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That feeling when you think "we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter," and then you do. 💫
305 replies and sub-replies as of Nov 02 2016
(Too impatient to wait for a paper copy? We put the text online: slackhq.com/dear-microsoft… But, support the print media and buy a copy!) 📰
Dear Microsoft - Several People Are Typing
Dear Microsoft, Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition. We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. It’s validating to […]
slackhq.com
what is this "paper" you speak of?
how did you do the links on print?
e-Ink technology. $300 per paper!
that's pretty BA
that is dope. Well played
That ocean air creates one of a kind people.
I'm going to send this around at work, but I bet it convinces us to look into Skype for Teams... :)
Didn't say SORRY this time :p
support "print media"? That's irony, right?
I am so fascinated by this marketing approach. This is one of the best cases I had ever seen. Great!
"open platform"? Slack is many things but it's far from "open".
we use and love Slack but this strategy seems incredibly dumb and petty
The responses on the slack page are genius :-)
The medium responses are fascinating. Have people forgotten friendly competition and kindness?
Ouch. Just looked. Oh well!
the defenders are there. The people that matter Get It.
Overall feedback is v. positive. I think most people can read between the lines. And, for real: competition's good for everyone.
hate to say it, but overall reaction online is not at all positive...
No, "out of network" responses are automatically hidden.
Hm, I see "out of network hidden" often. Dunno what to tell you. Perhaps the comment was in your network.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That feeling when you think "we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter," and then you do. 💫
the letter does seem passive aggressive, even if friendly. Not sure why @SlackHQ, needed to write it.
Love a shot across the bow, but wonder if you just gave that product 10x more publicity than it would have received on it's own.
Love Slack's letter on interoperability. Validation: I tried to add MS Teams, but Office 365 Admin center doesn't run on Mac. Fail.
It seems like you worried.
Because we said it's scary, you mean?
So true. THAT one was a bad idea. But this? Good :)
Plz reveal
(Too impatient to wait for a paper copy? We put the text online: slackhq.com/dear-microsoft… But, support the print media and buy a copy!) 📰
Dear Microsoft - Several People Are Typing
Dear Microsoft, Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition. We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. It’s validating to […]
slackhq.com
I say toasted!
lol, nah. Came off as way too passive-aggressive and insecure to me
what do you think about this vid? m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh6-am…
Text available anywhere?
(Too impatient to wait for a paper copy? We put the text online: slackhq.com/dear-microsoft… But, support the print media and buy a copy!) 📰
Dear Microsoft - Several People Are Typing
Dear Microsoft, Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition. We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. It’s validating to […]
slackhq.com
Excellent, thanks!
How awesomely old-school! I read the Medium version, it made me feel all warm & fuzzy & happy. Your comms team deserves many stars
The whole "open platform" part coming from Slack, is comical and tone deaf. #RealChatAppsAreOpenSource
Woah! Awesome
Keeping my eye on this page... flow.microsoft.com/en-us/services…
But this is 2016. A truly cool company would take out 2 full pages: the other mostly whitespace w/ large-font TL;DR summary.
that actually would have been funny
I must have missed something. What did MS even announce to compete with Slack?
I was wondering the same thing.
There is an announcement in an hour. Look for at #microsofteams
oh god, will brace myself, i feel like this is going to be Slack for Enterprises built on TFS and Sharepoint ;)
You forgot the other S word... Skype ;-) @darrel_miller @stewart
I have no idea. We will have to wait an see. However, I must acknowledge that the UWP Skype on Win10 is getting much better.
MS op sys have not gotten any better, MS keeps competition out to maintain position, so tired of MS crap
If Microsoft were cool they'd take out a full page ad with just a "TL;DR" centered in the middle w/ their logo at the bottom.
I had to google what the article was referring to... It has Skype and yammer attached to it #IThinkYoureSafe
I hate your product. Perhaps improving it would be a better way to handle competition.
Working on it :)
Imagine a user who is frequently doing other stuff and needs to quickly see relevant chats to them on periodic check ins
This is not easy. Particularly since notifications don't lead you right to the relevant chat.
