It looks more corporate than Discord despite being worse in every other way. It's been years and they are adding low quality features at a fraction of the rate of Discord who is still thriving. It also has better GSuite integration, I suppose?
I guess one other thing about Slack is that I can completely ignore it after work. Like having work inside a single app that is for nothing else. For some godawful reason Go and Kotlin decided to use Slack, but that just means we can safely ignore those places.
Yes, the USP of Slack is that you can close it down when you're done working for the day. It does nothing better, or much worse, than any other social media chat application, except it wraps up work in one button press.
Not sure how you could monetize that but hopefully the Slack staff doesn't know either.
Slack was everywhere, years before Discord was in common use. Discord, really, was just Slack for gamers - but more importantly, it was a replacement for Teamspeak and self-hosted forums.
It's a more user friendly IRC with many extra features. While pro users might still prefer their IRC terminal client with text only commands (that's also what I prefer), it's clear that most users prefer a fully featured rich UI with things like video calls in addition to chat.
Work chat. There have been many iterations of chat products for companies and Slack just did exactly what people needed it to do with a pleasant enough interface.
That said, the Slack vs Microsoft Teams numbers go to show the power of ecosystem integration and a widespread network of existing customers.
(and how easily you can fudge numbers of active users if you force install Teams on every Windows 11 machine and force it to run in the background, same as ignoring browser or search engine preferences and always force Internet Explorer Edge and Bing down people's throat until they suffocate in it)
The key problem they tried to solve was to keep distributed teams in sync, according to the above link, and for that it really does work, I think because it has the Channels concept and also because it isn't some "crazy open source hacker thing".
Nothing that IRC doesn't have, but they sold it better.
Google Chat is still my favourite just because it integrates nicely with Google office apps. Teams is pretty buggy. Skype is largely dead. But the killer feature of Google Chat is that you know it is private, whereas you always get the feeling that Slack is not.
> Nothing that IRC doesn't have, but they sold it better.
I think that's really underselling Slack, between threads, attachments, code snippets, reactions, etc.
For example a Slack pattern I've seen multiple times is teams offering an help channel for their internal users, with one thread per question, and using reaction icons to track which have been answered. It works amazingly well even with thousands of users. I like IRC, but I think it would be really chaotic in comparison.
I mean there are going to be a lot of creative approaches to something ubiquitous, I agree. But even IRC you can create your own channel and invite people to it. Slack is slicker, but the whole use case is still dramatically underserved.
That's a fair comment, but remember that threads didn't exist in early-slack.
Personally I love IRC, but at the same time I've not used it seriously in many many years. Slack? It has problems, but I've used it daily across multiple companies.
My biggest "win" with Slack is going offline for an hour, or more, a day, to avoid the notification-fatigue.
Group - async and realtime - comms that scales (i.e., group grows) better than most alternatives.
The integrations also allow Slack to become a dashboard of sorts. Key external events can be logged in Slack. You don't have to find them, they find you.
Not a Slack fan per se. Just trying to answer the question.
If one answers that with just "workplace chat messaging", Slack looks redundant and unnecessary since the world already had IRC, ICQ, AOL AIM, Yahoo Chat, Skype, etc.
E.g. in the early Facebook years (~2005), Zuckerberg and his team used AOL AIM as their chat system at work because Slack didn't exist. Early Twitter is another example where Jack Dorsey and coworkers used AOL AIM for workplace chat. (Indeed, Jack even said he got inspiration for Twitter from AIM's "away status" feature)
So we have to find the differentiator of Slack that attracted businesses to adopt it instead of just using IRC or Skype:
- Slack lets people subdivide the chat space into "virtual rooms" or "channels" as a 1st-class concept. This is something that the older AOL AIM, Skype, Pidgin client, etc didn't do. This feature is helpful for businesses because you have multiple projects or teams where multiple people collaborate with various subsets of employees. The older chat systems enabled 1-to-1 messaging based on userid but not on "topics" with 1-to-many participants.
