I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change.
My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not.
What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack.
This is a bigger deal than you might think.
Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.
I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add.
We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet.
We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user?
I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important.
I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team.
Agree with the sentiment here. On top of this, something very important are integrations.
We use a lot of tools that send messages to dedicated Slack channels for notifications. CI failures, incidents, etcs. They use probably Slack API that you can replicate, but the integrations are native in other services ("Click to connect to Slack"). Without that, you are in a big disadvantage.
> Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.
Google chat doesn't allow you to change whether external members are allowed to join after creation of the channel, but if you enabled that you can add/remove them at any time.
I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Microsoft, and arguably the most sticky part of the MS cloud productivity stack. So it can’t be lost on Google how important it is to have something here.
Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just
A: making it better?
B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.
History of Google text/voice/video chat is frankly insane, they refuse to just have a product and develop it, instead every few years the new thing pops up and the old thing gets deprecated.
They should've been dominating the space for near 2 decades now. Instead they had Google Talk (that even worked over XMPP!) then replaced it with google hangouts, and then Google Chat.
Hangouts was a proprietary reimplementation, that had most of the features in an awkward way. Group chat in columns wasn't a great idea but was fine on mobile.
Duo/Chat was weird, separation of communication for no great benefit, and wasn't really any better than Hangouts. More like Hangouts that they had given to an intern to fix up, but forgot to tell them that it still needed to work with Hangouts.
Now we have Chat and Meet, Meet "replacing" Duo, while Duo is becoming Meet?
All I know is that after Hangouts finally was retired and replaced with Chat, they hid the chat tab in gmail, and required you to unhide it, and then appeared to disable notifications so I never knew when the last couple of people using it messaged me.
And don't forget Google Wave that did the whole "chat integrated with various multimedia elements" decade before the competition (and arguably, better, coz those could be interactive elements not previews of websites and embedded media)
For me, Wave was the most exciting thing Google ever tried. The requirements exceeded most corporate hardware, but the whole "email as a wiki page" struck me as the future. Replay the messages in order to follow the responses.
(there was a lot of other stuff going on in there too)
I am not going to lie but I joined Zulip for some project and I really enjoyed it.
Stoat (formerly Revolt) is great for single server (ie. no federation between multiple servers) and matrix/xmpp are good if you want the latter (ie federation)
Good to see some more options though but all the services I shared are open source. Not sure if this is open source.
I don't like to use closed source services (usually) because then I am still trusting trust but I am gonna be honest that Closed source services make more money at times so there is a trade-off for some businesses.
I don't think you can ignore mobile, particularly wrt notifications. I'm not sure if the app stores are as aggressive in restricting wrapped apps as they used to be.
I know the comments will be "ew" but as a short term solution, can you just make a native app that's a webview and enable the few app only things with custom injected APIs?
Offtopic (I don't know if they are LLM Or not , I don't want to respond to it because many people will already do it) but someone should study the significance of em-dashes because to me (and maybe you or others) its one of the most significant indicators (sometimes false) as well.
If someone ever used em-dashes before , what are you using now? (I don't use em-dashes but I am curious!) and did you guys ever change to purposeful linguistic errors to not look AI
I am thinking of going back to a , comma like this with spaces in both side intentionally because I used to make this mistake in the start and I had people genuinely fume over this grammar nitpick more times than I can count. But after I stopped it and got better at writing, I got called AI too (mfw when I am a human helloooo)
Just writing what's on my mind recently; I find it funny to change back to grammar mistakes because of AI .
(I made the errors in this post as well! I try to ship ideas fast lol & brain.exe not working after being tired right now :] )
> If someone ever used em-dashes before , what are you using now? (I don't use em-dashes but I am curious!) and did you guys ever change to purposeful linguistic errors to not look AI
I keep using them because I've been using them on Mac keyboards since forever (and on iOS keyboards). I don't use them while on Linux because I couldn't be bothered to learn how to type them yet :)
I will not give up my ways just because AI is taking over
> What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.
We are there as well. Most partners and clients use Windows. Most of them therefore had exchange and moved to the cloud. Most of them got 'Teams' for free in the package, chat and meetings.
Now we see a zoom link and go 'euuuuugh', yuck. hipster yuck.
Give me Teams
Upsides seem to be, its back to xmpp where we can communicate with anyone
I feel the same way when I get an email with a Teams link, but I think we're all just going to have to live with the idea that everyone is on different platforms.
This just goes to show how badly Microsoft (or other owners before) messed up with skype. They had an opportunity to own the entire thing.
Screw teams. I had a meeting on teams for the first time ever so I decided to use safari, my designated un touched browser on my mac, to use teams in order to maximize compatibility. The thing kept shutting off my webcam every two seconds. I’d turn it on then it would shut off two seconds later. We switched to zoom for the remainder of the meeting.
Google’s offering isn’t much better either. I tried the same thing, going with safari, tested my connection, all was well. Then came time to share screen. No go! Kept complaining I need to enable permissions in safari for hangout that were already enabled.
Can I download Teams without it also requiring Microsoft updaters and other stuff that insists on lurking in the background? Having a standalone MS app is fine, but I will never allow their updaters and background processes.
The Microsoft AutoUpdate tool is fully configurable so long as your organization doesn’t have any specific forced configurations.
You can uncheck automatically update and install.
You can decide whether or not to run the background service at all at the OS level.
This is a really strange hill to die on because your OS and other programs already have similar functionality, you are just saying no to Microsoft specifically. Chrome runs a background process to stay up to date, for example.
All I know is the other two browser major engines work a lot better in practice than WebKit.
I don’t really know or care as an end user if WebKit represents browser choice. The fact is they Apple isn’t putting enough effort in to making their browser engine “just work” with popular websites.
If it was a requirement in iOS and a default in macOS nobody would choose it by choice. It would be dead as a doornail if it competed in a free market.
In my experience a comparatively broke Mozilla Foundation makes a better browser experience than the most profitable consumer electronics company in the world. Apple needs to do better.
Because it’s not just Teams that’s broken, it’s a solid percentage of the websites I visit.
Apple can’t blame developers for their browser’s inconsistency.
Firefox has 1/10th of Apple’s market share and that browser is clearly more compatible with websites in my experience.
Whenever I have some kind of rendering issue or functionality glitch in Safari I switch to Firefox and it works fine.
Like, dear lord safari can’t even implement the back button normally. The behavior is terrible. It’s like you see a static screenshot of the precious page and everything is frozen for a second, and then if you’re lucky it unfreezes and at worst your scroll position gets messed up, or you’re unlucky and the entire page reloads.
I ran Teams calls in Firefox on Linux for years, it worked as well as Zoom, I'd say. Other integrations, like the online office files had some issues. Didn't do chats there, though, only the meetings.
All the cross tenant inconsistency really needs to be ironed out, I'm not sure if it's just my org but half the features of calls are randomly disabled or enabled based on who originated it.
My favorite was when I entered VR during our standup on our otherwise quite locked down and very corporate environment.
My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not.
What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.
Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.
I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add.
We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet.
We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user?
I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important.
I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team.
Notifications need to be solid as well.