4 ms·

Your absolutely right. There is really nothing innovative here. But never underestimate the power of eye-candy. Think about apple products. You could throw yo

by ascotan 10y ago

Your absolutely right. There is really nothing innovative here. But never underestimate the power of eye-candy. Think about apple products. You could throw your hands up and say "but there's nothing innovative here! they just built a pretty UI on top of BSD and people have been using Unix operating systems for 50 years!". True, but it's the pretty UI that connects it to the masses. Slack took a concept that has been done to death (a chat server) and made it useable and accessible. I remember years ago installing pidgin, psi and adium at work because they all ran on different operating system and som guru had to configure an XMPP server somewhere in the company. Then at home i'd fire up mirc to work on some open source. My daughter would come home and hop onto yahoo chat so she could send terrible looking ascii/emoji bling to all her friends. Yesterday i came into work and some guy came over and saw i had slack up and said, "whoa i love slack, do we have a company server for this?" I said, "yep". He said "send me an invite! i'm gonna go get my boss on this". That sort of emotional reaction to a product I think is what makes something a success. I a chat room innovative? no. But i think success can't really be wholly described in terms of innovation either. Somehow software has to connect with real people (iXXX - because i own it?) and get people to buy into it like a brand of blue jeans.

oliv__ 10y ago
...and black turtlenecks
Theodores 10y ago
The Fear Of Missing Out Fear of missing out or FoMO is "a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent".[2] This social angst[3] is characterized by "a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out Slack has this to it, a team gets using Slack for their own purposes, the initiative started by someone that wonders why the company/team use Skype still. Then other teams in the company want to be in on it, there is a party on Slack and they want to know all the gossip that goes down. Plus the Giphy memes. The next thing is that you then find that it is no longer a private chat room, the guys in HR are reading this too so no longer can some things be said in the banter. So then you move your important chats off Slack and onto WhatsApp or somewhere where whomever the bad guys are, e.g. HR, will not be reading. Obviously Slack then becomes something that your manager uses to tell you what to do and no longer becomes a channel for convo for things peripheral to the tasks in hand. This is how I see Slack shaping up in the long term, it might as well be a MS product and you might as well get the MS product since it is better integrated to Office things.

by ascotan 10y ago

oliv__ 10y ago

...and black turtlenecks

Theodores 10y ago

The Fear Of Missing Out Fear of missing out or FoMO is "a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent".[2] This social angst[3] is characterized by "a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out Slack has this to it, a team gets using Slack for their own purposes, the initiative started by someone that wonders why the company/team use Skype still. Then other teams in the company want to be in on it, there is a party on Slack and they want to know all the gossip that goes down. Plus the Giphy memes. The next thing is that you then find that it is no longer a private chat room, the guys in HR are reading this too so no longer can some things be said in the banter. So then you move your important chats off Slack and onto WhatsApp or somewhere where whomever the bad guys are, e.g. HR, will not be reading. Obviously Slack then becomes something that your manager uses to tell you what to do and no longer becomes a channel for convo for things peripheral to the tasks in hand. This is how I see Slack shaping up in the long term, it might as well be a MS product and you might as well get the MS product since it is better integrated to Office things.