Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams.
Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe.
It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.
My personal favorite UX-failure-of-the-moment in Teams: If I open the teams tab > Browse, it shows a big list of company-wide channels that I could join. There's a search box, but unlike any normal search box, it only does a prefix search, so if your channel is named "some test channel", and you search for "test", it doesn't find it! Several times I've given up at guessing the right channel name and had to ask coworkers to tell me the exact name in order to join.
Ah, that's probably related to the bug I'm seeing where I've got my Teams calendar synced to my phone, but about half of the events show up an hour later or earlier.
Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
For thirty years now, the world knows that the last company to trust calendars and mail is Microsoft and yet they are all over the place. I have lost all hope for humanity‘s future.
This seems to be a very common response. I definitely believe it but Teams seems ok to me - can make video calls and do text chats. That is all I need it to do, really. Maybe I just haven't used Zoom enough to know what I am missing.
Our company is forcing us to drop slack and use teams. It’s going to be terrible. But hey it saves 600k per year. Never mind that our customer experience will become terrible as team communication fails.
We're all-in on Teams PLUS have management pushing for "service level objectives" on response time. It's impossible to stay on top of the stream of consciousness posts, impossible to find anything you previously answered or value you know is in there somewhere, impossible to measure response time or take ownership of... (what? a chat?). MS keeps cramming poorly thought out "AI-first" features without addressing things like cameras and mics that randomly stop working, blue screens in the middle of meetings. It's such a garbage piece of software that's now THE foundational infrastructure for so many companies. You'll save $600K on the financials and lose $6M across all the things that won't directly show: poor customer service, churn, slower everything, individual and team frustration... but your VP of IT doesn't pay for that.
I worked at a company that went through this. Honestly, it changed the entire mood of the company and working there. We went from thousands of messages per day to something like 10 (of those channels I was part of, at least). People just hated it, and only used it if they really, really needed to. No more bouncing of ideas around, no more ribbing, just the desperate 'who do I talk to about accomplishing X, anyone know?'
A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a couple years later - through both people literally quitting over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
The good thing: When you switch from slack to teams, all channel communications go to 0, because the experience is so dreadful, so you don't get 100 channels to read.
I worry about this too. Diversity is a good thing. And when we do email, DNS, Web, calendars, chat, meetings, storage, etc. all on the same platform, how will we operate/communicate when it fails?
Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
As if slack was any better. I never understand how people accepted this piece of crappy software for regular communication. I mean it has the populate when scrolling behaviour that everyone hates in website design, but somehow it's acceptable for a chat app where looking at past messages is crucial?! I mean you just displayed those messages to me yesterday, why do you need to reload them from the server today. The amount of space saving compared to the bloated mess that your electron app is can't be worth it?! That would be not so infuriating if the search wasn't so crappy that it's often easier to find things by scrolling.
The there's the whole mess when using multiple a mobile and desktop app. It often happens that I get slack message notifications from my phone in my pocket while the open desktop app sometimes takes another minute to get the same message. The same happens with huddles, why does my phone ring abut not my desktop app? And one of my colleagues even has the problem that when he picks up a call on the desktop it opens up on his phone.
I agree that teams is a mess, but IMO mainly because of the mess that is calendering... around it. The calls and messaging parts are OK. In contrast slack can't even get it's core competency right.
It's gonna be terrible. There are so many teams integrations with github, jira, our deployments etc that took busywork off my plate when I was at a slack company and has slowed down me down a ton when I went to a teams org. Sorry man.
I just had to use Slack again after 6 years, and it's incredible how much worse its gotten. Honestly I don't know how they managed to make an industry leading tool actively worse by so much that its now _worse_ than Teams.
Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
Sorry if I'm ignorant, but how can slack cost 600k/year? I doubt they wouldn't give some form of deal for bigger companies. I know integrations can sometimes suck up money, but 600k is insane
i hated using MS Teams (in the past) so much, i would probably look for a new job immediately if my company decided to do this today. I’m not joking in the slightest. And i’m not a slack fan boy, i just dislike MS Teams that much.
