[HN Gopher] Slack wanted to stay independent, but was unable to ...
___________________________________________________________________
Slack wanted to stay independent, but was unable to compete with
tech giants
Author : curiousigor
Score : 130 points
Date : 2020-12-11 11:07 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastcompany.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastcompany.com)
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _As Matt Stoller notes in his newsletter "BIG", Microsoft has a
| track record of giving "away its new product for no or low cost
| to existing clients, and [bundling] it with existing product
| lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity
| would be illegal."_
|
| That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor
| Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist --
| you'd be forced to buy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all
| separately.
|
| Or by the same logic, an OS shouldn't be allowed to have any
| applications at all -- not even a calculator app, because that
| would be anticompetitive against other calculator apps.
|
| In what universe should Microsoft not be allowed to add a chat
| component to their office productivity suite? When that's clearly
| an essential component of such suites these days? Sheesh.
|
| Slack has had an amazing outcome. And awesome products,
| historically, tend to be absorbed by large corporations simply
| because it's more efficient and therefore profitable for everyone
| involved. There's nothing wrong with that.
| the8472 wrote:
| > you'd be forced to buy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all
| separately.
|
| You can already do just that. What's the problem with that?
| mrkurt wrote:
| The purpose of antitrust laws is to limit how much damage
| powerful companies can do.
|
| So yes, if we had functional antitrust laws in the US,
| Microsoft may not be allowed to do certain things. Like bundle
| a Slack competitor with an existing product.
|
| The universe where this should happen is one where we recognize
| that a healthy capitalistic society is good, and putting
| constraints on concentrated power helps keep things healthy.
|
| The real question behind all this is: are we as a society
| better or worse off now that Salesforce owns Slack?
| lefrenchy wrote:
| > That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office
| (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to
| exist
|
| It's not that they should not be allowed to exist. Rather, they
| should not be able to undercut competitors by using their
| leverage as massive tech companies to subsidize losing money on
| something while they starve out competitors. Stoller's article
| has much more nuance than you are attributing, and he outlines
| that in a world where these tech corporations were not allowed
| to get as big and powerful, you wouldn't have to be left with
| binary decisions like this one.
|
| This sort of behavior is akin to Amazon selling items at a loss
| in order to starve out some competitor and then buying them out
| afterwards in order to benefit from their infrastructure and
| logistics.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I read his article, and unfortunately his nuance essentially
| comes down to:
|
| > _The loss of an independent Slack is sad, because Slack's
| strategy wasn't just a standard attempt to gain market power.
| As a company, Slack's team thought carefully about product
| design, and that care showed._
|
| That's not an economic argument, it's an aesthetic one.
|
| The fact is, it's natural in many industries to coalesce
| around 2-3 major competitors. And as we can see, that's
| exactly what's happening here. Slack isn't being snuffed out.
| It's living on as part of one of the ~3 major players in the
| space, which is a natural and desirable outcome for consumers
| who _want_ simple bundled all-in-one solutions.
|
| And Microsoft hasn't been "losing money" by including chat
| functionality in Office -- what you're describing is
| predatory pricing which is simply not the case here. Office
| is an expensive product that companies pay tons of $$$ for.
| sjy wrote:
| How is it "natural" for many industries to coalesce into
| oligopoly? This requires a legal system with strong
| property rights for corporations and lax competition law
| enforcement. These conditions have not always existed. You
| can argue that the status quo is welfare-optimising, but I
| don't see what's natural about it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Coalescing into 2-3 major competitors is natural in the
| sense that consumers can't, and don't want to, keep track
| of 10 or 20 different choices. It's just too much. It's
| the paradox of choice.
|
| There's nothing inherently wrong with "oligopolies"
| except when they collude together to raise prices, and
| competition is weak. But that's obviously not the case in
| office productivity software -- competition and
| innovation are intense, and there's zero evidence of
| price-gouging whatsoever.
| [deleted]
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| The dark reality is NOT that people can't compete against
| monolithic companies.
|
| It is that companies have tens of billions of dollars they can
| spend to acquire companies that are hundred-million-plus net-
| losers.
|
| That lump sum of acquisition money could have been spent in
| significantly more meaningful ways.
| esja wrote:
| It's classic malinvestment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinvestment
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I wish there were more well run 501.3c open source initiatives
| that relied on major donations from organizations wanting to
| diversify their risk to being forever beholden to major software
| providers.
|
| E.g. if an O365 subscription costs your organization $10MM per
| year, why not donate $100k per year (along with 10 of your peers)
| to a group writing open source bare bones versions that handle
| 90% of your employee needs.
