[hammerdr]

This saddens and frustrates me as a user. I love screenhero and it does its job well. I've used it for all of my remote interactions over the past year or so and was a happy paying customer (through our company).

Unfortunately, due to other concerns about paying for Slack[1], we probably will not be able to continue to use it. We'll be a once-happy customer that falls victim to this acquisition. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth :(

[1] It is expensive especially at our scale, we already pay for a couple chatroom-type/irc-like services, and the big one: long-lasting offsite chat logs present a difficult hurdle in client negotiations, a headache we just do not need

[jsherwani]

I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be able to continue to use Screenhero. This isn't just PR/marketing-speak, as someone who has spent many years of his life working on this product (that I love), it really does pain me to know that someone who also loved what we'd built will no longer be able to use it.

However, in the grand scheme of things, I (and our team) feels that this is the best step forward for everyone involved (including Screenhero users). Slack is on its way towards becoming the de facto communication tool used by teams (both big and small), and an integrated Screenhero + Slack product just makes the most sense for the most people.

I would love to learn more about why your team can't use Slack, and what we can do to mitigate the issues you've outlined and others that you may not have outlined yet. Please feel free to add me to Screenhero (j at slack-corp.com) and let's have a deeper conversation about this, if you're open to it.

[staunch]

> Slack is on its way towards becoming the de facto communication tool used by teams...

Silicon Valley hubris. Slack rose quickly and it can fall just as quickly. Being anointed by Silicon Valley doesn't make real success a foregone conclusion.

[fennecfoxen]

> I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be able to continue to use Screenhero.

You know what you need to do, to keep these teams happy? You need to continue have a minimal tool that does the thing that people need -- screen sharing -- and does it well, instead of bludgeoning them with a massive general-purpose communications suite that they don't want, which is essentially what you were just cheering about in your recent email.

I'm sure you'll make more money this way, but you needn't expect the people you're abandoning to be happy.

[hammerdr]

We actually use slack (and hipchat, and jive, and whatsapp, and groupme, and skype, and who-knows-what-else.. ugh) for communications that we would consider sanitized for public consumption (so, no discussion about client IP, for example). The only approved chatroom/im tool that we use is GChat, though. The reason for that is that our internal team is comfortable with Google Apps as a (relatively) secure platform for communication.

They also approved of screenhero (I can guess why, but it would be a guess).

They have not approved of slack, hipchat, etc. for client-related communications because they are nervous about having that much liability not under our control. It also makes it difficult for our contracts team that would then be required to explain that client data could now be in either Google Apps or Slack.

I would say that these decisions are going to be SOP for a consultancy of a certain size.

I don't necessary agree with all of these decisions, but I understand and try to empathize with the other parties that would be inconvenienced.

Edit:

I think what happened is that screenhero got a verbal and passionate following within our consultancy that the decision to use screenhero was 'encouraged' into being adopted. We started using it under-the-radar when it was free and when it became paid, the organization realized how many people were using it successfully. It was a ground up effort.

It makes me sad that a tool we found so useful across our organization (which you can see above is incredibly fragmented) is being made inaccessible. I know you're trying to do right by your users and we're just a weird edge case, so no bad feelings. Just wish it were not so :(

[dharma1]

We use slack (distributed team), and I was thinking of starting to use Screenhero.

When can we get Screenhero features in Slack? Any beta testers required? :)

[wallflower]

Slack has a feature where you can auto-expire chat channel logs. However, I have a feeling that may not good enough for your client's/industry compliance standards?

https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Settin...

[fidotron]

Post Sony Pictures a lot of companies have become super wary of it.

I know a good number of high profile companies (including in the HN sense) that won't let you conduct dealings with them via any cloud service. Potential clients/partners really do ask what email service you're using quite early these days, the only universally acceptable answer is self hosted (either Exchange or something else), which strikes me as crazy considering how difficult to do properly that is, but there we are.

[danudey]

The issue I have with Slack is that the one thing I want to pay for is more integrations, but in order to do that I need to shell out $7/mo/user, and doing ten integrations instead of five isn't worth $350/mo. As a result, we just straight up aren't using most of what Slack is great at, and we probably never will.

If they offered a paid tier for just extending the number of integrations available, I think it would quickly become far more useful to my team, but none of the rest of the paid features are of any use to any of the teams I'm on at all. I get that I'm probably not the target market, but I would wager that whatever those two extra integrations would cost them to provide us, our team would be able to pay and then some.

[droopyEyelids]

This would be the sweetest pricing structure for a billion uses like a friend-group Slack, a slack for your open source project, a slack for gaming clans, a slack for your minecraft server, a slack for small non-profits or small businesses, a slack for families.

Right now, the free tier only gets you basically an isolated version of every other free messaging service around. If you could pay $8/month for each additional integration, small slacks would go from being an {inconvenience OR huge bill} to something everyone with technical ability could use to integrate a million different signals with the people they care about.

I really, really hope slack lets us pay per integration someday.

[aagha]

What's the benefit of using solutions like Slack when there's free (unlimited users/groups/etc.) solutions like Kato.im?