[bawolff]

Slack is certainly more well known than its founder, but neither are household names unless you live in silicon valley.

As an example, have you ever watched a movie where someone uses slack? I haven't. Have you ever seen a movie where someone uses google (or some rebranded website that's obviously a google stand-in)? Of course you have. That's what a household name is.

Edit: also if it was rephrased that way the rest of the paragraph wouldn't make sense because they're discussing slack's founder well known-ness, not slack.

[bryanrasmussen]

I worked on the Danish government electronic invoicing project, and lots of people at the time I hung out with, being government people, knew what it was.

About a decade later I worked on the JavaScript implementation of NemID, NemID being a security thing in Denmark that basically every citizen has to use.

A coworker said to me (paraphrasing): "It's great to work on NemID, because everyone knows what it is, so it's easy to explain at family dinners" which is true. very true, everyone knows in Denmark what it is.

To which I thoughtlessly replied "Oh yes, it was the same when I worked on eFaktura", his face got the momentarily shocked and dismayed expression people get when they realize they are talking to a crazy person or an idiot.

About 5 minutes later I thought to myself "what the hell are you thinking, nobody knows what eFaktura is, fool"

I think the household name status of Slack or the guy who co-founded it is sort of like the household name status of eFaktura in Denmark.

[gkoberger]

I think, for the sake of this article, you could consider Slack a household name. It doesn't mean everyone has heard of it, it just means "well-known". It's a publicly traded company, and I'd say the average person (especially in America) likely knows what it is.

I guess I don't really watch many movies that delve into 21st-century office communication, but I imagine if I did their chat app would be modeled after Slack.

Overall, though, this is a minor point compared to the rest of the article.

[oap]

The average person definitely doesn't know. I've met wealthy people in their 20s in LA who don't know who Elon Musk is. Attention is hyper fractionalized.

People know who Jeff Bezos is, people don't know Tim Cook.

[TomMarius]

No one around me knows who Bezos is, but everyone knows Musk - the guy with the Teslas and rockets is kinda hard to forget, but Amazon doesn't even have a localized website here...

[esoterica]

I think the average white collar worker at a company with a trendy software stack knows what slack is, but that’s like 5% of the population. The average American definitely does not know what Slack is.

[bryanrasmussen]

I think more of the population might know what Church of the Subgenius Slack is than Slack the application.

[barcadad]

Lol, the average person most definitely doesn’t know Slack - that’s pretty funny that you’d even think that. That’s like saying the average person knows C++ or react.js or Tensorflow. Slack ain’t no Excel...

[User23]

All this tells us is that no executive producer has a significant stake in slack.

[imprettycool]

you are being very pedantic

[saagarjha]

Not really.

[imprettycool]

why