- Slack userids are scoped to the company which is more acceptable for private chats within the business. In contrast, the userids in AOL AIM were global ids and therefore not constrained to the particular company's communication. (Slack added ability to chat outside the company recently in 2021: https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+chat+with+other+compan...)
- IRC had topic channels but corporations don't want to hassle with admins setting up internal IRC servers and plain IRC doesn't have desired features such as chat history without additional effort (i.e. IRC bouncer). In contrast, using Slack for workplace chat is just a few clicks in the cloud.
In short, Slack had a combination of some extra useful features and near-zero admin (cloud).
But there were already other comparable solutions that existed and had adoption at the time -- eg. HipChat. I get why something like Slack or HipChat beat IRC, but what did Slack do differently than the existing offerings that enabled it to beat them all out so easily?
Arguably one difference between hipchat and slack in 2015 (when I was using hipchat) was slack nailed their design/UX. In turn it influenced the later generation of chat programs (discord, microsoft teams, etc). And they have good marketing.
My company switched to Slack pretty early (mid 2014). IMHO the secret sauce was the volume and quality of integrations so you could pretty quickly turn it into a real-time feed/joint timeline of, well, everything.
The other secret sauce Slack had in 2014 was that hipchat was _constantly_ in a state of outage. There’s probably an opportunity given then number of outages Slack now sees.
Having used both at the time, it was all about UX and marketing.
Back in roughly 2015-2016, some of friends were using Slack at their company and were making fun of how antiquated and uncool HipChat was — even though HipChat had all the same functionality. HipChat had the advantage of being a fast, native app, while Slack was a slow Electron wrapper around a web page. But Slack nailed the UX. It had the aesthetics of a generation of "post-Web 2.0" apps that were coming out that were more real-time and shipping as Electron apps. HipChat just looked old school. Pretty soon my company was on Slack, too.
It also helped that Slack quickly got support for a much richer set of integrations with other apps. HipChat had a bunch, but I think Slack realized this would be the number one way to beat the competition, and they spent a ton of effort on building out this side of the platform. Slack, of course, also had the advantage of focus; HipChat was made by Atlassian, who had a lot of different products to spread their focus more thinly.
Around the same time we saw a similar battle between Google Hangouts and "old school" apps like WebEx and GoToMeeting. The latter were/are native apps, rock stable, but fundamentally uncool. Hangouts was browser-based and super flaky, but somehow cool because they were the latest generation of web UX.
What's interesting right now is that Zoom, a thoroughly clunky and uncool native app (very similar to WebEx or GoToMeeting in that sense) has somehow gained enormous market share, despite the existence of decently mature web-based alternatives. Maybe because Google managed to mess up its chat/videoconferencing so badly.
My company was using Hipchat in 2016 but it was also an web browser (maybe it was nw.js?) wrapper with the following deficiencies compared to slack and we were very glad when they got acquired and we switched:
- Horrible text editor compared to slack (no inline code, no syntax highlighting, lists barely worked, undo barely worked)
- notification preferences (per channel) we’re lacking.
- no threading support
- UI was laggy compared to slack.
- there was an very limited set of emojis.
- no good mobile app.
- few and limited integrations (notably I use GitHub, Jira, and Outlook integrations for slack).
Threads get a lot of credit, but I think a big big value add was custom emojis--hard to understate the value of transforming local workplace memes/jokes into emojis and make them instantly accessible to anyone else in your workspace.
> - Slack lets people subdivide the chat space into "virtual rooms" or "channels" as a 1st-class concept.
In my opinion this is very much a double-edged sword. At my organization we have one person (maybe self-appointed) who, when seeing a question asked on a more general channel, invariably responds with something along the lines of “have you checked #super-niche-channel-probably-only-useful-in-this-exact-case?” When I see one of those questions pop up, I usually try to guess the particular sub channel that he’ll try to redirect the asker to but am rarely successful.
But my org may just be using slack wrong. We do have thousands of channels and the same order of magnitude employees. Maybe guidelines about the granularity of channels would be helpful.