|
| The world would seem to benefit in this model...
| Zhyl wrote:
| Ah, the Valve Proton model!
| marcinzm wrote:
| As the saying goes "If you owe the bank $100 that's your
| problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's
| problem."
|
| An organization that pays $10MM per year has a lot of leverage
| and likely has long term contracts to hedge risk. So why,
| basically, waste $100k?
| save_ferris wrote:
| The adage "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM" rings true here.
| Management at companies that pay $10MM per year on O365 don't
| see Office as a risk, they see it as foundational to their
| work. For that amount, they're probably also getting special
| deals from Microsoft to further integrate into their ecosystem
| and are constantly sold on all of the features that Microsoft
| products provide.
| varispeed wrote:
| Companies should not be allowed to buy other companies unless it
| is absolutely essential. This is a flaw in capitalism that
| creates duopolies and hurts consumers. We then get companies that
| are too big to fail, can afford creative accounting and plethora
| of other not so nice things, like lobbying government to change
| legislation in favour of them. We also need a rule that once
| company goes over a certain threshold it should be split. I don't
| think we have ever experienced something like this before that's
| why there is no regulation and we can see from our experience
| that companies do not behave nice, so we need a law that forces
| them to behave.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Eliminating market advantages for incumbents and wealthy seems to
| me to be obviously in society's interest: It creates a more
| competitive marketplace for consumers, reducing prices and
| increasing innovation, it creates more opportunity for
| innovators, and it's fundamentally more fair - a meritocracy. I
| think it should be aggressively pursued, but very carefully - we
| don't want replace one distortion and unfair system with another.
|
| Painting my impressions with a very broad brush: It seems that
| capitalism was formerly sold to the public as good for society:
| It provided economic growth, opportunity, and fairness. Those
| were the goals, and where there were market failures (such as
| monopolies or prejudice), society would step in and correct it,
| to further those goals. Now capitalism itself seems to be the
| goal, the religion, the ideology. It serves no higher purpose -
| the highest purpose effectively becomes the capitalists. If
| society steps in, it's rejected as a perversion of capitalism.
| Finnucane wrote:
| "Our free market trades on the assumption that good, innovative
| products will prevail over less effective ones released by
| entrenched firms like Microsoft."
|
| Wait, what? When did that start happening?
| giglamesh wrote:
| Trading on the assumption does not require the assumption to be
| actually true.
| floydnoel wrote:
| Who even makes that assumption. Not economists afaik
| ogre_codes wrote:
| With the current tech atmosphere, so many people want to call
| Facebook, Google, and Apple monopolies and Microsoft sort of gets
| forgotten. Microsoft still has a ton of levers they can pull to
| influence buyers.
|
| Microsoft has the ability to include teams as part of a bigger
| integrated bundle which businesses find more appealing.
| treis wrote:
| I think this is overblown. Slack was perfectly capable of
| remaining a stand alone company. They just wouldn't have been
| worth ~30 billion.
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| Yeah, it is actually weird how these stories are getting
| written. By any sensible standard slack was insane success.
| Most founders dream about reaching market value of 1bln. Of
| course it would be cool to be worth 30bln and have control as
| well, but tbh many founders are insanely happy if they can get
| exit even for 30mln.
| exogeny wrote:
| You're missing the point. The outcomes and upside are
| irrelevant, what is relevant is that Microsoft's only strategy
| to attack was to give it away for free and bundle it, creating
| a profoundly unfair (and illegal) advantage that continues the
| trend of consolidating power and reducing choice.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Whenever I build the next feature on my roadmap, have I now
| bundled and given away for free something that could have
| been a standalone company? Is there a bright line where it
| flips from incremental feature additions to anticompetitive
| behavior?
| philg_jr wrote:
| Free? Office365 isn't exactly free. Its arguably the
| new/better (subjective, I guess, both kinda suck) version of
| Skype for Business.
|
| Slack is actually free to use (last I checked), if you don't
| care about the chat history.
| maigret wrote:
| If an electricity company would offer a TV to each customer
| without any surcharge, then yes that'd be free, because
| customers are paying the same for less before. So, while I
| get your point, we are near unfair use of a monopoly
| situation here. Such a thing is good first for consumers,
| but once the companies own the monopoly, they own the
| pricing and can charge more than the former competitor used
| to, while customers becomes slave of one single monopolist.
| JanisL wrote:
| Even if you pay the chat history is a massive pain in the
| ass to get out of the system, something that was a deal
| breaker for me when I was running a business.
| formercoder wrote:
| Predatory pricing is a component of anti trust but a very
| difficult one to prove legally. One must prove that by giving
| consumers a cheaper product they are being harmed. It's an
| interesting conundrum.
