I don’t doubt it but that doesn’t negate the fact that Slack as a company exists and makes money by selling software. My question is this: AI makes it cheaper to build software, but ADP, SAP, and Salesforce also have access to AI and could make cheaper versions of their products. How does AI change the build vs buy trade off in a way that eliminates economies of scale? My opinion and that of the article is that it doesn’t.

> How does AI change the build vs buy trade off in a way that eliminates economies of scale?

I think a more likely scenario here is that something good and free escapes containment at some point and Slack’s core product just kind of deflates. Not something better than Slack, but something good enough that people don’t care about Slack any more.

I don’t see it as a question of whether you build it or buy it, but a question of the time horizon for selling messaging software as a business strategy. Most business strategies have a finite time horizon. How long can you continue to sell messaging software before there are too many competing solutions available and you stop making money from it?

We've already ran this experiment with Zulip and Mattermost. Slack still won.

N=2, no thank you.

Web browsers used to be exclusively paid software, if you were serious. So did operating systems, SQL databases, C++ compilers, and video codecs.

Local software is categorically different that hosted software.

You're too heavily discounting the effort to maintain, deploy, and scale a service like Slack.

Kind of like databases and web servers, then?

I don’t think “categorically different” has legs. I work on the operations & hosting side of applications like this. There’s an operations burden to maintain, deploy, and scale web servers. There’s a burden to rolling out new Linux kernel versions to servers. But we still do it! There would be a burden to running your own Slack, just like there is a burden to running your own email, and people will choose to pay for hosted versions or host it themselves.

And then there are companies and organizations who have strong incentives to self-host to make compliance easier.

I guess to provide a counterpoint to my own comment, even I worked for a company that created their own internal social network similar to Facebook (this was 15 years ago).

Of course it sucked and no one used it except executives and VPs. Everyone else did just enough to meet the minimum quarterly engagement metrics right before performance reviews.

Why don't they sell them?

A list of outcomes:

1. They did, and still sell it. You can buy it.

2. They did, and then exited the market. Employees gradually migrated off the internal platform.

3. They weren’t in the business of selling software, and didn’t sell their internal messaging platform (which is idiosyncratic and closely integrated with other internal system).