Also, when I want to DM someone I should just be able to type in their name and be directed to a space where I can start talking
Now it takes you to largely useless profile page even for frequent contacts and you can click to message. Annoying and useless step
slay king!!
⌘+k, you're welcome
command + k dude.
the Quick Switcher is your friend
cmd/ctrl + k will open a fuzzy search for users, after selecting the one you want it'll open the conversation...
pretty sure you can do this
The quick switcher allows this, on a mac try CMD + K, and then type the name of the person, hit enter. That help?
a few people suggested. here's my beef. didn't want another site to check. i already had messaging and many inboxes
So if Slack is going to push it's way in, it should be maximally intuitive and simple.
That's not really a problem with Slack though, which was the point you were trying to make - improving the product.
Hi Hunter-what if chat was automatically summarized, with Questions, Actions, Commitments delineated? How would this fit into your workflow?
to be clear, I love your product
two Hunter's, but only one Walker...it sounds like the beginning to a funny joke ha
A hunter walks into a bar with a walker.
i was gonna go there, but i wasnt sure if it was in good taste..clearly i should hav gone there ha!
yo. I'm like Hunter wait this is new levels of trolling a new handle 😂 I was so confused at first glance 😐🙁
Evil Hunter is mad salty like what bug flew into your morning coffee bro
so what's better? It wouldn't have grown as well as it has if people don't like it. Doubtful better will come from MS.
👀 what does it say?
Love this, @stewart 👍 "You’re going to have to match our commitment to their success and take the same amount of delight in their happiness"
ROASTED🔥
who reads the paper?
Brilliant echo of Apple’s 1981 ad, w/ a whole hell of a lot more meat & sense of reality.
Keep up the truly awesome work. Thanks.
kudos for pushing for openness, but Slack is a closed source proprietary product bound by your infrastructure and TOS :-P
that letter seems defensive, in a fearful way
Where else did you post it for the curious folks?
one day I want to do something this epic.
good work. Any chance of rebuilding the desktop application tho? BIG memory hog...
long copy ad for a digital productivity tool. What's up with that font though. Baskerville would've been a better choice.
are you in a denny's?
Turned the brightness down on your monitor. Seriously.
Thank you for robustly contradicting the idiotic advice to ignore your competitor ⭐️
check it out
My notifications are going to be interesting today, aren't they?
you're a good guy, Matt Slack.
Sorry, friend :)
you can always give up your Twitter handle. :)
I don't get this "open letter" business. Has the price of stamps really got so expensive?
At least you don't get @-mentions for people into Japanese porn? (av=adult video; I've got about 1800 accounts blocked.)
Eh. Target audience is Slack employees, potential employees & hardcore users.
my company took Slack away this wk:( had Five Stages of Grief presentation for design team who they knew'd be very upset!
Hi Ben any particular reason for this? Funding issue? Replaced with competitor technology? Thanks.
we work with lots of banks and say they're concerned about security. Only design was using it, 40 of 8k employees.
is going to seriously impact our productivity. My running joke is "email will be the Slack killer!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
interesting, thanks. I know the feeling. Were the security concerns about cloud services in general, or vendor-specific?
why did they take it away?
we work with lots of banks and say they're concerned about security. Only design was using it, 40 of 8k employees.
Gotcha. So how do you communicate with banks - email mostly or?
I love the smell of hubris in the morning
shots fired
if it's not on medium it's not real
should have just sent a fruit basket or a tube of bees tbqh
is slack open source yet
Dude.
ultra wide white margins, no finger ink, nice
bucket list item ✅
with style and grace. Did I mention it made me laugh? #cheekywonderful
Microsoft has been stereotyped as swimming in their competitors' wake for 30 years.
I will say tho, I had no idea they were coming out with a competitive product until @stewart pointed it out to me.
shots fired... shots fired
I...that's awesome, dude. Nice.
Damn, that's good. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
but what's the point? ego? this seems like a huge waste of time, money and reputation.
It's a wonderful ad that presents the open and friendly character of slack, as well as their principles and product benefits. Love it.
but wouldn't the massive amount of resources be better put into making a better product? live video chats ;)
I love using Slack, but that ad comes comes across as arrogant, tone deaf, and strange
Putting cheap VC money to some use.
how long ago did they come talk to you to ask about buying Slack?