| orf wrote:
| But it's not that they just gave consumers a cheaper
| product - they used their dominance in a specific market to
| gain dominance in another. It's the same thing as bundling
| Internet Explorer with Windows.
| nodamage wrote:
| Bundling IE with Windows was never actually ruled to be
| illegal. The appeals court overturned the district
| court's initial ruling and remanded it for further
| analysis, but the case was ultimately settled before any
| ruling could be made.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Also, from the 2020 perspective Microsoft seems to have
| been right that the browser is an important operating
| system feature/component and may have simply been ahead
| of the curve in realizing it. (Today's mobile OSes all
| make the case that it should be a tightly OS managed
| component. Most consumers today would be extremely
| confused if an OS didn't include a browser at all;
| whether or not they primarily use that browser to install
| a more preferred browser.) It's easy in 2020 to wonder if
| the Microsoft anti-trust effort delayed innovations like
| PWA standards and got in the way of people thinking to
| build earlier cross-platform, lighter weight HTML "app
| frameworks" than what we are seeing in this timeline with
| Electron.
| megablast wrote:
| There is 0 reason why help and file browsing needs to be
| part of a browser. MS forced IE deep into the OS, when
| firefox and chrome, two incredibly successful and popular
| browsers do not need this at all, and are better for it.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Base FTP/Gopher/WebDAV "file browsing" was at the time
| definitely seen as a common browser feature. It was much
| lamented when Firefox dropped those features and left
| them to be plugins/external applications.
|
| Most "help" is just webpages or ebooks today. All
| Microsoft did with "HTML Help" was essentially a very
| early version of EPUB.
|
| I think these are very strange things to complain about.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Or consider Chrome OS, which is not much else beyond a
| browser.
| toyg wrote:
| It's hard to argue chat is a different market from
| office. IBM sold Lotus Notes with integrated IM
| (Sametime, iirc) 15 years ago.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Except that in this particular case the aren't
| "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of
| (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an
| (enterprise) Productivity app.
|
| We also know that from a technical perspective Teams
| actually was a "cheaper product" because it was built on
| the backs of other existing parts of Office 365. It
| shares a ton of backend with SharePoint and it swallowed
| up Skype for Business/Lync. Both key products of the
| "bundle" before Microsoft decided on a need to compete
| with Slack.
| Teckla wrote:
| _Except that in this particular case the aren 't
| "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of
| (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an
| (enterprise) Productivity app._
|
| You can expand the definition of "(enterprise)
| Productivity Apps" ad infinitum.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Perhaps, but in this specific case:
|
| 1. Slack from a very early point in their pivot away from
| games branded themselves as an Enterprise Productivity
| app and made comparisons to Enterprise Email tools.
|
| 2. Microsoft's inclusion of Skype for Business/Lync (and
| to another extent Outlook, especially given Slack's own
| email-competitive marketing) for years prior to
| Slack/Teams implies that Chat/Communications has a long
| history of being considered an Enterprise Productivity
| App.
| ska wrote:
| > You can expand the definition of "(enterprise)
| Productivity Apps" ad infinitum.
|
| Perhaps, but in the case of Teams you don't even have to
| stretch.
| treis wrote:
| Bundling is a legitimate market strategy and not inherently
| anti-competitive. So long as the overall package is not sold
| at a loss I don't think there's an issue.
|
| There's room for independent apps in the face of a bundled
| solution. By focusing on one thing you can do it better and
| cheaper than the packaged solution. And indeed Slack, at
| least to many, was worth the extra money.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Slack was perfectly capable of remaining a stand alone
| company._
|
| It's possible that Slack's company insiders (founders,
| C-executives, investment bank advisors, etc) ... all concluded
| that continuing to compete as an independent company had a more
| risky outcome:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+not+profitable
|
| In other words, let's give the benefit of the doubt and assume
| all those folks above are above-average intelligent and can use
| Excel spreadsheets to model user growth, revenue growth,
| expenses, new products in the pipeline, "what-if" scenarios,
| etc.
|
| Also found a recent related HN thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422092
|
| EDIT REPLY to _> "It seems like you stopped reading before my
| last sentence."_
|
| Yes, I read that but a healthy business needs to be an _ongoing
| concern_ and _profitability_ is part of financial health. E.g.
| Blockbuster Video went from having a market cap worth billions
| to being worth _nothing_ because of competition from Netflix.
| Blockbuster went from being profitable to _losing money_. In
| one way, Slack is even worse than Blockbuster as it has yet to
| turn a profit.
|
| Setting your snark aside, what justifies your confidence about
| Slack's possible independent future more than the company's
| insiders who have _all the internal metrics and private
| financial data_ to analyze?
| count wrote:
| https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-think-netflix-
| kill...
|
| Heh, ironically, Blockbuster was almost never profitable
| either :)
| treis wrote:
| It seems like you stopped reading before my last sentence.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Slack has some pretty weird blind spots as a business, too,
| like that one where all your hundreds or tens-of-thousands of
| employees must be part of the same general chat channel, where
| anyone can ping the entire company.
| iscrewyou wrote:
| Nobody has engineered a checkbox to disable that yet?
