[babesh]

I think most of the value of Slack was cultural rather than technological. It was in getting people to discover/communicate via these abstractions of channels rather than point to point. This provides a lot of value in a company when you don’t know the specific person to talk to or want to talk to a group rather than one person.

EDIT: It also allows bystanders to learn from or keep abreast of the conversation.

However, this cultural practice can be easily transferred to another tool.

As an external observer, Slack seemed to have various issues that prevented it from innovating further.

One was lack of vision of how to innovate further. I think this often happens when someone stumbles onto an idea. They don’t have deep reasoning or conviction of where to go further.

Another issue is that they seemed to have other cultural preoccupations for a time. Look at the cultural discussions brewing when their growth was exploding. They have since stepped back from that but I think it slowed them down.

I don’t think these helped when you have a competitor that can integrate their entire suite of products into their chat system while effectively selling the chat for free. Slack didn’t even integrate as well or as quickly.

Slack wasn’t innovating enough to not be overtaken.

[tracer4201]

>It was in getting people to discover/communicate via these abstractions of channels rather than point to point.

Do you mean Slack is or was the first to get users to communicate over channels (vs point to point) in a business or enterprise setting?

I’m honestly not sure about what innovation came out of Slack. I worked for a startup in the early 2000s, and we ran our own IRC channels.

I’m only vaguely familiar with Slack, but what am I missing?

[babesh]

I have a limited perspective but my experience was in getting acquired by a larger company that used Slack. In the larger company, especially when you first join, you don’t know who to talk to to get information you need or to coordinate work. This was partly due to the by design self service/decentralized culture of the company.

The use of channels was eminently useful then. You discover the general channel to use and then people that you didn’t previously know can help you. Also it doesn’t have to be a specific person helping you. Different people can help you at different times and with different questions. Likewise, you return the favor.

Also, you can then snoop in on a channel to keep track of areas you are interested in. This was a way of extracting and sharing institutional knowledge.

Lastly, you can create temporary channels for coordinating projects.

Although channels existed before, this was the first setting that I found it used extensively and effectively in this way. Perhaps most importantly to getting the whole system to work, there were cultural expectations placed on groups responsible for particular channels of being timely and helpful in replies.

Therefore you would get replies to questions in seconds or minutes. That was very useful in getting unblocked and unblocking others. You would almost never encounter the flame wars that you would see on Hacker News (well besides the social channels).

The organizational environment and the culture of how to use channels is what I mean when I say the innovation was cultural. Divorce channels from the environment or culture and you will see very different outcomes.