We Don’t Sell Saddles Here (2014)

https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d

by tim_sw • 11 years ago

26 6 11 years ago

medium.com

antidaily• 11 years ago

Meta Lab designed this post.

andrewmwatson• 11 years ago

this is from a long time ago. why is this up here again?

temuze• 11 years ago

The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour.

It just goes to show you - even if it's not a "new" product (group chat existed before) - really understanding an area and making the best product in a vertical is innovation.

Every time I hear "don't compete, make something new", I think about the fact that before Google, there was Alta Vista. Before Facebook, there was Friendster and Myspace.

If a product us enough of an improvement for customers to spend time and money on it, it's successful. That simple.

physcab• 11 years ago

"By that measure, Slack is a real and large innovation. It is not as eye-catching as self-driving cars or implantable chips — it is not basic research-y kind of stuff. But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity."

Slack is cool and all, we use it, I know lots of people that use it. It doesn't suck and doesn't make my computer crash. But let's be honest here -- there hasn't been a dramatic shift in communication or how my time is spent for the better. I can set up channels now and put gifs into my chat, which I then promptly disabled because it was annoying as fuck as everyone in the company began doing the same.

Personally I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with all the chats I have to maintain. There's Slack, because its pushed on me by my IT department. There's Skype, which I have for legacy co-worker interaction. There's GChat, which all my friends and family use. There's Facebook, which all my non-friend acquaintances use. In any given day I have 5 windows up, not counting the distractions from SMS and E-mail itself.

Nothing gets replaced...I just have to maintain more. Now I feel like its having the opposite effect. All this communication is actually making me anti-social.

keerthiko• 11 years ago

This reflects how I feel. We gave Slack a go at my 4-person company. It was cool and all (although it actually did make Firefox crash often) but we decided against it since it did little that our other chat clients couldn't already do. We ended up using Hipchat for business communication since one of our external clients used that and we kinda got used to it, but I personally just wish we'd stuck with gchat. Now between my phone and computer I use hipchat, LINE, fb messenger, gchat, and email. I would like to just fb messenger if possible, although it probably isn't the best medium for business talk, so maybe gchat as well added into that.

gfodor• 11 years ago

The point of slack is that it is more than group chat, it's group chat that is easily extendable to your teams workflows. At my company we've extended it to support deployments, busting caches, executing jobs, etc. We've molded our project management processes onto it. It reports tweets about our company and it also reports errors in our infrastructure.

It's basically like a much-easier-to-extend IRC that is accessible to the mere mortal.

We Don’t Sell Saddles Here (2014)

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