Or maybe Slack is just not for me: e-mail is my preferred method for asynchronous comms and I prefer phone calls for synchronous comms because I think the slight friction in having to pick up a phone to make a call helps limit throughout and improves quality of requests. And for info repositories I prefer a curated wiki page to discussion threads for both search and comprehension.
> And for info repositories I prefer a curated wiki page to discussion threads for both search and comprehension.
This point is so important.
Some folks seem to think that chat threads can serve properly in this role but in my experience both Slack and MS Teams are nearly useless in the role of "info repository."
> Slack userids are scoped to the company which is more acceptable for private chats within the business. In contrast, the userids in AOL AIM were global ids and therefore not constrained to the particular company's communication.
I know for sure that AOL[1] and Yahoo [2] had enterprise messaging services available for some time, but I think they had both shut down that option because of lack of uptake before Slack was started or at least before it rose to promenence. I'd guess MSN had that feature too, but I don't specifically remember. Segregated scopes being the only option makes a big difference though, and timing is also important; Yahoo was making cool products and killing them because there wasn't enough traction only for the market to show up later for years before Google made that cool. Startup idea: look through old Yahoo new product press releases for ideas that worked but were before their time; if Google did it years later and abandoned it, then it's been shown that an independent team can build it, so you probably can too.
XMPP was also years ahead and even federated! At my employer we self hosted a server after AIM and it was great. Lack of persistent history was just a plugin away. Adium was also a nicely polished client which also handled AIM, so the user transition was easy.
Sadly I think Slack was largely marketing and timing: federation was nontrivial (unlike email).
I agree with all points. I'm curious if the makers of Slack actually thought these were the critical differentiators they needed to build to succeed from the beginning, or they built "just another chat app" when they started and eventually had an aha moment
Slack the messaging app was actually the pivot off of an unsuccessful MMORPG. They were writing it for their own internal use. Motivations were somewhat different than you are envisioning.
And the founder's (Stewart Butterfield) earlier company, Flickr, was also a pivot off another unsuccessful game. Man just wants to make games but gets too successful building billion dollar companies.
Made it easy to set up real-time chat in a corporate setting, and normalized the idea.
First of all, before Slack real-time chat in a company setting was a novel idea. Your sysadmin may have been born in IRC, but non-tech people probably never used it. "Why would you chat online when you can in real life!?"
Setting up a chat was full of hurdles and questions without clear answers. Do you use XMPP? IRC? Which clients, which servers? Back then it was still common to have on-premise physical servers, so spinning up a server there was suddenly a big deal. Bigger companies did not appreciate "going rogue" with potentially sensitive company information they may had obligation to secure and archive. It was a lot of friction for something that people weren't convinced was a good idea in the first place.
Slack made it accessible, polished, and corporate-friendly, at a time when SaaS and web apps were catching on. You didn't need to get people install an XMPP client, which was designed for 1:1 chats and had awful afterthought UI for group chats, with different capabilities in each client on each platform. You didn't need to explain to anybody how to keep an irssi session alive. File transfers worked with pretty drag'n'drop without having to open ports.
There was a Microsoft Linq back then, but it was awful, and it was an ICQ clone, not a group chat.
Fun fact: Slack was salvaged from a group chat feature of a failed MMORPG "Glitch".
> "Why would you chat online when you can in real life!?"
Never met anyone I worked with well who thought that, even in the 80s (I ran a BBS (on a MSX2 by the way, written in Pascal) to communicate with my teammates and my business partner; he was sales and he loved it). I preferably only ever work with engineers so that might explain something. The real great thing about this day and age is that now you can just demand it from anyone; I have noticed that other roles in the company also prefer it vs 'real life' because there is a record of everything. So 'minutes of meeting' is copy/paste/export instead of writing from your very bad and biased memory; the latter is basically built in for many (especially corporate in my experience) people who insist on calls and face to face; it's easier to fudge the details and deflect blame for failure ('but I told you this when we had this little meeting a couple of weeks ago remember?'). And that happens basically all the time; it's nice that you can just search an archive and say ; 'you said x, we did x, x didn't work, own it please, now back to work'. Only in case of deflection or blaming of course; everyone does stuff, no-one needs to be called out but if someone calls someone out while being wrong, it's good to get the facts.
