Ben Thompson published this piece a few weeks back on the state of Slack up against its competitive market for chat and collaboration, namely Microsoft’s Teams product. It covers the history well, dating back to Microsoft’s 2016 announcement of Teams, through to their traction, scale, and eventually overtaking of Slack in daily users on their platform.
We’re a Slack shop like many, but I’ve used Teams to join in on calls and it’s gotten darn good from what I can tell. The devil is, of course, in the details. I use Slack for hours a day and it’s become so second-nature...
You may have thought the entire 14th century was pretty bad, or maybe 1918 with its flu pandemic and millions of war casualties, but how about the 6th:
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine...
In this essay, Kevin Kwok attempts to differentiate between productivity and collaboration, with a focus on how Slack has failed as yet to become the nervous system that combines these things.
This take is one of the better summaries of where Slack sits in the stack of business productivity tools:
A new generation of functional apps have risen, with messaging and collaboration built directly into them as first parties. And with them it becomes increasingly clear that Slack isn’t air traffic control for every app, it’s 911 for when they fail.
There are many examples...
Slack grew huge on the idea that it would “replace email” and become the digital hub for your whole company. In some organizations (like ours), it certainly has, or has at least subsumed most all internal-only communication. Email still rules for long form official stuff. It’s booming into a multi-billion dollar valuation on its way to an IPO on this adoption wave.
But over the last couple of years there’s been something of a backlash to “live chat” systems. Of course any new tool can be abused to the point of counter-productivity. As tools like Slack and Intercom...