These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
I think the cracks that ultimately led me to quit corporate IT and pursue being an artist were first formed when leadership insisted that the entire company switch to Teams under the guise of saving $9 a month per user.
I never really understand allthe hating on Teams around here. I use it at work for team meetings, often with people in multiple timezones, on desktop and mobile, and it just works. Its not a stellar experience, but it does just quietly get the job done. The whole, largish company runs on it.
That is exactly the thing. It never just works. There are new bugs plaguing our company on a daily basis. And they change daily. Can't share screen today. can't unmute. unread messages will never become read. Can't call anyone. Meeting invites only updated for one attendee. meeting alerts don't pop up. trying to open basic windows takes upwards of a full minute(workflows panel for example). these are just some of the things from the last couple weeks. The problem is that it's never a consistent experience. It becomes a time sink of eternal FOMO because it cannot be trusted.
None of that mentions the terrible UX(why do emojis take 10s to load?). When your company is remote first, it's a complete disaster.
I only have to use teams as a contractor thankfully for a single client. Not a single meeting I’ve had in two years of using it has been free of someone having some kind of issue specific to teams itself, including me.
I've worked at companies that use both Slack and Teams, and the chat culture that Slack creates is hugely different than Teams. Have you experienced both? Teams chat rooms are ghost towns compared to Slack. The UX of teams discourages chat, syncing is a mess so ordering is all funky, and good luck finding anything written in the past. Slack is so good at search that we have channels with just feeds of auto-generated information, and there's a good chance anything you need to know is in one of those channels. (company is 800+ people doing 300m ARR)
I think on HN, it might be because smaller teams are using it and aren't actually managing it properly. I get the impression they are just rolling it out as a free for all and not restricting who can add apps and channels etc. Of course it will turn into a mess if you allow that.
Features that worked in mIRC in the 1990s are broken, like sending messages. Right this second if I click to reply to someone's message, I can't add a message in Japanese unless I copy-paste it in. This happens every few months. I can't tag people who have non-English names reliably.
It crashes my browser. There are weird security settings, and when you have multiple environments, it is completely unusable without having multiple browsers. Sometimes you can't log in without clearing your cache completely.
It is sheerly anti-organic, adding features no one wants.
I'm literally taking time out of my vacation to complain about it, fml.
I don't understand all the hate for Jira to be honest. I've used it at various companies and I think it's fine. You can absolutely customize Jira into a monstrosity that sucks to use, but that's true of many ticket systems. I think that the out of the box experience is reasonable though.
If you're in a company with a very top-down model/mentality, Teams is fine. Your comms are mostly in small groups or DMs, which Teams seems to really push users towards.
The whole channel experience is horrible and really degrades any attempt at having open communications in a company.
However, if you are a "flat" company that does everything in the open, Teams is going to work against you; this is one of the qualities that makes Slack great. Its whole approach pushes more things out into the open for more collaboration.
Sad but true. If you run Teams you're more likely to be what some people would consider a slow death corporate hell hole. Thankfully last place I had like that was a husk of a company so I enjoyed a flexible work schedule since literally no one knew what I was doing and no one cared. I logged in, ran an offshore stand up, did the days activities to maintain schedule, and left whenever I wanted to. Liminal office spaces aren't so bad when you can leave anytime and get decent fast food for lunch. Good times!
People use Teams because they're already using Microsoft office products and it is "free" in that way. Then it's entrenched and folks can't imagine doing things any other way.
(Disclaimer: Teams is in my "red flag" list when evaluating a company - I hate it that much)
Teams is not popular because it does something that no other app does. It is popular (IMO) because it does everything (calendar, chat, videoconference, and wiki - all of it badly) and, if you're a Windows user, you're paying for it one way or another.