All the early startups I worked with used AIM or MSN Messenger.
The main thing Slack did was 1) give each company their own private walled garden, 2) integrations/extension support.
AOL or Microsoft could've owned this space in the 90's... if they thought about it.
Slack made it easy and fun to connect with your coworkers, it wasn't unique, but it was a right time sort of thing.
We had chat systems before like IRC, Hipchat, Campfire, Flowdock (We have used them all), but with Slack it was the first time I felt a push from other departments to use it.
I'm still sad about the implementation of threads that Slack went with, Flowdock did this much, much better, every new post into a thread were also posted in the channel view but with a unique colour, the interaction can be seen here: https://youtu.be/BxRE5GUbFes
I also liked that Flowdock had the concept of an "inbox", so every channel had their own inbox for integrations that wouldn't post a message and notify everyone, but you could still chat with your team about a certain item in the inbox.
It is frustrating that notifications on threads opens the common threads view instead of the main thread view. I would rather have it like HN or Reddit where threads are in the same flow, but with a possibility to expand.
I have no idea. Some of my non-technical colleagues seem to love it for gossip, like baby and vacation photos. They also created lots and lots of topic rooms, like 10x our headcount. Inside it's mostly crickets.
I muted email notifications on the first day and then forgot about it :)
IMHO everything mentioned before to get Slack started, and then their integration efforts with APIs. They catered towards developers, had easy integrations for DevOps workflows.
So Slack was the tool for developers, with a lock-in effect, and other departments just followed (-> product -> marketing -> sales).
Are there any tools that actually take that metaphor more seriously, and really do present the existence of your co-workers as though they were each at their virtual desks etc.? Such that those sitting near you (your "team") can be instantly and easily communicated with while those further away require more effort? Being able to have "overheard" messages vs private "whisper" messages maybe? No idea if it would work but I'm genuinely curious.
There is absolutely a different dynamic in the way communications happen when sharing the same physical space, but most of us seem to assume that dynamic couldn't be introduced for remote work with the right technology...
Irc as a service. You can pay with money instead of losing time maintaining it.
It is more accessible being in the browser so non-technical people can adopt it more easily.
Yes, they added bells and whistles like threading, emojis, and snippets that made the experience even better.
As an aside, I think slack huddles are superior to every other screensharing method out there. Being able to draw on the screen is a killer feature when collaborating.
Before Slack, I found it extremely difficult to send all those cat videos and emojis in emails. Worse still even if I tagged specific people in email to get their attention to watch my cat videos, it was always asynchronous and I never caught enough attention. Thanks to Slack, all attention is now on me and I'm well known in my company. So many emojis on my cat videos now.
This is a very good point. The unifying mechanism for notifications was generally missing across all the varying tools but something like Slack means it’s impossible to miss content no matter how hard you try.
This kind of sarcasm falls flat since slack has very fine grained notification preferences. You can make it as loud or quiet as you want. Of course if your workplace culture doesn’t support IC focus, then you have much bigger problems.
Slack combines addressed to you, important, and time sensitive. Limiting Slack to certain things mitigates this. But they push it as all purpose. And they shut down tools that gave more control.
What tools did they shut down that gave more control? I am subscribed to over 200 channels at my company as well as 4-5 other community Slacks. The controls they provide are fully adequate to tune to my preferences (which involves minimal distraction for deep focus, while still maintaining aware of important incidents and other updates).
I believe the second question is crucial here. In many places I worked it "solves" the problem of people who feel they need an answer now and I should stop whatever I'm doing now and give them my undistracted attention. In other words, Slack is used to prevent me from working.
The main problem here is the expectation of synchronous communication. In email, async is sort of built in - nobody expects my answer 5 seconds after they clicked "Send". With Slack, they get nervous if they have to wait too long.