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| They've been spending their their effort giving you their
| third version of a message-composition "block API" that
| still doesn't-quite-work as documented.
| dalyons wrote:
| They have and it's been an option for years now. (Disabling
| posting in #general)
| RKearney wrote:
| > where anyone can ping the entire company.
|
| It takes 5 seconds to change the permissions on that channel
| to restrict posting to admins only. We figured that out a few
| hours after rolling Slack out to a small subset of users to
| test.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Is it so weird? Surely #general must be a holdover from IRC
| or some other pre-Slack messenger.
| hpoe wrote:
| So theres an interesting concept in the bible that I have thought
| about more and more that seems like it would help the problem of
| concentration of power and large firms.
|
| In the Old Testament God commanded the israelites that every 7th
| 7th year (or every 49 years basically) was to be a year of
| jubilee. Included among the instructions for the year of jubilee
| was the requirement that all debts be forgiven and all land
| revert to it's ancestral owners. Basically the financial system
| gets reset every 49 years.
|
| It seems to me that there are great things that can be done when
| a business has the right resources but at a certain point
| business stop competing and start regulating or burying their
| competition out of existance. Now of course we can't due it
| exactly how the bible outlines things but I've been increasingly
| interested in the idea of a regular societal reset on a half a
| century or so basis. This creates enough time for large firms to
| grow innovation to happen and wealth creation to happen. Whilst
| at the same time it prevents eternal dominance by a handful or
| large players .
|
| What would y'all think of a societal reset?
| [deleted]
| giglamesh wrote:
| https://www.weforum.org/great-reset - not based on jubilee, but
| rather seeing covid-19 as an opportunity to fix some of the
| problems which the pandemic is bringing to (more) light.
| munificent wrote:
| I don't know about a complete _societal_ reset, but I sure
| would be interested in a _corporate_ reset.
|
| Forest fires are good for forests over the long term. They
| remove large old trees that are full of rot, dead wood, and
| parasites. Those old giants aren't using the sun's light and
| other resources efficiently, but they block too much light for
| smaller trees in the understory to grow tall enough to compete.
| A forest fire clears those out, returns the nutrients in them
| to the soil, and provides a level playing field for smaller
| trees to grow and compete.
|
| I wouldn't go full Fight Club Project Mayhem, but I'd love
| something like a cleansing fire that periodically breaks up or
| disbands all corporations above a certain size.
| mikem170 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're thinking of when you say a "societal
| reset". I've heard of this as debt forgiveness. No other
| property is interfered with. I believe it acts as a limit on
| how carried away, or long term entrenched, a society can get
| with debt.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| What makes you think the forest fire metaphor is applicable?
| Seems like a "firebombing Dresden" metaphor could just as
| easily apply.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...corporate reset...
|
| You read my mind: this is exactly what is needed! I could not
| think of the right phrasing (because i, too, agree that a
| societal reset might not be the right thing here)...and the
| forest fire cleansing is an apt metaphor here. So thanks for
| sharing this thought!
| seattletech wrote:
| I am fairly certain that corporate charters were originally
| time-limited.
| matmatmatmat wrote:
| Except this is not what happens at all. Older, larger trees
| tend to have thicker bark, which lets them survive the fires,
| while clearing out the understory and ground level.
|
| Forest fires reset competition at the ground level while
| mostly maintaining the status quo for large, established
| trees.
| JanisL wrote:
| This is exactly the sort of dynamic that would happen in
| many economic "resets" and is a huge part of the reason why
| the ultra wealthy aren't as concerned by such resets as
| many people assume
| kansface wrote:
| I wonder what that did to financial transactions in the 48th
| year?
| novia wrote:
| After thinking about this idea for a while, it occurred to me:
| couldn't the same thing be accomplished by banning inheritance?
| Debts are already forgiven upon death. The average human life
| isn't that much longer than 50 years, and the resets would be
| happening continuously.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Debts are already forgiven upon death_
|
| The dead person's estate is responsible for paying back
| creditors, even if that means liquidating the estate to do
| so.
