Comment by glerk

5 days ago

Discord is a solid product. They just need to launch a simple business-friendly alternative UI without the teenager gamer aesthetics. I’m surprised they never tried going after the enterprise market.

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glerk

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roncesvalles  4 days ago

Enterprise doesn't buy chat/meeting products without PSTN interop (dial-in dial-out to traditional phone line). Discord would probably need to double their dev team to add PSTN.

Building something like Slack or Teams to the level that a F500 company would make it their primary videoconferencing solution is a multi-thousand-employee project. It's not a little skunkworks project for 15-20 people in some corner of the office.

That's why TFA is hilariously flawed. When Altman says "tell us what we should build, we'll probably build it!", he's talking about driveways and backyard pools, not the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like asking mall Santa for a summer home in the Hamptons.

  • glerk  4 days ago

    > multi-thousand-employee project

    I know absolutely nothing about PSTN interop and I'm sure it's very complex to implement. However, at the end of the day, this is just software we're talking about right? Software is cheap and easy to produce these days and I doubt you need thousands of people to implement something that syncs your meeting's audio stream to a phone line especially given that it's a problem that has been solved before.

    • roncesvalles  4 days ago

      Hardly. You're going from analog to digital and vice-versa. You probably need specialized appliances. For every country in the world. And it's "solved" but only in proprietary contexts; I don't think there's a standard. Then you need to operate it - you need SREs, bug fixes, keeping up with downstream changes etc.

      Adding PSTN to Discord is absolutely a Discord-sized problem.

      >Software is cheap and easy to produce these days

      Yeah todo list apps

  • redserk  4 days ago

    There’s a size of enterprise where you can get away without PSTN integration but do need an answer for SSO and account provisioning/deprovisioning.