All that Microsoft had to do during the pandemic (which is when they unleashed Teams) was to approach a higher-up and pitch "why would you pay for Slack and Zoom when our product does the same? And since it's already included in your Office license you're already paying for it, so really, you're throwing money away". I know me and my friends complained about it, but so what? The company saved on licensing costs and IT people are always complaining anyway. And while the bundling of Teams got Microsoft in trouble in the EU [1] they still haven't paid any fines for it (I think) so it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have done that.
Comments like this are the real source of dread on HN. The guy built a successful side hustle that clearly has found a place in the market, and people just want to shit on it and virtue signal how much cooler they are than ms teams. If it’s not for you, move along if you don't have anything useful to contribute.
Honestly I'm here for it, because it's an option for a market of groups that don't otherwise have the opportunity to deploy this kind of capability. Teams feelings aside :)
I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript API.
A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option at all to solve them is pretty nice.
Gosh, I just recently talked our management out of taking the Teams turn after Skype sunset was scheduled, in favor of another solution. I thought maybe I'm too biased against M$ due to all those coworkers' accounts being blocked for no reason without any way to reinstate - but reading through this thread is a sure confirmation I was right
Looks like a great product and congratulations on your success.
I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
There is good reason why these posts don’t regularly make front page.
The genre of content is regularly abused by hypesters. There is a forum / podcast dedicated to this kind of success story and it is just massive cheerleading and success bias.
If you go look for it, you’ll find it.
HN readers achieving this success either don’t need or don’t want the attention that might come with this kind of content marketing.
It’s much more interesting to learn about detailed technical solutions engineering and the SOTA.
There's limited space on the front page, and the topic of AI is so prevalent, it occupies a lot, every day. Right now 10 out of 30 stories on the front page are about AI and LLMs.
Yeah, it's a Trump-related political outrage, or it's an AI thing. I feel anecdotally like the AI-related things are even more prevalent, but would love to see some data on it.
The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
I'll speak as someone who is part of the problem. As groucho Marx says, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member!
HN is a victim of its own popularity. Things just get diluted and more mainstreamy by people like me, who are perhaps hackers in spirit but don't have much to show for it.
I work in IT at an international company everyone knows the name of. I've got a garden and there are meals in my fridge made of meat from pigs I raised. I've got furniture in my house my wife and I made years ago in a different state.
I'll submit random articles, but never a show HN. How could I? Woodgearsca built a woodworking shop out of his woodworking shop. No one cares about the tables I built. I try to speak only when I know I can contribute, but im very unsure i raise the quality here.
I've submitted articles that I thought were really valuable, and never had any success [0] (maybe the first is too business-y, not hacker-ish, but I genuinely believe what I wrote there matters and it's worth understanding, at least in the sense it was transformative for me when I did understand it) and then an article on a random weekend project a friend and I did made the top five on the front page [1] and stayed there for ages.
People very much just might care about the tables you make! Especially if you can share something you learned.
Do you have a blog or Instagram or something with your work? Non computer projects sometimes get traction here if they are unusual or interesting or are made by a regular or whatever criteria the hivemind uses to choose the upvotes.
I'd like to take a look, in case there is one where my spider sense feels that can farm some karma. (Obliviously, my spider sense can fail!)
I was not expecting this comment here but it tracks with my observations.
Things that previously could be taken for granted now require applied thought and physical capability.
For example, people regularly ask how to find reasonably priced housing in /r/askPortland. The OP usually mentions constant looking at Zillow and other sites / apps.
Very, very few good deals will be found there because the marketplace is too fluid and too accessible. You gotta hustle on the ground in the neighborhood you want to be in to find the best housing compromises.
Used to be you could wing it on craigslist.
From concert tickets to new Nike shoes, you want a good seat / common size? How about a nice family campsite?
Well you better have set up automation. It’s to the point where public swim lessons can’t be got without a bot. Unless, you go to the pool and ask about lessons not scheduled on the internet.