Yep. This introduces many more problems than it solves.
Slack can be both a tool that gives slack and takes it away. Given its critical mass, the latter seems to be more prevalent given the instant gratification people are expecting.
An ability to send all forms of information (video, images, text) simply and efficiently in an Enterprise setting. Unfortunately it isn’t so efficient due to being Electron-based and introduces more problems of its own. I can’t recall if it does real-time video and transcription to text.
I think Teams will really win out as it’s IM, collaboration tools, real-time tools, and transcription services are the best IMO.
Teams is terrible for sharing code snippets though, something very broken with its backtick markdown. No proper threading for regular chat rooms either though it does have another type of messaging ("posts" within "teams") where it works better.
Sadly, the thread list within teams still looks awfully much like a Skype chat, and people end up using it as such. The New conversation button should open the expanded new thread view that looks more like sending an email and has a title field to encourage proper threaded use. The Microsoft employee who manages to push that through will be an unsung hero of productivity.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadI guess one other thing about Slack is that I can completely ignore it after work. Like having work inside a single app that is for nothing else. For some godawful reason Go and Kotlin decided to use Slack, but that just means we can safely ignore those places.
Not sure how you could monetize that but hopefully the Slack staff doesn't know either.
That said, the Slack vs Microsoft Teams numbers go to show the power of ecosystem integration and a widespread network of existing customers.
The key problem they tried to solve was to keep distributed teams in sync, according to the above link, and for that it really does work, I think because it has the Channels concept and also because it isn't some "crazy open source hacker thing".
Nothing that IRC doesn't have, but they sold it better.
Google Chat is still my favourite just because it integrates nicely with Google office apps. Teams is pretty buggy. Skype is largely dead. But the killer feature of Google Chat is that you know it is private, whereas you always get the feeling that Slack is not.
Regarding IRC, I don't remember having e.g. threads or reactions. It's difficult to add features like that when the messages don't even have an id.
I think that's really underselling Slack, between threads, attachments, code snippets, reactions, etc.
For example a Slack pattern I've seen multiple times is teams offering an help channel for their internal users, with one thread per question, and using reaction icons to track which have been answered. It works amazingly well even with thousands of users. I like IRC, but I think it would be really chaotic in comparison.
Personally I love IRC, but at the same time I've not used it seriously in many many years. Slack? It has problems, but I've used it daily across multiple companies.
My biggest "win" with Slack is going offline for an hour, or more, a day, to avoid the notification-fatigue.
The integrations also allow Slack to become a dashboard of sorts. Key external events can be logged in Slack. You don't have to find them, they find you.
Not a Slack fan per se. Just trying to answer the question.
If one answers that with just "workplace chat messaging", Slack looks redundant and unnecessary since the world already had IRC, ICQ, AOL AIM, Yahoo Chat, Skype, etc.
E.g. in the early Facebook years (~2005), Zuckerberg and his team used AOL AIM as their chat system at work because Slack didn't exist. Early Twitter is another example where Jack Dorsey and coworkers used AOL AIM for workplace chat. (Indeed, Jack even said he got inspiration for Twitter from AIM's "away status" feature)
So we have to find the differentiator of Slack that attracted businesses to adopt it instead of just using IRC or Skype:
- Slack lets people subdivide the chat space into "virtual rooms" or "channels" as a 1st-class concept. This is something that the older AOL AIM, Skype, Pidgin client, etc didn't do. This feature is helpful for businesses because you have multiple projects or teams where multiple people collaborate with various subsets of employees. The older chat systems enabled 1-to-1 messaging based on userid but not on "topics" with 1-to-many participants.
- Slack userids are scoped to the company which is more acceptable for private chats within the business. In contrast, the userids in AOL AIM were global ids and therefore not constrained to the particular company's communication. (Slack added ability to chat outside the company recently in 2021: https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+chat+with+other+compan...)
- IRC had topic channels but corporations don't want to hassle with admins setting up internal IRC servers and plain IRC doesn't have desired features such as chat history without additional effort (i.e. IRC bouncer). In contrast, using Slack for workplace chat is just a few clicks in the cloud.
