I had a conversation with Tony Conrad at the StrictlyVC event in San Francisco last week, following a dizzyingly talented line-up of Chamath Palihapitiya and Steve Jurvetson.
Techcrunch has a good write-up with a number of the relevant quotes from the event. The only thing I’d like to respond to, because it wasn’t a direct quote, is the headline “Move Over Slack? Automattic Mulls Commercializing Its Own Internal Messaging Product.”
The first problem is the headline missed the obvious alliteration of “Mullenweg Mulls,” 😀but more importantly… Slack has become a really key tool for both Automattic and WordPress.org and anything we do with the evolution of P2 (some of which we already have running internally) will be complementary to Slack, not competitive with it.
Nice
I was wondering about that article! It never seemed to me that there was any competition there. From what I’ve seen on the Make WordPress P2s or the O2 theme that was released, it’s a separate but awesome product!
Only question is, what can be commercialized? Hasn’t the entire project been released on Github already?
As soon as you expand past one P2 a lot of extra stuff is needed, and we’ve built all that internally, so have some interesting things to offer companies larger than a few dozen people.
If we’re submitting headline re-writes:
“Matt Sacks Slackbot? Mullenweg Mulls Moving to Automattic Messenger Made Autonomously”
Why not take on slack. It is not that great and many people would prefer a gpl alternative?
Pete
We’re pretty happy with it. Some other people are working on an OS alternative already:
http://www.mattermost.org/