It is an absolute hustle, across the minor daily desires of good things and experiences.
Those products rejected by the most motivated get binned into some consultant optimized vertically integrated reseller.
The services get marketed heavily with dark patterns just to cancel their membership.
Yes, but maybe this rose-tinted glasses, but it seems like every week we would have a story like yours, an essay from Patio11 on how much money Bingo Cards are making, Nathan Barry talking about how a book launch earnt him $50k in a weekend, Brennan Dunn launching a course for 5 figures etc.
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
The popular keywords for some time have been AI, Trump, Russia, Ukraine.
As these are hot topics, the "Hacker" part of HN has taken a noticeable backseat. There are still interesting submissions but they don't reach the front page that often.
For example, there's a huge thread on this very post about the source site because of its supposed origins.
Well, perhaps people see such success stories for what they are, well curated commodity flowers in the walled gardens of the major players, who will not hesitate to pluck them the instant they threaten to have any kind of uncontrolled growth. It's "ISVs" all over again, commoditization of complements etcetera, the tech molemen that serve the big machines.
AI looks to many as a wall buster, at least for the time being, so even if breakout success is unlikely you can't blame people for at least trying to escape the underground caverns where the "widely successful" ceiling is capped at perhaps reaching a FAANG manager level of compensation.
I quit a AU$300k job almost exactly 2 years ago to work on my ‘side project’ full-time. My partner too: it’s our only income.
I earn perhaps 20% what I used to. We just quit our lease and sold all our stuff so we can live in a cheap country for a while. I’ve never been poorer. I’m 48.
It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
Nothing beats the freedom and fulfillment of owning and operating your own business. A job at a FAANG company with a high salary is so overrated. I know, since I have worked in multiple FAANG companies over the last 12 years.
You make that salary only if you physically live near Silicon Valley, or some other HCOL areas where FAANG have offices. And guess what? The world is bigger.
True, and the author also said that they are working with a 20 person team. But looking at those growth projections they will likely double in a few years.
> Every time I check out competitors' sites — those who also build knowledge base or customer support platforms — I notice something odd. Almost all of them use third-party tools like Intercom or Zendesk to support their own customers. That surprises me. If your product is so great — why don’t you use it yourself? For me, that’s a golden rule: your product should be so good you want to use it yourself. If not, that means something’s wrong.
Is this not just because Intercom and Zendesk have their own ticketing systems tightly integrated to the docs? Integrating the two allows e.g. customer query auto-reply based on RAG with the documentation, or auto-replying with the 3 support articles most likely to solve the problem. I assume Perfect Wiki has no equivalent ticket integration?
I also see it as a contingency plan. How do customers get help from you if your service has interrupted downtime? Relying on separate systems helps you be available still. It's one of those things that is not a problem until it's a problem.
BTW - I see you have a LLM answering questions based on your docs on the help pages (which is great). So really I mean for customer support issues that are raised outside this channel
When working for my former employer, we rolled our own help center, but after awhile, it was deemed easier and cheaper to just cut it and transfer everything to zendesk.
This is cool, I never even heard of MS Team's marketplace. My wife uses Teams a lot for work and likes it. I should put BrowserBox on there. I need marketing ideas.
The way he did product research to find out what customers really needed, after testing the waters with a translator, was really good.
Definition of make something people want. Classic way business has always been created, by keen observation of the market. Well done!
What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store. I’ve become so accustomed to thinking of releasing on Apple first that I didn’t even know you could make money through Teams addons.
Other ecosystems are smaller (probably nothing has more consumers than the two major app stores) but often much higher intent. The same person who you have to coax into paying $1 for an iOS app won’t bat an eye at a productivity tool that costs $20/mo.
So while the platform has less reach the lower competition and higher RPUs make them great. If I were still making games I’d be looking at Steam before iOS, for instance.
>What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store.
