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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I think your point still stands but some of that S&M can never be cut because of churn and is highly susceptible to interference from competitors.

Slack doesn't have that much lock-in and a lot of people have their sights on that market -- "Cheaper than Slack and bundled with Office365/G Suite" is an extremely tempting offer.

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Maybe, so far I've been in a few situations where we didn't go with Slack...only to go back to Slack. Part of the lock-in is their brilliant multi-org client. I can easily go back-and-forth between my company, a contract's IM, an alumni group of people in my last job and a group of local artists that like to talk to each other. Hell I've thought about luring most of my close friends from Facebook onto Slack.

Their API is also quite good IMO, which provides a sort of lock-in, though not a huge one.

Do all your contacts work in the tech industry? I'm wondering if we're really backwards here in Australia, or if I've just had bad experiences. Slack-style messaging seems really uncommon outside tech, even though traditional AIM-style IM is used everywhere. I think a lot of enterprises could benefit from capturing corporate knowledge in searchable Slack channels, but the only teams I see using them are doing IT and software.

> Part of the lock-in is their brilliant multi-org client

While not quite as fully-featured as Slack, Keybase offers this. I'm a member of multiple orgs and seamlessly change between conversations (both group and 1-on-1).

From my experience slack also has negative churn. People get used to it and automatically choose it the next time. You are correct about potential threats though.

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