| csomar wrote:
| > Debts are already forgiven upon death.
|
| Not quite. You should have life insurance and something the
| bank can seize to be able to get financing. So even if you
| die the bank can recover some of the principal. You can also
| file Chapter 11; that's actually a reset.
| agarden wrote:
| This is an entirely different idea. Banning inheritance makes
| corporations even more powerful, as they can increase their
| wealth from one generation to another and families cannot.
| hnracer wrote:
| I wonder if this would massively increase conspicuous and
| frivolous consumption. Some may go the direction of Bill
| Gates, but others may not be so benevolent. At least when
| wealth is conserved in the family unit it's mostly passively
| invested in the economy as capital supply.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Yes, estate taxes are progressive taxes. See Bernie Sanders'
| proposal:
|
| https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-
| business/a-pr....
| briefcomment wrote:
| What about just limiting inheritance to, say, 500k per child?
| kansface wrote:
| Off the top of my head, what happens to any farm, family
| business, or house in California?
| briefcomment wrote:
| Not sure. Maybe a policy like this stops crazy property
| inflation? And limits farm sizes? Meaning, local
| agriculture flourishes?
|
| I think it's better for people to stop working when they
| get pretty rich, like $20mil. People should stop working
| when they get rich enough to pay for an awesome life, and
| give someone else the chance. And if they actually enjoy
| working, they can do it pro bono.
|
| I do not trust the uber rich to mind their own business
| and stay out of other people's lives.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Accruement of those levels of wealth is usually the
| result of ownership, and not labor.
| hnracer wrote:
| This view comes from the largely flawed assumption that
| making money is a zero or negative sum endeavour. In some
| cases it is but in many it's not. Whatever you think of
| his character, if Musk just threw in the towel at PayPal
| we wouldn't have SpaceX. I can say the same thing for
| Jobs, eg if he gave up after Next where would Apple be.
|
| Making money is generally a positive sum endeavour as
| long as you're not generating unpriced externalities such
| as carbon pollution, and as such I don't like the idea
| that rich people stop working after they're rich. As long
| as they're not creating externalities we want them to
| continue building and contributing to society. It's a
| much better alternative to them relaxing on a yacht
| somewhere, which contributes nothing.
|
| It's also inaccurate to think that making money by
| building crowds out other people from doing so. The
| opposite is the case. It's the same mindset behind the
| "immigrants took our jobs" train of thinking.
| briefcomment wrote:
| People can work as much as they want. They just don't get
| paid after $20mil.
|
| I'm not worried about making money being zero sum. I'm
| worried about uber rich people doing uncalled for things
| with too much money. No one should have that kind of
| power.
| hnracer wrote:
| I think we'll find a lot of the people who are currently
| uber rich would've either stopped working at $20 million
| (which would've been a big loss to the economy and
| society at large), or they would've gone to another
| country (as we see in countries with a wealth tax in EU -
| also a big loss). Money continues to be a motive even for
| those with enough to satisfy every need, because it
| becomes a marker of status, achievement, etc. If you
| remove that motive then you remove the output of some of
| our best minds.
|
| You'll certainly remove their clout over society but I
| think you also need to consider the significant downsides
| to this proposal. Maybe you would be better off finding
| ways to limit the power of rich people over society (eg
| political contribution laws) instead of trying to ban
| being rich?
| JanisL wrote:
| Any fixed amount only makes sense in a world with sound
| money, otherwise inflation or deflation will make the fixed
| number shift over time. Unfortunately because of these
| pernicious "inflation targets" with monetary and fiscal
| policy being popular the purchasing power of currency isn't
| even being attempted to be held stable in many parts of the
| world at the moment.
| nostromo wrote:
| Is it necessary though? The biggest American companies 50 years
| ago:
|
| 1. IBM
|
| 2. AT&T
|
| 3. Kodak
|
| 4. GM
|
| 5. Standard Oil of NJ
|
| 6. Texaco
|
| 7. Sears
|
| 8. GE
|
| 9. Polariod
|
| 10. Gulf Oil
|
| Not a single one of these companies is in the top 10 today.
| (Edit: correction, one is: Exxon.) Many of the current top 10
| didn't exist at all 50 years ago. Thankfully our economy seems
| to be dynamic enough that companies must continue to compete or
| lose marketshare organically.
| triceratops wrote:
| I don't know what these are "biggest" by (revenue? market
| cap?). If it's revenue, AT&T and Standard Oil of NJ (now
| ExxonMobil) are still in the top 10. Gulf Oil and Texaco
| (both now Chevron) are both in the top 15.[1] So 40% of that
| group is still around and quite successful.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in
| _t...