Which is very limiting considering that the Apple ecosystem, other than for phones, is the smallest one. A lot of software companies don't even target Apple at all because it's not worth it.
However, this is one of my frustrations about Teams - it absolutely sucks, and what few integrations it has from Microsoft absolutely sucks. You are already paying too much to MS for it to not be working properly.
God knows how much my company is giving to Microsoft for us to have crappy and expensive (read: time wasting) experiences with Teams, Windows 11 onboarding, Azure DevOps (better than what wr had, at least), Visual Studio 2022, etc.
In my (admittedly very limited) experience, Teams was almost free when you're already paying for microsoft 365. At least last time I had any involvement with it, the price difference between having teams in the bundle or not was negligible. It makes it cheaper than any competitor.
Now in reality, I think the true cost is hidden by the frustration it causes (some?) users, but it's very hard to quantify that in a dollar amount. Which is why companies stick with Teams.
The hidden cost is also the removal of competition. Google get more heat for browser "monopoly" when they even provide a free browser base for others to customise, and Microsoft gets almost none for incredibly overwhelmingly anti-competitive behaviour around lock-in to Office, Teams, Sharepoint, Azure.
Yup. That's because they had actual competition in the space. Throwing a (bad) Slack clone for free was a way of preserving and extending their monopoly.
But you're still paying for it. The costs to build and fund the product still exist, and are still coming out of customer payments. Manipulating their pricing to manipulate their customers doesn't change that.
Very cool story! I love it. Here’s a direct archive link for those who want to support their fellow tech folks but don’t want to support habr, which directly funds Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:
Readit News
Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams.
Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe.
It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.
Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a couple years later - through both people literally quitting over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
The bad thing: it all moves to private messages
Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
The there's the whole mess when using multiple a mobile and desktop app. It often happens that I get slack message notifications from my phone in my pocket while the open desktop app sometimes takes another minute to get the same message. The same happens with huddles, why does my phone ring abut not my desktop app? And one of my colleagues even has the problem that when he picks up a call on the desktop it opens up on his phone.
I agree that teams is a mess, but IMO mainly because of the mess that is calendering... around it. The calls and messaging parts are OK. In contrast slack can't even get it's core competency right.
Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
None of that mentions the terrible UX(why do emojis take 10s to load?). When your company is remote first, it's a complete disaster.
I only have to use teams as a contractor thankfully for a single client. Not a single meeting I’ve had in two years of using it has been free of someone having some kind of issue specific to teams itself, including me.
Source: I run a SAAS where we have to unfortunately support integrating with MS Teams (for training etc).
Jira on ghe other hand.....
Features that worked in mIRC in the 1990s are broken, like sending messages. Right this second if I click to reply to someone's message, I can't add a message in Japanese unless I copy-paste it in. This happens every few months. I can't tag people who have non-English names reliably.
It crashes my browser. There are weird security settings, and when you have multiple environments, it is completely unusable without having multiple browsers. Sometimes you can't log in without clearing your cache completely.
It is sheerly anti-organic, adding features no one wants.
I'm literally taking time out of my vacation to complain about it, fml.
The whole channel experience is horrible and really degrades any attempt at having open communications in a company.
However, if you are a "flat" company that does everything in the open, Teams is going to work against you; this is one of the qualities that makes Slack great. Its whole approach pushes more things out into the open for more collaboration.
Teams is a different beast
Teams is not popular because it does something that no other app does. It is popular (IMO) because it does everything (calendar, chat, videoconference, and wiki - all of it badly) and, if you're a Windows user, you're paying for it one way or another.
All that Microsoft had to do during the pandemic (which is when they unleashed Teams) was to approach a higher-up and pitch "why would you pay for Slack and Zoom when our product does the same? And since it's already included in your Office license you're already paying for it, so really, you're throwing money away". I know me and my friends complained about it, but so what? The company saved on licensing costs and IT people are always complaining anyway. And while the bundling of Teams got Microsoft in trouble in the EU [1] they still haven't paid any fines for it (I think) so it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have done that.
