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bossx

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Switched to a MS Surface Book after nearly a decade with Macbooks. Reasoning:

1) Powerhouse specs (core i7, 16gb ram, 512gb SSD, nvidia GeForce) for running pretty much anything

2) Convertable to tablet for casual browsing, watching videos and drawing

3) Super accurate pen and touch support, pen acts like a mouse so can be used for OS level interactions not just specific apps, even hover works

4) Pen mounts to screen magnetically

5) Can be used like a traditional laptop on your lap

6) Beautiful 3000x2000 pixel display, higher DPI than retina with a 3:2 aspect ratio

7) Windows 10 with all the patches is actually a decent OS and supports all form factors, touch etc.

It's really nice to be able to do creative work, everyday work and gaming all on the same system. Currently playing Overwatch with no issues!

I agree, it will be hard to disrupt them through technology right now, but in the next 2-3 years there will be a new wave of tech they might not adapt to immediately.

Another possibility is them getting acquired, as they have already raised 7 rounds of funding (investor pressure), and their founder has had a large exit already (Flickr to Yahoo).

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack

I'm not eager to disrupt Slack, I am genuinely curious how the companies I referenced in the original post could possibly disrupt them. As I mentioned, we are happy with their product and continue to use it, and I am seeing Slack disrupt other products we use (example is the recent addition of voice chat).

I don't want to disrupt Slack, I posed the question to the community to start an intelligent debate around how they might be disrupted in the future.

I disagree that you can't compete with a well run team at the peak of their abilities, this is a free market, you can compete with whoever you like. Slack is successful because they solved an internal pain point, read about their history http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-slack-2015-...

I didn't ask how I can disrupt Slack, nor do I have any intent to. I posed the question to the community to start an intelligent debate around how they might be disrupted in the future.

Slack wasn't built by walking around talking to people outside, they built an internal chat tool to solve a problem they had at their company (where they were originally building a video game). They realized the chat tool was good, and turned it into a product. They solved their own pain point, not other people's. http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-slack-2015-...

First of all, I never said I wanted to disrupt Slack, I simply posed the question to the community to start an intelligent debate about how they might be displaced in the future. If you lack the foresight to look that far head, that's okay, you can say you don't know how they can be disrupted.

There have been multi-million (and billion) dollar businesses started by disrupting major players in their space, by solving the problem they are trying to solve, with much better technology and approaching the problem from new angles. If you think tech companies aren't started with the intent of disrupting other companies, you are living in a bubble.

http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilem...

Exactly, this is what people are missing when they are trying to compare Google's speech recognition to other services. Google uses deep neural-networks to continuously train and improve the quality of their speech recognition, they get their training data from the hundreds of millions of Android users around the world using speech-to-text every day. No other company has a comparable amount of training data, continuously being expanded. http://googleresearch.blogspot.ca/2015/09/google-voice-searc...

Facebook is already being displaced by Snapchat, people don't want to share their lives with every single person they meet, Snapchat solves this problem. It's also a mobile-first social network and difficult enough to keep the older crowd away, while building a massive user base of the younger generation. The facial filters feature will 100% try to be copied by Facebook with their recent acquisition of MASQRD, but it's too late, because they don't fundamentally think of social networking the same way. I was at the airport and I spotted at least 3x as many people using Snapchat over Facebook. If you don't have it already, do yourself a favour and read this http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-...