Yes. I wouldn't know where to start, if I wanted to open a Team with some friends. But in organizations where they already have an Office subscription, and an IT dept to manage the tenants and accounts ? People will love it :-)
470 karma · joined November 8, 2015
The pros : the product is quite good, let say it is good enough and much better than the status quo of relying on emails or Whatsapp. It is integrated with the Office suite, and if I understand correctly, will be free for pro Office users. It has a handful of very interesting product decisions, like threaded replies and iframe apps.
The cons : MS Teams is not as polished as Slack, the UI (especially of the chat area) is not as clear. The installation/onboarding is not as fluid. They have less apps and integrations (obviously, this is just the beginning).
My guess : MS Teams will not even begin to make a dent in the almost 100% market share of Slack among startups, agencies and similar small, agile groups. The whole Office ecosystem is simply to heavy, the UX is not as great, and some integrations might be missing. On the other hand, it might win big in the entreprise segment, where Slack is less present, and where being in the Office family is not seen as a drawback but actually an sign of solidity
(1) I am an independent dev, working on an app for their platform, so this is an educated guess based on my testing. I will enable Teams to connect with each other or with Slack teams through shared chat (www.smooz.io/microsoft).
This is so true. But look at it from a personal growth perspective. You get to learn so much! Crash course in server-down-at-2am, in contradictory-marketing-advices, and in my-pricing-is-really-screwed :-)
What I hate is writing content :-)
After launching in January last year, I saw a relatively significant level of interest from early users (relatively significant = much more than I had in all my previous side projects). 10-20 active early users are very good for the ego when you are usually met with polite indifference. I can't thank them enough.
After a bit from traction fro Product Hunt, I started monetize in May. After a few months, I have about 20 customers, for about 300€ /month revenue. I changed pricing in November (cheaper, but without free plan), and I start to see some promising growth.
Smooz being a side project, and the first one I take from idea to shipping to scaling issues, and from early users to actual customers, is an incredible success for me in itself, if only for the learning. Success on the financial side will be when I reach 1000€ / month (recurring, passive) with it.
I think workday hours are similar to American employees, but work less in the weekends and have more vacations.
* Scalable architecture is, most of the time, a very-NOT-big-deal. Bots tend to be relatively lightweight apps, sending/receiving json data only. Even websocket Slack apps can now be replaced by HTTP API.
* Discovery is really un-solved at this time, especially by Facebook. Slack does a better job, but arguably has a smaller ecosystem of B2B bots to manage and promote.
However, I think the article is about a rather ambitious (more than usual) and interesting bot. Having to parse normal language symptoms into medical terms is 1) an interesting use case 2) hard to do well technically. So maybe they face challenges most bot dev don't face.
Design-wise, most people don't see how hard it is to design chatbot flows that hard not horrible and confusing. Most chatbots are horrible and confusing at the moment, because coding bots is easy, designing them is really hard.
I think the article make interesting points about their own specific case, but their situation is perhaps less general than they seem to think.
The toll on household finance and peace of mind of the US insurance system is incredible. The births of two daughters, including a couple of days at the hospital, peridural, pre-birth prep and post-birth followup, cost us a grand total of 30€. Of course nothing is free, we pay it through other means (taxes), but not having to think about cost at that moment is so relieving.
1) Successful business model (retail)
2) Smart iteration on the business model (Monoprix livraison a domicile +)
3) For legacy reason, do not upend the whole business model, do not put it front and center, limit it to some categories / users
4) Watch a younger competitor, not uncumbered by legacy, focus solely on that service
5) Get shocked when they get PR. Release a video to say you've done it for 10years
6) Go bankrupt as the new service spreads like wildfire
Monoprix home delivery is great, my grandmother uses it quite a lot, but retailers are still totally going to get taken over by Amazon
It seems to me that - it is another motivation to move to the Events API - it would be great if Slack could notify issues at the client level. Right now, users are pissed off at app makers, not knowing that Slack is to blame.
Many definitions can coexist, some more actionable than others. "Being aware of the existence of oneself in the world, and being able to reflect on oneself's decision" seems relatively practical. So, Self-perception + self-reflection = consciouness (as a definition)
From this starting point, it seems reasonable to derive that consciousness can arise from 1) mental representation of the world that include oneself 2) empathy for others (I can guess why this other worker has taken this decision) that, once applied to the actions of the self as if it were an external agent, gives self-reflection.