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Slack replaced Skype chats mostly for me and it did also reduce email. It was really important for us, because important decisions were being agreed in the mid
by icc97 9y ago
Slack replaced Skype chats mostly for me and it did also reduce email.
It was really important for us, because important decisions were being agreed in the midst of a Skype chat, which was only in your history on one machine and not easily searchable.
We also had Google Hangout chats/conversations which are searchable. However this caused further confusion about having to search via email/Skype/Hangouts to find out what was said. Also the conversation from one Hangout was separated from the other - where as we could replace that with one slack channel from all the Hangouts that we had.
Skype for Business now does something similar in that it also keeps you chat history in Outlook.
However I really like the clean separation of emails vs Slack chats. Slack is completely independent of my email so I'm not dependent on Gmail or Outlook.
For me it means that email becomes reduced but I regard it as a channel that is reserved for more important communication, i.e. I'll email something if I want it to be on record as having been written. All the chat fluff gets dumped in Slack.
- achievingApathy 9y agoI am routinely amazed that people find Slack innovative. It's basically a pretty front-end to IRC. And your chat logs were always searchable.. open in a text editor and Ctrl-F. Even the integrations aren't novel, IRC bots have existed for decades. IRC also has the added benefit of being scalable and free. And everyone has their favorite client already that is more customizable than any Slack client. And you can own your own data/conversations, as an organization. I have never really been comfortable with the notion that Slack can poke around in any channel's history regardless of how secret those conversations are thought to be.
- ryandrake 9y agoA great deal of tech, especially today, is just re-writing things from the past, closing up the protocols, and then putting marketing behind them to make it look like you're inventing something. Slack (IRC) is one. Look at the dozens of instant messaging clients that are just clones of ICQ from the 90's. Social networking sites are pretty much rehashed (albeit giant) BBS systems.