In short, Slack had a combination of some extra useful features and near-zero admin (cloud).
Back in roughly 2015-2016, some of friends were using Slack at their company and were making fun of how antiquated and uncool HipChat was — even though HipChat had all the same functionality. HipChat had the advantage of being a fast, native app, while Slack was a slow Electron wrapper around a web page. But Slack nailed the UX. It had the aesthetics of a generation of "post-Web 2.0" apps that were coming out that were more real-time and shipping as Electron apps. HipChat just looked old school. Pretty soon my company was on Slack, too.
It also helped that Slack quickly got support for a much richer set of integrations with other apps. HipChat had a bunch, but I think Slack realized this would be the number one way to beat the competition, and they spent a ton of effort on building out this side of the platform. Slack, of course, also had the advantage of focus; HipChat was made by Atlassian, who had a lot of different products to spread their focus more thinly.
Around the same time we saw a similar battle between Google Hangouts and "old school" apps like WebEx and GoToMeeting. The latter were/are native apps, rock stable, but fundamentally uncool. Hangouts was browser-based and super flaky, but somehow cool because they were the latest generation of web UX.
What's interesting right now is that Zoom, a thoroughly clunky and uncool native app (very similar to WebEx or GoToMeeting in that sense) has somehow gained enormous market share, despite the existence of decently mature web-based alternatives. Maybe because Google managed to mess up its chat/videoconferencing so badly.
No log-in required — just enter the 10 digit code and your name.
And I think Zoom beat Hangouts because you could invite someone to a meeting and they didn't need to create an account to join.
- Horrible text editor compared to slack (no inline code, no syntax highlighting, lists barely worked, undo barely worked) - notification preferences (per channel) we’re lacking. - no threading support - UI was laggy compared to slack. - there was an very limited set of emojis. - no good mobile app. - few and limited integrations (notably I use GitHub, Jira, and Outlook integrations for slack).
Still hipchat was far better than Teams is today.
Particularly due to the choice of the word "understate."
In my opinion this is very much a double-edged sword. At my organization we have one person (maybe self-appointed) who, when seeing a question asked on a more general channel, invariably responds with something along the lines of “have you checked #super-niche-channel-probably-only-useful-in-this-exact-case?” When I see one of those questions pop up, I usually try to guess the particular sub channel that he’ll try to redirect the asker to but am rarely successful.
But my org may just be using slack wrong. We do have thousands of channels and the same order of magnitude employees. Maybe guidelines about the granularity of channels would be helpful.
Or maybe Slack is just not for me: e-mail is my preferred method for asynchronous comms and I prefer phone calls for synchronous comms because I think the slight friction in having to pick up a phone to make a call helps limit throughout and improves quality of requests. And for info repositories I prefer a curated wiki page to discussion threads for both search and comprehension.
This point is so important.
Some folks seem to think that chat threads can serve properly in this role but in my experience both Slack and MS Teams are nearly useless in the role of "info repository."
I know for sure that AOL[1] and Yahoo [2] had enterprise messaging services available for some time, but I think they had both shut down that option because of lack of uptake before Slack was started or at least before it rose to promenence. I'd guess MSN had that feature too, but I don't specifically remember. Segregated scopes being the only option makes a big difference though, and timing is also important; Yahoo was making cool products and killing them because there wasn't enough traction only for the market to show up later for years before Google made that cool. Startup idea: look through old Yahoo new product press releases for ideas that worked but were before their time; if Google did it years later and abandoned it, then it's been shown that an independent team can build it, so you probably can too.
[1] https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/18829405/aol-final... https://www.computerworld.com/article/2564773/aol-phases-out...
[2] https://www.internetnews.com/enterprise/yahoo-extends-im-to-... https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/yahoo-soups-... https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/yahoo-scraps...
Sadly I think Slack was largely marketing and timing: federation was nontrivial (unlike email).
