Better Products Are Hard to Explain Unless Experienced

Having only used MS Teams throughout my professional life, I never truly understood the beauty of Slack until I started using Cursor.

I always wondered what the big deal about Slack was. You can chat and do so many other things in Teams that aren’t even possible in Slack.

I hypothesized from a theoretical perspective, made a checkbox comparison, and concluded that Teams ticked all the boxes Slack did, so there was no need to try it.

Every time I wanted to try, my analytical mindset dominated and said it was just hype, that the actual functionality was the same.

If I were still at an enterprise, I would today feel the same about Cursor. What’s the big deal with Cursor? GitHub Copilot has everything. It checks all the boxes.

If you use both, you’ll immediately prefer Cursor over Copilot. Maybe Copilot is a tad slower. Maybe it’s a bunch of small things that don’t even sound like a big deal until they add up and make the overall experience feel dramatically different.

I’ve felt this “beyond checkboxes” so many times over the last couple of years. Building a startup is helping me see why these products win, even when big companies already offer something similar.

Now I know: it’s never about features, and it’s impossible to explain in words. Don’t bother convincing someone who’s never used Slack why it’s better; you’d always lose the argument.

Most enterprise software experiences suck. We’re trying to change that, in whatever way we can, at Actalyst.

This isn’t a knock on GitHub Copilot. It’s still early. For all we know, Microsoft might nail the execution and make it awesome. They might have the deep pockets to discount it heavily or bundle it smartly, and still win.