One Hyphenated Word: Follow-through. Yes, Slack's core tech has been around for decades now, and that it is pretty much a gussied up IRC with some bots. But th

One Hyphenated Word: Follow-through. Yes, Slack's core tech has been around for decades now, and that it is pretty much a gussied up IRC with some bots. But they found that IRC is awesome for what it does and they found that businesses needed something like IRC with bots. Luck is for sure what they have, but they also followed it up. A favorite site of mine recently had a post on follow-through [0]. I'll quote the part that is relevant to Slack: "There’s a dearth of people who know, or have the will, to do the stupidly easy stuff to be charming and successful. Let me give you just one example. Both off the air and on, guests of my podcast will tell me, “I can tell you actually read my book before this interview and I really appreciate that. It’s so rare.” I don’t bring this up to toot my own horn, but rather to point out how ridiculous it is that this might even be something worthy of mention! An interviewer reading someone’s work before asking them questions about it would seem like the barest of bare minimum job requirements — a prerequisite rather than something above and beyond. And yet the majority of podcasters aren’t even taking care of this most basic of basics. There are tons of people doing what you want to do, but how are they executing? In 90% of cases, not as well as they could be. That’s your opening. And such openings are absolutely everywhere." (emphasis from the source) Slack is this to a T. It's simple stuff, but they followed through with it. They spent time on the code, on iterating, on making sure it was not just ok, but good. And as a result they are not eating Ramen anymore. Is MS going to squish them? Who knows?! What we do know is that Slack is capable of following through with this product and the MS has a history of not being able to do so. I'd put the money into Slack over MS in the long run. But we will have to wait and see if MS will dump enough cash into their competitor to squish them out before MS runs out of follow-through and bureaucratic stamina. [0]http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/10/10/myth-scarcity-12-stupidly-easy-things-thatll-set-apart-pack/ http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/10/10/myth-scarcity-12-st...