Atlassian is back with another chat app, Stride. Their original competitor in the space, HipChat, already lost to Slack. That makes Stride like The Bride in Kill Bill, seeking vengeance at all costs.
We all know HipChat lost on UX because it’s not fun. In 2014, Slack was crowned the fastest-growing workplace software of all time. So how does Stride compete with such explosive popularity? It poses as the responsible alternative to Slack, and that's just lazy.
There’s one recurring criticism when it comes to Slack. Focusing on one conversation is hard. I get it. There are almost always multiple conversations going on in a single Slack channel. When held up against the focused experience of reading email, Slack is all over the place.
Look, I’m not a digital native. Born in 1983, I’m only on the cusp of being a Millennial. Slack is easy for me because I grew up with AOL Instant Messenger and chat rooms. I can make sense of it. It must be even easier for kids who grew up with texting.
It’s intuitive to follow multiple threads if you have been doing it since you learned how to read. It’s a matter of cognition. We're talking about developmental learning that takes place early on in life.
My generation is often accused of rotting our brains with TV and video games. That tired argument's lazier than launching a single syllable Slack killer called Stride. All I’m saying is that “rotting our brains” might have prepared us for Slack. Anyone who struggles to keep up with Slack should reflect on all the hours they didn’t play video games.
Slack launched a feature called Threads earlier this year. It read as a direct response to criticism about messages being hard to follow on their platform. Slack Threads, which sounds like a hippie bedsheet brand, does what it's supposed to do. If you want to centralize all the information related to a given topic, Threads has you covered.
The problem is that the user has to make a conscious choice to use the feature. A thread doesn’t begin and end with total clarity. There’s always a straggler who misses the thread and unspools it all over the entire channel.
Atlassian uses this weakness to characterize Slack as a chaotic way to kill time. Their slogan on the homepage for Stride is “Put conversations to work,” as if Slack users are wasting time. Clear aside, Slack users. Stride users are here to do grown-up work. It's absurd. They’re saying one of the most entrepreneurial generations in modern history can’t focus.
(To be fair, Slack's slogan on its newly redesigned website reads, "Where Work Happens." So it appears this is the narrative they're both engaging in now.)
Stride comes packed with a bevy of other features. But they're nothing more than incremental improvements like a new take on video integration. When I browsed the Stride marketing site, three takeaways emerged. It’s cheaper, it’s more conservative and neither of those points matter because it’s not Slack.
The name Stride even sounds like they're in denial about Slack winning the chat space. This launch proves they are not taking Slack in stride.
It’s no surprise that they’re undercutting Slack on price. Atlassian does that with Bitbucket, which provides insight into the strategy behind Stride. Along with JIRA, Bitbucket is a GitHub competitor. GitHub and Bitbucket are the most well-known Git platforms. (Git is open-source software that is essential for most developers.)
GitHub is so cool that it has an inspired mascot called the Octocat. It’s so celebrated/marketed that there is an epic gallery called The Octodex. Using GitHub is a joy. Its design is so practical and full of understated details. It’s the thinnest possible layer between the codebase and the UI you could want.
Developers link to their work on GitHub when they submit their online profiles for jobs. It’s a mainstay of today's hacker culture. It’s free to use, except if you want to make your code repository private. That makes sense because GitHub is a social platform as much as it is code-versioning software.
Bitbucket is the antisocial platform. Bitbucket’s slogan is “The Git solution for professional teams.” As with Stride, Atlassian is marketing its products to the crowd that doesn’t want to have fun. And, oh yeah, it’s free to host a private repo. Take that GitHub.
Slack and GitHub win on culture. They represent Silicon Valley's brash dismissal of tradition. They are the Barack Obama to Atlassian’s Mitt Romney.
All Atlassian can do is compete on price and pose as a more responsible app. They claim to provide the conservative alternative that will take care of business. But all they do is strip GitHub and Slack of their culture. Then they package them into a suite of applications like Microsoft.
Atlassian is traded on NASDAQ and they have a $7.86 billion market cap. Woo-hoo. Is that all we want from a software company in 2017? Market cap?
We don’t hear the word Twitter 100 times a day because they were the first to broadcast messages online. A culture that reflected a new, connected, immediate world emerged from their platform. Others copied and surpassed their design, but Twitter won on culture.
For Slack to do that in the workplace earns them a home in my heart. Atlassian needs to stop mischaracterizing the software my generation loves. It's not holding us back. It provides an opportunity for us to express our authentic selves at work.
