There will always be egregiously priced “enterprise” software but that doesn’t mean the value is there, it’s usually because nobody knows better; the “tire-kickers” are people suckered into the platform using the exact same tactics as people who peddle drugs, that’s not defensible.
Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era, it gets reinvented constantly.
BBS's, the pre-cursors to forums had real time notice boards and messaging systems.
The only bad part of it was the fact that nobody had a BBS compatible device in their pocket, but the core functionality of a centralised message board accessible from anywhere in the planet in essentially real-time was definitely at hand.
The major difference is that things these days are quite a bit more usable and we have little devices that are many hundreds of times more powerful than those BBS clients in our pockets.
But there have been so many iterations on the same idea that it's absolutely FALLACIOUS to say that Slack has innovated in anything other than marketing, they are so far from the first and so far from the best that it's sickening that you would defend $12/mo PER USER for a family.
yeah, they're not serious enough, but it's not costing Slack $48/mo to host 4 people, it probably costs $4 (very generously, taking all costs into consideration)
Sure the BBS ecosystem had a mostly similar feature set if you combine everything here and there but there wasn't a single product a customer could just download that had ALL the features rolled into it.
And even if there were such a product, why do you think that the $4/month in 2022 terms wouldn't have been $40/month or more, in 2000?
To me it seems intuitively obvious, much smaller adoption rate, much more niche or wealthy customer base on average, etc., in 2000, which would have made 2000Slack a boutique product.
$4 in 2002 is equivalent to $6-7 with the US treasuries own inflation calculator; but I never really argued that, I argued their current cost.
Other than that it is obvious to me that you’re out of touch with reality entirely. $12 per user per month for a chat tool is a legitimately unjustifiable amount for the majority of the current slack user base.
You can argue that free is freeloading, perhaps I agree, but saying anyone not forking over €12/user is not a serious user is just insanely dismissive to the point of absurdity.
You also completely missed the point: BBSs were a one stop shop for all the features and more that slack has, IRC was the same but lacked persistence, which was bolted on, XMPP also had all the features slack had and is being sold to you as things like google talk and Facebook messenger (which is XMPP underneath!).
Slack innovates in marketing, telling people that they want this stuff. The product is not innovative and for the average/prosumer user the value simply isn’t there.
Zulip is so superior it is actually disgusting; and it’s FOSS.
Not to mention “matrix” or the multitude of fantastic walled garden chat tools.
Slack enjoys a niche because of rugpulling, bringing people in with marketing and UX and the promise that you can work with your existing client and cheaply so don’t worry about it! (IRC/XMPP gateways; generous free tier) before removing them.
That you defend this makes me believe you have a financial incentive.
There will always be egregiously priced “enterprise” software but that doesn’t mean the value is there, it’s usually because nobody knows better; the “tire-kickers” are people suckered into the platform using the exact same tactics as people who peddle drugs, that’s not defensible.
Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era, it gets reinvented constantly.