Because that worked so well for Apple to IBM back in 1981. mjg.ph/2e2fMdK
(No comment)
and to everyone questioning your choice of print media...screw 'em. In this moment, you are Josh Lyman.
I, and my children, thank you for it.
Slay @stewart, slay.
But why?
I get that. All the Ad did for me was generate interest in Microsoft teams. And it's just unnecessarily passive aggressive.
Why on Earth would you do this?? Srsly. Who does this benefit? Who is this for?
It's pretty much a tradition now, when a larger company blatantly copies a newcomer's product. See, Apple 1981:
C:ONGRTLNS.W95
Sure, but not only was that also somewhat small & needless, it was optimistic & customer focused. Slack’s nonsense is neither.
Slack’s note here is smugly prescriptive, bizarrely defensive, and not customer-focused at all 🙄
Roasted
👋 Challenge accepted!
Love it. Thank you :)
ignoring the elephant in the room? @WorkplacebyFB
Haven't used it, but it seems only tangentially related. Definitely not a substitute. We'll build an integration!
We would be thrilled to set up an account for you!
maybe spend this money to make your product less 💩 instead?
As someone that has been considering Slack for a while your “open letter” didn’t help you at all.
Hi Martin, I'd love to get you and your colleagues into the preview of IBM's team chat platform (workspace.ibm.com). DM for details.
you can work on #LivingMeetings with @acrossio
Everything evolves around context and video. Text is so last year!
amazing!
"new product category"??
that time when you have to tweet the newspaper or else nobody would see it #SVexcess🚮
pretty trashy imo
you should fix login the slack login mechanism. Then investing time/money to do this.
I love this, especially the matching commitment to the customer’s success and taking delight in their happiness - right on!
but what about yammer? ☺️
agree with @kitchenettekat; this feels weird. Personally, I'm surprised and disappointed. Show, don't tell. Be humble, not smug.
really rubbed me the wrong way :(. Sort of thing I associate with Apple and *old* MS. Could go on, but I guess deed's done.
Right, sure, Slack, the "open" platform. A proprietary service with a proprietary protocol, and forced arbitration in the ToS
that looks like the Sabado Gigante size Turkish coffee. amirite?
Netscape vs IE?
let's reinvent the reinvented IRC that Slack reinvented. IRC is and always will be superior to both.
message search is an awesome feature not found in irc. Also usability is lacking. I do prefer irc personally tho.
yeah, I log my IRC convos so I can search those. I will admit that is a nice feature though.
Yeah but if msft can manage read receipts properly that's a huge win over slack. known issue on all @slack apps
How far you go in helping companies truly transform...is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.🔥🔥🔥🔥
honestly, i doubt i would've heard about microsoft teams if i didn't see your full-page ad
Staying on top of the latest tech news is important. Glad I could help out!
you're the best editorial assistant i could've asked for
Fantastic.
Disgusting.
we started using slack on our office campus re: real estate management and it's been great! 👍🏼
😂 nice, sounds like what you're really saying is "Welcome to the Thunder Dome b#@ch"
so you just paid for a full page in NYT to tell everyone about a giant company becoming a competitor? niiiice
They'll need the leg up!
why no Dear Facebook? I thought that was a more direct attack on your territory.
easier to attack Microsoft than google?
Not sure it is easier, but it is relevant. mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/tec… We work well with Google :)
Microsoft Puts Slack in Cross Hairs With New Office Chat App
The tech giant introduced Microsoft Teams, an addition to its Office 365 suite, which resembles Slack but adds features like threaded conversations and videoconferencing.
nytimes.com
Some days it's a bummer not working at Slack. Great expression of values, again!
Next one will be better! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
nicely done, sir. ❤️👍🏻
oh, Microsoft is launching a Slack competitor? Now I have to check it out
the tweet probably had bigger reach
funny the mention about Open Platform.
huge slack fan, but this makes you guys look weak. I'm embarrassed for you guys
This is all kinds of funny, but your logo looks way better on screen. ;)
I love Slack and I love Office365. I'm excited to see what the comptetion will help you both create. I hope for success for all.