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| I'd wager there were bigger societal changes between now and
| 50 years ago then there were in the 50-100 range. Do you have
| a list of top 1920 companies and if so, how does it compare
| to the above list (presumably 1970)?
| sjy wrote:
| 50 years ago the two top companies in that list had just
| started defending expensive and long-running antitrust cases.
| IBM changed its behaviour to settle these cases, transforming
| the computer industry, and in AT&T's case the litigation led
| directly to the breakup of the company. These companies
| didn't lose market share "organically."
| mikem170 wrote:
| The idea of a debt jubilee does not wipe out corporations, it
| wipes out current outstanding debts only. The idea would be
| that nobody would loan corporations so much money that they
| wouldn't be able to pay it back before the debt is wiped out.
|
| Something like that could counter a lot of financial games
| that are played to the detriment of so many, which is why
| some societies had things like dept jubilees.
| hnracer wrote:
| Wouldn't this just translate into higher interest rates, to
| make the supply of debt financially worthwhile for the
| lender?
|
| We can see this market mechanism play out in the corporate
| lending market where companies with high credit risk must
| pay double or more interest rates. A debt jubilee would
| simply raise the default risk on all of society and thus
| increase rates to compensate.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I kind of like the idea, in principle. But in practice...
|
| Let's say you wipe out debts. And let's say that my pension was
| invested in those debts. That's going to be a bit problematic.
|
| Let's say you reset companies. Including, say, Intel and AMD.
| The CPU monopoly is wiped out. Oh, yeah, and Microsoft. But
| next month I want to buy a computer. Can anybody make me an x86
| chip? Can I get Windows, assuming that I want it? Or do I have
| to run Linux on a public-domain chip?
|
| It's not going to be easy to maintain continuity of supply
| while shaking up firms that dominate important markets.
| golemiprague wrote:
| The bible was talking specifically about land because it is a
| limited resource, especially for Israelis who are commended to
| be confined to the limited area of the land of Israel.
|
| Other types of ownership are not resetting, partly because
| someone having a corporate doesn't prevent other from creating
| one and partly because it is a much more dynamic market, if you
| check you will see that the corporate landscape changes
| immensely every 50 years anyways.
|
| Another way to look at it is that land is not sold, only rented
| for 50 years, but this can't be done with a corporate because
| corporate is not rented in the first place, in many cases it is
| just created out of nothing.
| mikem170 wrote:
| There are other and more recent precedents for this - all debt
| periodically being forgiven. Graeber mentions this in is book
| "Debt: The First 5000 Years". Everybody knows it is coming, so
| the market works around it. I imagine it acts as a check on
| inflation via too many financial games.
| brundolf wrote:
| I feel like the US has a similar (if incidental) cycle around
| antitrust. When the market is humming along regulators turn a
| blind eye, the public doesn't really care, etc. Over time the
| big companies get bigger and bigger, eating more and more
| smaller companies, until a breaking point is reached and
| suddenly everyone cares again and we have major action taken.
| Then the cycle starts again.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| So you're born 15 years into the reset.
|
| When you're 18, you're about halfway through. If you work hard
| for 10 years to accumulate wealth, add value, whatever, by the
| time you're ~40, it's about to all get taken away. What's the
| point?
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| How about banning debt? People live according to their means?
|
| No debt. Just gifts or charity.
| JanisL wrote:
| Currently we have a debt based monetary system, so banning
| debt means we would need an entirely different monetary
| system. This might be worth doing but there's a lot of
| challenges, specifically debt in some small amounts allows
| flexibility and options that don't exist otherwise. Some
| other mechanism to fund future work would need to be created
| to fill that gap.
| satyrnein wrote:
| No mortgages, just pay rent to the landowning class forever?
| erentz wrote:
| This would make huge waves of distortions around these events.
| Who is going to be able to get a 30 year mortgage to buy a
| house if the debt reset is in 15 years? Now only people who can
| afford 15 year mortgages. As you get closer it gets worse. Then
| it all resets after.
|
| I think the problems you're trying to address with this need to
| be addressed in a more fundamental and continuous way.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > all land revert to it's ancestral owners
|
| Because those who's great great great great great grandfather
| did well out of knowing Henry 8th don't already get enough
| headstart in life?
|
| Land shouldn't be owned by the people, with rent paid yearly to
| the people based on its unimproved value.
| lostcolony wrote:
| So there are some noted problems with doing so. Namely, reset
| starting -when-? At a time of large scale inequality? I.e.,
| millionaire owners of much of NY get locked in as owners for
| all future generations, and are unable to sell the land, only
| lease it? Does that lack of salability reduce their economic
| power sufficiently?
