Let's hope that Discord doesn't end up going the way of Slack. Since Slack got overconfident over Microsoft Teams and lost and got acquired by Salesforce.
I wish I could "lose" by cashing out with $30 billion.
The truth is there is no room for a standalone service in an area as competitive as enterprise communication. Microsoft would be able to undercut them in price no matter what. Bundling is the only way forward, and hopefully Salesforce can put in the resources to keep it competitive.
Personally, I'm finding the transition from Slack to Teams absolutely maddening. Do people actually prefer Teams or is it that many large enterprises already had Office 365 licenses?
They are both garbage. Neither of them gets webrtc right in 2021, while Discord has had it working for years now. It is a rare thing, that I cannot hear someone on Discord and I can use it with any browser, while Teams and Slack still give me the middle finger for trying to do a call when using Firefox.
So whatever makes people use Teams, it's not Teams working well, that much is for sure.
Teams voice/video is better than Slack, worse than Zoom. In basically every other respect it's inferior to either Discord, Slack, or Zoom. The fact that I can't move the video thumbnails from their default location at the bottom of a call boggles my mind every day.
But Office is the standard, so bundling it Microsoft won the enterprise by default.
I don't think they got overconfident at all - I think that slack was relatively well built but lacking too much of a value proposition to differentiate themselves. Then they got acquired before anyone realized how much of their usage was marketing driven and how little was driven by the quality of their application.
I'm not saying it's bad by any means - in fact the search functionality is pretty sweet... but there is very little there that couldn't be out competed.
Agree. They came out of the gates with a really well put together chat app, that made a massive impact. Then, basically, didn’t advance it beyond that. It is still great for chat, but Teams is sooo much more useful for the virtual office, and discord waaay better for social. Slack is in an ever decreasing middle zone.
And I think they're starting to regret that acquisition, as their last Q started to show signs of a turnaround. If they had waited and didn't cave in to Wall St pressure, I bet they would've figured things out eventually.
Discord is more like a ventrilo replacement for gamers. It was primarily voice chat in its early days. They've done a lot of work to make the chatroom space on par with any other chat application you'd use otherwise. They also now allow for direct screenshare and game streaming.
I wouldn't ever have considered Discord for Enterprise use at a serious company, but I guess it could do everything Slack can. For personal use it's more versatile for group stuff like gaming or group presentations (my friends have used it for music/video production meetings).
I (as a uni. student, so take it with a grain of salt) am involved in managing several large projects - overseeing 4 teams of around 10 people each. We decided to use Discord as the university did not want to pay Slack workspace licenses and it has been a frustrating experience to say the least.
Comparing to several experiences I have had with similar-sized teams and even a larger, albeit still small-ish, organization, there are many complaints to be had:
- No threads. This one is Discord's Achille's heel when compared to Slack. If you have even two or three simultaneous conversations around the same topic, you either a) are unable to understand what's going on past a certain point or b) need to take the conversation somewhere private, essentially losing one of the main components of the experience.
- No archiving channels. Seriously. I have categories in my Discord servers to archive stuff, and it just means that there is a dump of channels clobbering the interface for day-to-day operation. The Slack model where they are tucked away in a closet is much better.
- Integrations. Discord bots are cool for music but everything productive, from /gcal to Doodle/GitHub/Trello/Google Drive integration is better on Slack.
One thing I think is overrated is the search. Discord's sucks, and while Slack search works reasonably well, I do find it hard to remember relevant information to put in the search prompt. Essentially I think that you still need an external place to store persistent documentation and more durable information, be it VCS issues, wikis (Notion has been a product I started using recently and seems pretty cool), but even there threads help write the docs.
Where Slack falters is not-text. As ludicrous as this sounds, I have seen cases of teams using Slack for written communication and falling into Discord for voice channels and transient chat. I think this can be made better with good integration with some communication suite: Zoom? Google Meet? Anyhow, this is where MS Teams comes and eats their lunch. Worse at everything than everyone else, but at least it does it all.
Slack has a million enterprise focused features. If your company's Discord server has to go through eDiscovery for a lawsuit, for example, you are going to have a bad time.