</rant>
[1] https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-teams-eu-european-union...
Oracle have a dark team working on what will become "Oracle Team Fusion".
I'm looking forward to the competition.
I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript API.
A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option at all to solve them is pretty nice.
Deleted Comment
I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
The genre of content is regularly abused by hypesters. There is a forum / podcast dedicated to this kind of success story and it is just massive cheerleading and success bias.
If you go look for it, you’ll find it.
HN readers achieving this success either don’t need or don’t want the attention that might come with this kind of content marketing.
It’s much more interesting to learn about detailed technical solutions engineering and the SOTA.
The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.
It's heady times, anyway, that's for sure.
I'll speak as someone who is part of the problem. As groucho Marx says, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member!
HN is a victim of its own popularity. Things just get diluted and more mainstreamy by people like me, who are perhaps hackers in spirit but don't have much to show for it.
I work in IT at an international company everyone knows the name of. I've got a garden and there are meals in my fridge made of meat from pigs I raised. I've got furniture in my house my wife and I made years ago in a different state.
I'll submit random articles, but never a show HN. How could I? Woodgearsca built a woodworking shop out of his woodworking shop. No one cares about the tables I built. I try to speak only when I know I can contribute, but im very unsure i raise the quality here.
I've submitted articles that I thought were really valuable, and never had any success [0] (maybe the first is too business-y, not hacker-ish, but I genuinely believe what I wrote there matters and it's worth understanding, at least in the sense it was transformative for me when I did understand it) and then an article on a random weekend project a friend and I did made the top five on the front page [1] and stayed there for ages.
People very much just might care about the tables you make! Especially if you can share something you learned.
[0]: https://daveon.design/what-are-you-optimising-for.html and https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...
[1]: https://daveon.design/adventures-making-vegemite.html
If you rose them at home, contrary to a dedicated farm, I want to hear about it!
Do you have a blog or Instagram or something with your work? Non computer projects sometimes get traction here if they are unusual or interesting or are made by a regular or whatever criteria the hivemind uses to choose the upvotes.
I'd like to take a look, in case there is one where my spider sense feels that can farm some karma. (Obliviously, my spider sense can fail!)
Take a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?q=woodworking
Deleted Comment
People will reproduce what you made - to the pixel.
It is really, really frustrating. Founders who have experienced this learn to avoid sharing the stories on HN, etc.
Things that previously could be taken for granted now require applied thought and physical capability.
For example, people regularly ask how to find reasonably priced housing in /r/askPortland. The OP usually mentions constant looking at Zillow and other sites / apps.
Very, very few good deals will be found there because the marketplace is too fluid and too accessible. You gotta hustle on the ground in the neighborhood you want to be in to find the best housing compromises.
Used to be you could wing it on craigslist.
From concert tickets to new Nike shoes, you want a good seat / common size? How about a nice family campsite?
Well you better have set up automation. It’s to the point where public swim lessons can’t be got without a bot. Unless, you go to the pool and ask about lessons not scheduled on the internet.
It is an absolute hustle, across the minor daily desires of good things and experiences.
Those products rejected by the most motivated get binned into some consultant optimized vertically integrated reseller.
The services get marketed heavily with dark patterns just to cancel their membership.
It is tough out there.
The popular keywords for some time have been AI, Trump, Russia, Ukraine.
As these are hot topics, the "Hacker" part of HN has taken a noticeable backseat. There are still interesting submissions but they don't reach the front page that often.
For example, there's a huge thread on this very post about the source site because of its supposed origins.
AI looks to many as a wall buster, at least for the time being, so even if breakout success is unlikely you can't blame people for at least trying to escape the underground caverns where the "widely successful" ceiling is capped at perhaps reaching a FAANG manager level of compensation.
Hmm. I see a lot of people trying to build products on top of models trained by other people, which seems very vulnerable.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He chances on a Mastiff as powerful as handsome Fat, sleek, who had strayed by chance.