|
| Likewise individuals; for anyone who doesn't own land at the
| start of the system, is there a path to land ownership?
| hpoe wrote:
| Well to be clear I'm not saying we should just take what is
| directly in the bible and lift and shift it, there would
| obviously be substantial differences between the
| implementation now and then. As for the when I would say a
| regular calander cycle, every 50 years or so. Again this is
| more of the kernel of an idea than a fleshed out plan.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| There's a reason this is just the kernel of an idea. It's
| because any possible plan you make off it will very quickly
| make its manifest unfairness obvious.
|
| We aren't living in ancient times, and the distribution of
| wealth and debt in the world isn't what it used to be. Debt
| isn't "our crop failed and my family is going to starve
| this year" anymore.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Sure, but those questions have to be answered. Is there a
| system that guarantees people can own something? Is there a
| system that prevents it from being inherited? Else you
| prevent wealth generation for anyone coming to the country
| anew.
|
| I agree that a reset on the extravagantly wealthy is
| needed...but that can also just take the form of, say, a
| wealth tax, without also raising questions on how new
| people enter the system fairly.
| mikem170 wrote:
| It can reset on a schedule. Everybody knows it's coming. It
| ensures that debt's don't grow so much that they warp other
| aspects of the economy. I believe it was done in the past to
| avoid the large scale virtual enslavement of the poor via
| debt. It was meant to be a relief valve of sorts.
| hnracer wrote:
| Interest rates would skyrocket because the default risk of
| lendees just went up a lot. I'm not a fan of this idea, the
| debt market will figure out a way to be compensated all the
| same (or else refuse to provision debt, which is also a bad
| outcome).
| loehnsberg wrote:
| Me and my team use both, Slack and Teams, but only because
| Slack's video call feature is really poor compared to its
| competitor(s). I never really quite got why Slack dev was not
| able to at least close the gap to Teams in this area. The video
| call feature is still buggy and lacks important features, such as
| inviting externals (by calendar invite) or sharing screen AND
| video, not to mention a whiteboard. If Slack had been a bit more
| ambitious in this respect, Teams would never have been an option.
| staplers wrote:
| It's really beyond me how bad Slack's video feature is. If it
| worked well, most companies could leave behind Zoom.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| I can vouch that delivering quality, scaled, enterprise video
| conferencing is a much bigger technical challenge than it seems
| after, say, a weekend or two hacking with WebRTC in a hobby
| capacity. It combines the challenge of supporting a huge
| landscape of differing hardware devices with that of supporting
| a huge landscape of differing network environments. There's a
| near-infinite combination of corner cases that can cause
| problems and handling them poorly creates the impression of
| severe instability for the users who experience them. The
| nature of video conferencing/collaboration software means if 1
| user's environment makes the experience unusable, the value for
| everyone who needs to collaborate with them is also seriously
| hampered.
|
| That said, when we started dogfooding our own conferencing
| product it was partly because Slack consistently had issues
| dropping calls after 5-10m of group video. I'm kind of
| surprised to read such similar complaints 18 months+ on.
| Presumably it's harder to solve those problems at mass market
| global scales, we're pretty vertical specific.
| borroka wrote:
| Don't forget the thousands/(millions) of companies who have
| enterprise contract for Office 365 and for which Teams comes
| for "free". Like the company I work for of hundreds of
| thousands of employees.
| agapon wrote:
| IMHO, we all want to live in the "ever after". I think that's why
| many successful startups (or startup-like companies) get sold by
| their founders to mega-corps.
|
| The existence and seemingly never-ending expansion of mega-corps
| is a different story though.
| yalogin wrote:
| Slack missed the opportunity to add video communication and
| replace webex. They somehow didn't take that next step after
| conquering chat. I thought with video + enterprise integration
| they would have become the de facto tool for all collaboration. I
| guess that is still there on the cards for them. Instead they
| left that door open for Microsoft to add Teams.
| thethethethe wrote:
| > These giants, armed with nearly limitless funds and extensive
| client relationships, frequently abuse their advantage and bully
| smaller upstarts into oblivion.
|
| I don't really understand this viewpoint. Companies are
| _choosing_ to use Microsoft's products for various reasons. Maybe
| they already use Office and the integration with Teams made Teams
| the best choice over Slack. Maybe the company had an existing
| relationship with Microsoft so onboarding Teams required less
| Administrative overhead. There are probably many more that I am
| not listing. These are legitimate reasons to choose a product
| over another, not Microsoft abusing its power.