Branded SaaS chat platform with SLAs is also more appealing to business than open standards.
First of all, before Slack real-time chat in a company setting was a novel idea. Your sysadmin may have been born in IRC, but non-tech people probably never used it. "Why would you chat online when you can in real life!?"
Setting up a chat was full of hurdles and questions without clear answers. Do you use XMPP? IRC? Which clients, which servers? Back then it was still common to have on-premise physical servers, so spinning up a server there was suddenly a big deal. Bigger companies did not appreciate "going rogue" with potentially sensitive company information they may had obligation to secure and archive. It was a lot of friction for something that people weren't convinced was a good idea in the first place.
Slack made it accessible, polished, and corporate-friendly, at a time when SaaS and web apps were catching on. You didn't need to get people install an XMPP client, which was designed for 1:1 chats and had awful afterthought UI for group chats, with different capabilities in each client on each platform. You didn't need to explain to anybody how to keep an irssi session alive. File transfers worked with pretty drag'n'drop without having to open ports.
There was a Microsoft Linq back then, but it was awful, and it was an ICQ clone, not a group chat.
Fun fact: Slack was salvaged from a group chat feature of a failed MMORPG "Glitch".
Slack led the markets with best execution (maybe?) and good funding. Until Microsoft came around with its own unique non-replicable assets and skills.
AIM, Yahoo, Bloomberg, etc were very commonly used I'm finance before slack.
Never met anyone I worked with well who thought that, even in the 80s (I ran a BBS (on a MSX2 by the way, written in Pascal) to communicate with my teammates and my business partner; he was sales and he loved it). I preferably only ever work with engineers so that might explain something. The real great thing about this day and age is that now you can just demand it from anyone; I have noticed that other roles in the company also prefer it vs 'real life' because there is a record of everything. So 'minutes of meeting' is copy/paste/export instead of writing from your very bad and biased memory; the latter is basically built in for many (especially corporate in my experience) people who insist on calls and face to face; it's easier to fudge the details and deflect blame for failure ('but I told you this when we had this little meeting a couple of weeks ago remember?'). And that happens basically all the time; it's nice that you can just search an archive and say ; 'you said x, we did x, x didn't work, own it please, now back to work'. Only in case of deflection or blaming of course; everyone does stuff, no-one needs to be called out but if someone calls someone out while being wrong, it's good to get the facts.
And also to monitor all communication on it. No more of those pesky P2P-encrypted XMPP messages.
AOL or Microsoft could've owned this space in the 90's... if they thought about it.
We had chat systems before like IRC, Hipchat, Campfire, Flowdock (We have used them all), but with Slack it was the first time I felt a push from other departments to use it.
I'm still sad about the implementation of threads that Slack went with, Flowdock did this much, much better, every new post into a thread were also posted in the channel view but with a unique colour, the interaction can be seen here: https://youtu.be/BxRE5GUbFes
I also liked that Flowdock had the concept of an "inbox", so every channel had their own inbox for integrations that wouldn't post a message and notify everyone, but you could still chat with your team about a certain item in the inbox.
I muted email notifications on the first day and then forgot about it :)
So Slack was the tool for developers, with a lock-in effect, and other departments just followed (-> product -> marketing -> sales).
It is more accessible being in the browser so non-technical people can adopt it more easily.
Yes, they added bells and whistles like threading, emojis, and snippets that made the experience even better.
As an aside, I think slack huddles are superior to every other screensharing method out there. Being able to draw on the screen is a killer feature when collaborating.
- What problem does this tech solve?
- Whose problem is it actually?
- If there is a problem solved by this tech, what other problems are created?
The main problem here is the expectation of synchronous communication. In email, async is sort of built in - nobody expects my answer 5 seconds after they clicked "Send". With Slack, they get nervous if they have to wait too long.
Slack can be both a tool that gives slack and takes it away. Given its critical mass, the latter seems to be more prevalent given the instant gratification people are expecting.
I think Teams will really win out as it’s IM, collaboration tools, real-time tools, and transcription services are the best IMO.