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Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist.
For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space.
Source: I use google chat everyday, so its not just a "UI looks ugly thing". Literally nothing you think should work works. Ex: inviting outside collaborators to a shared channel, converting a private DM group into a channel, having public channels for community & private channels for internal work. Goes on and on.
While the current incarnation of Google Chat has indeed been steadily improving, Google has a lot, and I mean a lot, to make up for:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... (2021, as the URL says)
And it's not just messaging. Google has a decades-long history of abandoning apps that don't make them billions, which means no-one with memory trusts them. Especially in their current "AI-everything or bust!" incarnation.
"how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is" - is that a common sentiment on HN?
To me, Google Sheets is 10% of Excel on desktop (Mac), Slides are 5% of PowerPoint on desktop (Mac), and the integration between the two (copying and pasting linked charts from Excel to Powerpoint with formatting) makes it a completely non-starter to consider the Google alternatives as primary drivers.
I'm probably a power-user of both, granted, but I took for granted Sheets/Slides are still just toys compared to the real stuff, so curious if I'm missing something.
I hope I don't suffer from early onset Alzheimer's, but I seem to recall the joke pre the pandemic was that Google would constantly make new chat apps.
Google Dou, Google Chat, Google Wave, Google this, Google that. Seemingly because someone needed a promotion and the way to do that was to create a new chat app or lead the effort for the same.
I don’t understand why Gemini is not better integrated into Google Docs.
I can’t transfer results into docs, it can’t manipulate existing docs.
I can’t even rule out that I’m doing something wrong somehow.
But it’s just frustrating to see that the teams inside of Google don’t work well together.
Google Chat is definitely a product that could use more love, but it is situated in a specific internal landscape, and grows out of it. Slack is built for a very different context, and I doubt Google would build something like that. Google simply doesn't see the world the way someone who likes Slack would (and I also doubt a large co like Google could operate out of Slack).
Good is really good at engineering great software and really sucks at making them enterprise ready.
It's why they've been failing with GCP, Google Tables (shutdown now I guess), Analytics or any product that aims for enterprise consumption. Note: they are really good at making consumer softwares though (take the success of Google Photos or Gsearch)
There might be an institutional block in Google due to the way that Google Wave was received. Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work. It's never quite lived up to expectations (or hype in the case of Wave). Knowing their history, I can see why they'd want to avoid trying to take on that market again. It's difficult to get enough traction with users to make it a successful product.
Not impossible, but it's not like they haven't tried before in the past.
I remember using google chat prior to slack arrival and it always bothered me that google seemed allergic to letting me organize the freaking contact list.
The insistence on choosing who shows up where by algorithm and "intelligence" made it impossible to create muscle memory, you had to look and/or search every time.
I have never understood the dislike for Google chat. I’ve been using it since it first came out even for friends and it’s everything I want in a chat.
In my experience building a couple ChatGPT apps and, through colleagues, working with OpenAI folks, I'm not sure they should be building anything in their current state. Seems quite disorganized over there.
There's already Zulip, Mattermost, and many others. Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO. A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple.
It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.
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.
It's funny how people complain about Slack pricing but I've been using it for our company (nearly 100 people) for nearly a decade without paying a dime. The only thing we're not getting is history (and you really shouldn't save valuable info on chat anyway, we have other data repositories for that such as Wiki and git).
So for me, we're getting tremendous value out of Slack and not once have they bothered to ask us to pay.
I'd agree if OpenAI seemed any good at building apps. They're a frontier AI lab and not operating like a product company. A lot of great and interesting things come from that, but not refined products.
Their MacOS app really sucks. For months now, it's been eating up 100% CPU with some zombie process occasionally, their helpful global shortcut layover often doesn't autofocus, and their UX has never felt like it gets a lot of attention.
They lack user obsession. Altman talks a lot about going above and beyond RLHFing to get the tone just right. But it's never felt right to me.
If Google had stuck with Wave, and applied proper product management to it to refine the design feature set, it would be Slack+Notion today and I'd enthusiastically be using it.
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.
A friend and I are working on something like this. It’s more Slack-adjacent; the problem we’re tackling is, “what does a future where agents seamlessly integrate with day to day communication look like?” We’re a little more focused on the developer platform.
We’re embarrassingly early and haven’t “launched” yet but I guess there’s some value in sharing with an audience who might be interested!
We call it “Superuser” [0], the social hub for agent tools. There’s more of a focus on the developer platform, but warning: major WIP! We are shipping huge changes and our docs are out of date...
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.
Does anyone use Mattermost? I remember thinking it wasn't too bad, and I guess it's open source.
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.
Oh yes please let us hand over all of our real time communications to Sam Altman’s company. I’m as excited about that as I am to use their browser.