To attack him, quarter him Lord Wolf would gladly do;
But he would have to join battle,
And the Mastiff was of such stature As to defend himself with ease.
So the Wolf approaches him humbly, Enters into conversation, compliments him On his girth, which he admires.
"You fine sir could be as fat as me" Replied the Dog.
"Leave the woods, you would do well: Your like are miserable there,
Dunces, hairshirts and poor devils, Their estate is to die of hunger.
Every bite of food is hard won By dint of fang and claw. For what?
Follow me: you would have a fate much better." The Wolf replied, "What must I do?"
"Almost nothing," replied the Dog, "Chase beggars And people carrying sticks;
To flatter those at home, to please one's Master: In exchange your salary would be
A great many scraps of all kinds: Bones of chickens, bones of pigeons,
Without mentioning many caresses." The Wolf already imagines a happiness
Which makes him teary from fondness. Walking along, he saw the bald neck of the Dog.
"What is it there?" he said. - Nothing. - What? Nothing? - Nothing much.
But still? - The collar by which I am tethered Is perhaps the cause of what you see.
"Tethered?" said the Wolf: So you do not run Wherever you want? - Not always; but what matters it?
It matters so much that all your meals I would not want in any wise or manner,
And would not desire even a treasure at such price." This said, master Wolf runs off, and he runneth still.
— Jean de La Fontain, 1668 ( translated by Tad Boniecki)
I earn perhaps 20% what I used to. We just quit our lease and sold all our stuff so we can live in a cheap country for a while. I’ve never been poorer. I’m 48.
It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
Or. If you like the idea of having no boss, no standup meetings, no Jira, no commutes, no open office plan, etc.
And $250k is the current point on the graph - it could be $1m this time next year.
> Every time I check out competitors' sites — those who also build knowledge base or customer support platforms — I notice something odd. Almost all of them use third-party tools like Intercom or Zendesk to support their own customers. That surprises me. If your product is so great — why don’t you use it yourself? For me, that’s a golden rule: your product should be so good you want to use it yourself. If not, that means something’s wrong.
Is this not just because Intercom and Zendesk have their own ticketing systems tightly integrated to the docs? Integrating the two allows e.g. customer query auto-reply based on RAG with the documentation, or auto-replying with the 3 support articles most likely to solve the problem. I assume Perfect Wiki has no equivalent ticket integration?
The way he did product research to find out what customers really needed, after testing the waters with a translator, was really good.
Definition of make something people want. Classic way business has always been created, by keen observation of the market. Well done!
So while the platform has less reach the lower competition and higher RPUs make them great. If I were still making games I’d be looking at Steam before iOS, for instance.
Slack addons or plugins used to be a good example before it was acquired by Salesforce.
Which is very limiting considering that the Apple ecosystem, other than for phones, is the smallest one. A lot of software companies don't even target Apple at all because it's not worth it.
However, this is one of my frustrations about Teams - it absolutely sucks, and what few integrations it has from Microsoft absolutely sucks. You are already paying too much to MS for it to not be working properly.
God knows how much my company is giving to Microsoft for us to have crappy and expensive (read: time wasting) experiences with Teams, Windows 11 onboarding, Azure DevOps (better than what wr had, at least), Visual Studio 2022, etc.
Now in reality, I think the true cost is hidden by the frustration it causes (some?) users, but it's very hard to quantify that in a dollar amount. Which is why companies stick with Teams.
But you're still paying for it. The costs to build and fund the product still exist, and are still coming out of customer payments. Manipulating their pricing to manipulate their customers doesn't change that.
https://youneedawiki.com/
As the files are all stored in Google Drive, so there's no vendor lock-in.
The documentation site is also made with their product: https://docs.youneedawiki.com/
Except for Google Drive
[0] https://github.com/nytimes/library
https://archive.is/wDHrB