|
| Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type
| of value, and I don't really see why that's a problem. Lone, un-
| integrated startups, like Slack, still pop up and shake up the
| market. Then big companies replicate their product and integrate
| it into their existing software suites and sales pipelines,
| providing value that the smaller startup cannot. In this case the
| smaller startup merged with a larger company and will likely be
| integrated with their systems, providing value that both
| companies could have easily created alone. This all seems like
| it's working as intended to me.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this
| type of value, and I don't really see why that's a problem
|
| It's a chat app. (And Slack itself is a huge company) Teams, as
| a product on its own merits, is not necessarily better than
| Slack. I very strongly disagree with the notion that
| integration into a locked-in ecosystem is a legitimate reason
| and not an abuse of power.
|
| When you switch from product A to product B only because
| product B integrates with proprietary protocols or services you
| rely on and not on the merit or price of the product itself
| then that's bad, and it's harming consumer welfare and
| competition. It also is a positive feedback loop in that those
| services just keep claiming more and more space and the claim
| of space alone diminishes the value of everyone else, because
| you're forever locked into a web of, in this case, Microsoft
| products. Which is of course one of the reasons the company is
| so powerful.
|
| You can ask yourself this, if every software company waas
| forced to implement transparent protocols and APIs, so that
| clients can freely choose their end-user software, what would
| the market share look like? If it would look different than it
| does now I think you can make a strong case that consumers are
| being deprived of choice.
| jonas21 wrote:
| I suppose it's all a matter of perspective. As a bootstrapped
| company, we often worry that someone with lots of venture funding
| (like Slack) will enter our space with a free product, making it
| difficult for those of us who actually have to turn a profit to
| compete.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| I felt that Slacks innovation never went beyond stage 1-2. The
| app was thrusted onto stage by upending chat and the momentum was
| sustained against teams by its 3rd part integrations
| implementation.
|
| Innovations that could have carried the company further could be
| digital whiteboarding, google docs like editing, dropbox style
| storage, squiggle like remote teams collaboration.
|
| Also the atlassian merger via hip-chat sunset could have resulted
| a stronger integration between the two organizations.
|
| Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control aspect
| of things got abandoned
| an_opabinia wrote:
| That's because the thing that killed Slack wasn't Microsoft -
| it wasn't a bunch of horseshit executives say just before their
| retirement into angel investing - but Discord.
| mrkurt wrote:
| I think they did innovate, just not in ways that we-who-post-on
| Hacker News benefit from.
|
| 1. Shared channels are amazing
|
| 2. The "Enterprise Grid" was the first viable enterprise chat
| product. Slack made chat ubiquitous at places like IBM.
|
| It's easy to blow off #2, but I think it's big. It was big
| enough to threaten MS Office.
| NickM wrote:
| _Screen hero was innovative and it looks like the control
| aspect of things got abandoned_
|
| I'm still mad about this. It was such a great piece of
| software, and then Slack bought it and literally killed it
| without offering anything to replace the lost functionality.
| nateabele wrote:
| Then maybe knowing that Screenhero's founders went on to
| create Screen[0] will assuage some of the anger.
|
| Also, maybe it doesn't make it better, but it sounds like
| Slack didn't _intend_ [1] to do this.
|
| [0] https://screen.so/
|
| [1] https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-
| Work-57df16351a884bc...
| CMCDragonkai wrote:
| Can it record?
| noneeeed wrote:
| This is one of the small number of takeovers (along with
| Sparrow and Dark Sky) that actually make me angry, because
| they deprived everyone of something really great, for little
| apparent benefit.
|
| The fact that so many people use Slack, but then do all their
| voice, video and screensharing in Zoom or some other tool
| says a lot about Slack as a tool and company.
|
| My wife uses Teams for work. It's rubbish in many ways, but
| when she's using it they do everything in it. Somehow slack
| has failed at this despite having many of the same features
| built in.
| pmart123 wrote:
| Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the market a
| few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't integrate it into
| a simple feature button in Slack.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Screen Hero was light years ahead of anything on the
| market a few years ago. I'm not sure why they didn't
| integrate it into a simple feature button in Slack.
|
| They claim they did, but Slack screensharing is nowhere
| near what Screenhero's was.
|
| A more Screenhero-like replacement is Tuple:
| https://tuple.app/
| somehnguy wrote:
| I completely agree. I've been using Slack for a couple years
| with a couple of niche groups. Besides the occasional small UI
| changes it has felt dead for a long time. I suppose to make it
| not feel like that I could get more involved with adding
| integrations & whatnot. But on the surface it just feels like a
| dead chat product without any major improvements in a very long
| time.
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