Thank you!
how about instead of publishing open letters, you address your own problems like memory leaks?
I can't read this without significant bias but it is not the tone I've come to expect from your awesome employees. Respect.
Well, it will only happen this one time :)
nice move! Wait, no emoji no gif in the letter, come on...
both print and tweet, very nicely done!
Oh! @travishines @tomwarren We went back forth over this a lot. Even designed a custom emoji for it: /CC @hattmodgins @bvelestuk @_kcwatkins
but seriously, that should really be an emoji.
bug report: can't find the "Add Reaction" button on the newspaper...!
haha! I see I'm not the only one 😂
FYI I'm sharing this tweet into our Slack 🙌🏻 Custom emoji FTW!
happens all the time
Cheeky! Do you have a digital copy, it's a little bit difficult to read from here
(Too impatient to wait for a paper copy? We put the text online: slackhq.com/dear-microsoft… But, support the print media and buy a copy!) 📰
Dear Microsoft - Several People Are Typing
Dear Microsoft, Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition. We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. It’s validating to […]
slackhq.com
Seems like you put a bad taste in a lot of peoples mouths with this. Bad brand move.
will the MS product not have juvenile release notes that are a waste of everyone's time?
One would argue that this just means someone's scared.
who still reads a paper?
use Microsoft Lens and convert the image to text. I got about 95% of it in 60 seconds
or usability in a word. Not Microsoft. Getting worse with those bloody ribbons.
okay now let's go, make a decent native client for slack on mac.we deserve more than a web view man :)
newspaper where do they sell those? Must be in the bigger cities.I call the letter some snipe shooting advertising @seanmmitchell
Competition is good. But I will feel better if Microsoft wasnt my competitor 😁
"We know that playing nice with others isn’t exactly your MO". Do you still think BSODs are common too?
If Teams doesn't work out, they can always just connect Slack to a Group instead. ;)
Connecting a Slack Channel to an Office 365 Group - Collab365 Community
Create an Incoming Webhook on Office 365 Group To begin, go to the Office 365 group that you would like to connect to Slack. Click on the Connectors button. From the list of connectors, click the Add button next to Incoming Webhook. You will now be asked for some cosmetic choices for how the connected […]
collab365.community
the text of this was kind of petty
Given the growing unease I’m hearing about Slack overload and unmanageable comms, I’d be careful of that hubris @stewart
That feeling when you think "we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter," and then you do. 💫
well said
was the best dev comms tool there was. Until the focus shifted.
is that the same feeling the drives Super Bowl advertising?
brilliant Stewart, just brilliant
on a leftwing magazine with 95.7% fall in quarterly profits i.sli.mg/yH5yxC.jpg it's not like anybody is going to read that
someone getting shook here😉
Brilliant, funny and exactly in line with my beliefs about how to build great enterprise software. Congrats!
how much does a 1 pager in the Times cost?
if only you could fix the eternal installing update issue instead
Keep on improving don't come with excuses @stewart. Suddenly I'm rooting for the big guy. I do hope @satyanadella and team come strong.
this is awesome 👏🏼
Prepare to be eaten.
Like MSFT beat Google in search, and Google went on to beat Facebook at social networking, and FB has been eating Snapchat …
The Trump of tech.
Really more like #Microsoft vs Netscape and WordPerfect and Lotus and GroupWise and...
passive aggressive, but also great marketing. Nicely done.
(No comment)
I go to some lengths to avoid giving Rupert Murdoch any money, and so should you
(The New York Times, not the Times of London)
jolly good, carry on
this is crazy! ⚡️That person has a super small hand. Is that @realDonaldTrump's baby hand? 👐
comes across as little scared, no?
No middle fingers! Playful provocation :)
Congrats @stewart, you have won the Internet AND print media today. And this is all kinds of win... 💣💥
very Apple
So basically, you wrote a full-page ad for Slack in an industry where nobody reads print media? lul
(No comment)
/
Hmm... 🤔 well played @SlackHQ... well played. 😎
⬜️
That feeling when you think "we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter," and then you do. 💫
