Hipchat was basically unusable for me. Constant crashes, sloppy integrations, poor search, and a notification system that did more harm than good.
Slack is completely different. Pre built integrations mean I don't have to spend time writing a bot. Starred search means I can find that message from a few months ago with the click of a button. Auto responses mean I can inject some humor into conversations during the work day. Image comments mean I can use slack to gain feedback on wireframes. I could go on but theses are just some of the things that make slack far better than Hipchat.
I use hipchat at my place of work. It has so many issues. People appearing offline at least every other day when they aren't. Auto reconnect may have never worked even once for me that I can recall. Even worse, when trying to auto-reconnect and it's not reconnecting, the only thing you can do is close the app and open it again.
Hipchat has had integration for everything we have ever needed. Slack is far prettier and more polished though. And lately Hipchat has been unreliable, so we are thinking of moving on that basis.
Slack's marketing is genius. The whole play on making Email look bad is brilliant and many startups are following suit.
But to be quite frank Slack is making things a whole lot worse (for me only perhaps?). It's super distracting. I have to add a new app to my workflow (while maintaining email). And Slack is much more demanding (end up checking it much more the email). Too many notifications and msgs. It isn't as ground-breaking as they want us to believe.
I wonder how long it will take for others to feel the same way I do? (maybe I'm the outlier?)
Mr. Butterfield is doing a stellar job leading the wheel. Congrats!
It's not just you, I might also be crazy. I find "if it's not something you're willing to write me an email about, it's probably not something worth bugging me about" a useful filter.
The difference in the requests I get over IM-type platforms vs emails (or even ticket trackers and the like) is pretty big. For whatever reason, most people don't want to bother writing an email, so they'll actually do more investigation on their own before sending one...
Excellent point. One thing that I'm noticing is that other tools are becoming just as busy as Email for me. At times I feel like there isn't a difference. The volume of email is what bothers me. But now if that volume is being transferred to Slack (sorry to point them out) I'm still stuck with the same problem. It's the people behind the tools which cause the problem IMHO :)
I think that a lot of "startups" are using the fantasy of an email-less world as a marketing tactic. I agree, I don't think email is going to disappear. Whether that is a good thing or bad, it's irrelevant
