Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020. Took over a field full of mediocre products with one that "just works" for the casual user. 'to dropbox' was a verb too. Zoom will probably suffer the same fate, where the big corps catch up in UX and the little dedicated product can't keep up with the service you already have access to. When Google manages to properly integrate Gsuite with whatever chat service comes after Meet/Hangouts/Allo, then Zoom's days are numbered.

Does this apply to Slack as well?

Absolutely.

Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company.

Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company.

File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company.

The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat.

These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have gargantuan budgets, extensive engineering headcount, and rich product ecosystems to pair these features with.

> Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company.

That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations.

For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built out with Slack's APIs.

That sounds about as natural as using Xbox Kinect gestures. Additionally, your SLA is now also tied to Slack's, which is a multiplicative downgrade.

Not every integration makes sense. I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs, and I'm also reminded of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Just because you make a choice to integrate with a product doesn't mean it's widely adopted, practical, or wise.

Or supported.

Edit: I want to clarify. I don't mean to be rude, and I wasn't in the room when y'all made these decisions. I just don't think Slack is the ship you want to tie yourselves to, especially not as your control plane.

Sorry, but I have to post this now:

https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl

"xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes."

"You can finally administer your cluster from the same spreadsheet that you use to track your expenses."

It's a (working) joke of course, but a hilarious one.