAI spends time and money building a slack competitor, because they've apparently run out of good ideas
> Slack uses AI to improve the existing product
> Slack is still marginally better, so businesses continue paying for it
> OpenAI now on the hook for maintaining one of many cheap slack clones
> Investors are left scratching their heads...
Late stage bubble behavior
I use Slack every day, and I love it. Integrations are simple and reliable, giving us useful information about critical things.
Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.
Slack would be a lot better if they supported clients via rest api or similar. I want to run it in a terminal window alongside IRC etc. I have no desire to put up with their ridiculous UI/UX decisions
> Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.
Yes, this is an important detail as well.
Make a Slack clone, but have it perform way better than the original (less RAM, CPU usage), with a smaller storage footprint.
Also deliver on features faster than the original. And have those features be more tailored to what the users both want and need - and things they didn’t even know they needed as well.
This is, after all, what’s being promised, no?
That's just the base footprint of an Electron-based app.
Which they do because it means they can ship the same thing in many places (actual browser, cross platform OS and mobile if they're lucky).
But it's so unreasonably slow. It lacks basic features like syntax highlighting on ``` blocks. It's basically become a super expensive and painful to use while Discord continues to be a joy.
And the 'start a thread' nazis are just too much to bear. Prediction: they will add subthreads within 3 years.
> And the 'start a thread' nazis
Social issues can't be solved by technical means. Just slightly incentivised in some direction (like discord's "this is the third reply, would you like a thread instead?")
But for the resource usage, ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ already proved you can have a capable client which is super light and fast if you care. This was made by a single person and in many ways is better than the official client.
Electron?
> Slack has been on a slow rachet up in prices and has struggled to introduce compelling new AI features
I can think of a few reasons that Slack could be improved upon. But a lack of AI features is not on that list. Slack is effective for async communication between humans. We don't need AI features to accomplish that, and most AI would just be annoying slop. If you are using Slack for something else, maybe AI features would help those other uses, but you also might be stretching the cases for which Slack is a good thing.
There are already a ton of slack alternatives. Slack connect is the main thing that is blocking a lot of people from moving off slack, otherwise chat is a commodity.
Agreed. Every productivity software and their mother has chat.
Does anyone use Mattermost? I remember thinking it wasn't too bad, and I guess it's open source.
I mentioned them last week and per the comments I got, not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901946
There's the mostlymatter fork which restores the proper oss behaviour https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter
Funny, didn’t even mention using the massive amount of compute available to them to build it!
A prompt ran through a Wiggum loop over the course of a week/month and viola
The real issue isn't whether OpenAI could build a Slack competitor — it's whether they should fragment their focus even further. They're already stretching into search, image gen, video, agents, and an app store. Every great platform company eventually gets the itch to become everything, and that's usually when quality starts slipping on the core product.
We use Slack at work, and everyone we work with uses Slack, and we all work together with Slack Connect. I suspect if we moved to a competitor that’s pretty much the main impact we’d see, and it wouldn’t be good unless everyone else work with moved too. I think that network effect is probably the only meaningful differentiation in that space.
I'd rather it build docs. Or at least have a feature in chatgpt that lets you highlight something and start a comment thread, rather than a multi-page essay response as a continuation of the chat itself.
signal should just add better API / bot stuff and then we could all use that. there's no way OpenAI would be trustworthy for this; slack certainly isn't
What evidence is there that OpenAI will be more benevolent than Salesforce? Perhaps we shouldn’t give large corporations more opportunities for data mining.
Why not ask for a federated slack?
for the same reason why not a federated <insert-the-tool-you-would-love-to-see-federated-here>
and, why is that?
It works in communities, not corporations. Every federation seems to die when enough millions are connected to it. Facebook used xmpp for chat. Google chat could federate too. Apple promised iMessage and then hid behind a silly excuse.
It's extremely against company interests to federate.
My personal experience with using Slack as just a in-company chat app has been fine. I enjoy using Slack more than Teams or Discord.
All their integrations kinda suck though, and its not uncommon for integrations to randomly break with no discernible changes elsewhere.
We used to have a local devs slack and any time someone came up with a random slash command one guy would add a new php script to power that command. I assume a lot of it is just an abandoned API that nobody cares about anymore because Microsoft forced Teams into Office so it took over corporate America in waves. I cant remember the last place I worked at that didnt just use Teams.
Speaking of php slack was built with php until they followed Facebook with Hack (which is essentially a modern flavor of php)
I hate how Slack has no syntax highlighting for code blocks. Even Discord has it.
They almost have, you could wrangle group projects + group chats together pretty easily and you'd be close-ish. The claude cowork experience backed by google drive with the openai group projects and group chat would, imo, be a really awesome way to work!
Wait the two problems are apparently the price, and the reliability?
And you're asking a company famously burning money building a tool that is used for vibe-coding (aka unreliable software development) to build a replacement?
Idk man.
Slack's software quality has been in absolute freefall over the past couple of months.
Is it me or does the article mix characters with different fonts weights through the text?
I hate Slack. Total information overload. I’d prefer a tool that encourages people to think more before hitting send.
I for one would love this - if it’s done well - except that it would presumably be locked in to OpenAI agents
OT latent space podcast is great, most recently interview with jeff dean. Worth a listen
> Developers routinely complain about Slack’s API costs and permissions
What? What API costs is the op talking about?
They'll just do what Anthropic does: let it Ralph Wiggum a pile of broken shit, and then say "wewwwww, doing pwogwamming is vewwy hawd, UwU >_<" when it won't build and fails at basic use cases that would be easy to test automatically
If AI is soo productive why do they even sell it and don't hoard it for themselves to build a competing offer to everything ?
No one is claiming that level of productivity.