I'm not really bullish on Slack as a product, but I don't think Slack as a business is so bad. I think Slack is trying to be the Yammer of IRC: you get it in through a couple of people using it, and all of a sudden you convert the entire enterprise, hence the focus on marketing.
Hipchat/Flowdock/probably others existed before Slack, and are still largely interchangeable at this point, but they're not investing so heavily in marketing.
I think a direct comparison to MySpace is inaccurate since neither they nor their competitors are directly viral (yet?), but they could certainly be replaced.
The question is: who would want to spend a pile of money trying to outmarket Slack? It's hard to tell what their sales figures are, but if they get lodged in the public's view as the company that does this, it will take concerted, capital-intensive effort to dislodge them, and why would you go to that effort for a low margin space?
Open Source is really not relevant in this space since the price is cheap and you're paying for convenience.
Hipchat/Flowdock/probably others existed before Slack, and are still largely interchangeable at this point, but they're not investing so heavily in marketing.
I think a direct comparison to MySpace is inaccurate since neither they nor their competitors are directly viral (yet?), but they could certainly be replaced.
The question is: who would want to spend a pile of money trying to outmarket Slack? It's hard to tell what their sales figures are, but if they get lodged in the public's view as the company that does this, it will take concerted, capital-intensive effort to dislodge them, and why would you go to that effort for a low margin space?
Open Source is really not relevant in this space since the price is cheap and you're paying for convenience.