Maybe I'm living in a parallel reality, but there are plenty of Slack alternatives and plenty of companies using Slack clones such as Mattermost and Zulip, among others. And yes, they work just fine.
You'd be out of your mind to trust an OpenAI built Slack competitor. Slack, for all of it's many faults, is two things:
- Reliable, both in terms of "service uptime" and in terms of "Slack isn't going to rugpull your features" - Secure. Slack don't have a history of major breaches or data exposure.
Both of these means that people feel comfortable relying on it. Who would possibly trust OpenAI with data security, or that their app will still be around in 3 years.
I'd take even a smaller self-hostable "Hey, here's a really cool project that can be made with Codex and our other tools, ain't it great PR?" program that's not built for some crazy scale, but that I can put on a VPS somewhere - and would support the basic features of Slack and Discord. Think a Node.js app or something similar, PostgreSQL, maybe RabbitMQ/Redis, a SPA with React or whatever. Basic but consistent styling and features.
So, workspaces, channels, threads, voice and video calls, screen sharing, file sharing, polls/reactions to messages.
Especially given the current situation with Discord. If such a thing could even be built with any tools and mostly/partially vibe coded, then it'd reflect really positively on the state of the tools!
The problem is that if they'd try that and mess up, it'd be like Unity's own Gigaya project, which was really bad PR: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/vz1b43/gigaya_has_...
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
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 stop at Slack, we need better software for tons of things. Even a better OS is something which we would do if we had the AI productivity gains that people pretend we do.
Just let the agents spin. But it's not that easy, is it.
Someone that will tackle this will be competing against B dollar companies and extravagant level of features and integration. It's not as simple as a chatroom with people in it.
Apple should build Google search.
Google should build Windows.
Microsoft should just die.
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.
I don't think the world needs another protocol, we need to leverage the ones we have. This space (text-based real-time messaging with media attachments) is feature complete, there's nothing left to add. The remaining value-adds are exactly that; optional extensions for productivities suites and integrating SaaS tools. Pricing and Privacy are another two concerns, and personally for the latter I'd like human chat to be as far away from AI as possible.
I use Google Chat, only because my clients use it. Network effects matter. Personally I think it's terrible, but I wasn't a fan of Slack either but I'm not entirely sure why as it's pretty much just sending text. Maybe the opportunity to innovate in this space is UI/UX, and performance/reliability (Signal has been slow/flaky recently for us).
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
Interesting idea. I do feel one of the major barriers to mass replacement of white collar workers is lack of direct integration between email/slack and LLMs. A human still needs to distill organizational needs from multiple stakeholders to write a prompt.
At the same time, I would be very surprised if companies are lining up to hand over all of their internal comms to OpenAI. Would need really strong privacy guarantees, and I’m not sure OpenAI has the goodwill to be convincing on that front.
Also, doesn’t MS still nominally have some stake in OpenAI? Would be surprised if they were chill with another competitor to Teams getting built.
Seems like a better fit for Anthropic. They’re the ones doubling down on work.
> 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.
Just for reference, teams is not an astounding success it's forced on the workforce by management who want to pay less. It's a classic management square peg into workforce round hole.
Yes I understand sometimes something is better than nothing but teams is _so_ bad it causes user communities to fracture when they would previously congregate on the same platform.
Sure if deployed correctly and not by ape sysadmins with a thump of "deny everything in terms of security" I'm sure teams is a reasonable product, but in the real world, no, it's a nightmare.
FWIW, we've been working on building a chat application. Still very much in beta stage, but trying to build something useful.
If you haven't tried the new slackbot you should... I've been using it at work and I'm blown away at what it can do with the context it has on you and your teams from slack.
https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/01/13/sl...
Most SaaS companies eventually veer towards the heavy enterprise which results in them raising prices and excessively complicating their app. So there is opportunity for a competitor but I'm not sure OpenAI is in a good position and it'd cement the view that they will eventually use your data to compete with you.
Why keep relying on API services? If you'd like your own local AI integration with open providers like Rocket.Chat and Mattermost, check out txtchat (https://github.com/neuml/txtchat).
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!
If I worked exclusively with technical people, then I wouldn't need to use Slack (or Teams, Webex, Jabber, etc). I can't ever see myself paying for an application like that.
Why not ask for a federated slack?
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?
> 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.
Should they be a model company or a product company? What do you think is the best way forward for them? Apple went with Google as their model choice while OpenAI was looking into new products to build.
Shameless plug. We’re working on something like this. thismachine.ai. It’s still early, but interested to get feedback. The slack/chat part is still behind a feature flag. Let me know if you want to use it
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.