Slack Has Raised Our Charges by $195k Per Year

Same with private VC/PE held companies. The board will replace the C-Suite if they aren't maximizing value.

You'd need to find a company which is huge but privately held by a group of people with only good intentions.

I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunities

Edit: here's a Wikipedia page on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

>By 2019, Deng had turned his attention to consumer goods. Pool robots, though low-profile, offered untapped potential, especially in markets like the US, where high labor costs made automation more appealing.

>“For what these machines can do today, they should cost USD 300–400,” he said. “That’s already the cap. Anything higher is just an ‘IQ tax,’ unless the cleaning function actually gets significantly better.”

The problem is that you want other people to fund your goodness.

Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now, where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.

High time preference. The free stuff is here today, and the pain will only come much later, so I can disregard it for now.

I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.

If they determined that Hacker Club violated some terms of the nonprofit demanding they move to regular or be kicked out seems not as bad

you might notice it's 100% free software

now there is always the question how a company used Slack, e.g. just some ad-hoc fast communication channels like "general", "food", "events" or a in depth usage with a lot of in-depth usage, including video conferences, channels for every squad/project/sprint/whatever

but the relevant thing to realize is that there is subtle but very relevant difference between a "social network" focused tool and a work place communications focused tool

and Mastodon has a very clear focus on the former while Zulip has a clear focus on the later

Yeah? cool. Just get microsoft's cloud suite, its standard across non-cool companies.

Life is not worth living bikeshedding about chat apps.

Eventually this leads to pressure to give them newer/better tools

Sometimes, these nontechnical users are dealing with problems as real power users that technical users may not see - there really might be a better way to do something and they may have already seen it at another company or something like that

It also happens that something might be working great but looks really dated and right or not, it can give new employees a bad impression

Still another thing is of course that sometimes someone is just throwing a hissy fit and wants something for no good reason but they somehow get the powers that be to listen to them

I’m dealing with this now - everyone is going out and buying AI tools because there is so much pressure to have AI tools and everyone feels like they are falling behind if they don’t go out and buy 10 task-specific AI tools

All that is to say that it could be that those users you referred to were facing problems that you may have been too far removed from the business to understand, it’s not a knock on you, it happens. It’s also possible they just wanted something new and shiny. The pressure to do that kind of stuff is real - I can’t imagine forcing people off of slack, for example

Obvious caveat here - the law of course must be made for monopolies.

A large group of hackers likely can figure out a way to export it all...

Everyone starts off with a price that's too low because you want a "no" from a customer to be "no, because your product isn't useful to me" and not "no, I don't have that kind of money". (Maybe this is a flaw and generalizes to generative AI. I like Github Copilot for $0/month. I would not like it for $200/month. If it costs them $200/month to run it, then there is a big problem with the business model.)

I’ve nothing against self hosting, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than saas just because you can get amazing amounts of hardware for what amounts to a rounding error in accounting.

However the value of money is quite absolute, it's dictated by the exchange rate after all. If $250,000 is nothing more than "pretty big", then your perception is either quite distorted or the rate of inflation is much more severe than I understood it to be.

For 99.9% of nonprofits, their annual budgets are in the single digit thousands or less. A sudden $250k bill is fatal.

N customers * X% drop out rate * $200K > N * $5K

Then its a profitable operation for slack.

They spent multiple paragraphs complaining about Slack, and gave Mattermost a brief mention in a single sentence. I'd enjoy hearing praise about Mattermost if they're willing to provide it as well.

Imagine your landlord increased the rent by 4000% and it's due in 5 days or you're out on the street.

Sure, they have the right to increase their prices, but there should be at least a month notice for something like this.

Slack can probably charge an extra $10/month/user for this.