[afandian]

It is interesting. It might go some way to explain the culture that the app embodies. Lots of 'cutesy' things like MOTD on the loading screen, emoticons everywhere, application messages that include the word "yay", integration with Giphy which seems to be a random Gif roulette. It all feels rather unprofessional sometimes. And like they're trying to crowbar the Slack culture into my own office culture.

When tools are straightforward in their utility they can empower, but when they have so much baggage, they can also influence culture. Of course being able to communicate more fluidly can change the culture of a workplace to be more open. But it sometimes feels like an extension of flippant social media, except you can't escape because there's critical stuff on it.

I used to work in a place that used XMPP, and before that Microsoft Communicator. They didn't bring as much benefit as Slack does, but sometimes I wish for something a bit more unobtrusive. I don't want a tool to try and make friends with me.

[microcolonel]

I've been trying to figure out what it would take to make SMTP the last business IM protocol. Today's fancy email applications are basically laid out like IMs anyway. It just seems like a matter of getting delivery latency down, and demanding some level of compliance with modern email standards (STARTTLS only, must have spf and dkim, must have FCrDNS). If we're playing by IM rules, we can even have people establish contacts, which should make spam filtering a lot lower latency.

The other sundry things would be video transcoding, and reference-type attachments (for stupid nonsense like attaching a giphy to your message, or possibly-useful things like embedding google docs info).