Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on Changing the Way We Work | Hacker News Reader

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on Changing the Way We Work

wsj.com

30 pointsmatsur11 comments

I closed the page as soon as I read the title. Why anything mildly succesful (or largely, as slack) in this field must be immediately labeled as an email killer? Why are we trying so hard to kill email!? Nothing like slack, which is extremely useful and productive, can substitute the naturally delayed nature of email. It's freeing, it's free of expectations of a quick answer, but it can be fast and paced nonetheless. Email is still wonderful, and open, and available everywhere. It's the best piece of technology we ever invented in the field of personal communication. And it's damn resilient.

Slack is great and somehow revolutionary. It doesn't need to be downplayed by being defined as the n-th email killer that wasn't.

It isn't trying to kill _all_ email, or replace the entirety of what email offers but replace using email as communication intra-office.

I still email my friends and use email every day, but slack has reduced my intra-office work email to 3-5 threads a week from a 20-30 before.

Which is correct and it's also why the title and the label - email killer - are dead wrong and anti-factual.

The one killer feature missing from email, and which should be doable with an standard extension, is to retroactively include someone in a conversation, forwarding the messages you have a notifying other participants of the change.

I note that newsgroup are somewhat that feature, but they live in a different space than email, with no integration. I really wish companies would develop and push such a standard instead of reinventing 80% of the wheel, tack on their shiny new proprietary hubcap and try to displace email.

We have people pushing slack here, and it's annoying to have yet another independant channel. It doesn't properly cross polineate with email.

The only thing Slack has changed is the name of the chat application I open. In the 90's it was ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and AIM. In the early 2000's it was Meebo (remember them?). Just a few years ago, we had Skype. See where I'm going with this?

I'm sorry but I find nothing revolutionary about Slack. It has a good UI -- and it should, for being a real company and not some side project. But chat clients are like TV shows, they don't seem to last. I wouldn't be placing any bets in 2-5 years we will have all moved onto something else and be heralding it as the next replacement for e-mail or whatever. It's just way too easy to move on to a replacement that's the new new.

I somewhat agree with you, but, a closer comparison would be that it is a 'better' corporate IRC. The comparison with ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and Skype does not really fit given that, at least for me, the biggest advantage is the tons of integrations with automated development tools etc. That wasn't really there for Skype, ICQ, Yahoo messenger, etc. It was possible with IRC, but a pain to maintain on your own and out of grasp for many other teams. Slack and HipChat make it a breeze. At our company we used to build our own integrations with IRC (using existing OSS bots, redmine plugins, etc) but ultimately it was a distraction. Moving to HipChat or Slack was liberating.

It's just chat you can drop files into easily. What's so revolutionary about that? I keep trying to use it with my teams and we just end up reverting back to email and dropbox.

Agreed. I am puzzled not so much by its popularity, but by the claims that it is some kind of revolutionary change, and especially that companies are willing to pay that much per user in order to put their data into someone else's vault. I've been using HipChat for quite a while, and don't see what more Slack provides. I've recently been trying out Ryver and like it better than Slack.

But if I'm going to pay for something, it's going to be an app designed for project management. Basecamp costs less than the cheapest 5-user Slack plan. You can have an email conversation (others don't even need a login and don't have to know anything about Basecamp) and it is automatically included as part of the conversation.

After some more looking around, it does seem like Slack has some built-in Compliance functions regarding preservation of data. That's useful. Regarding the 1+ million users, I wonder how many treat their Slack communications with the same level of evidentiary legality as email? As in, when a case finally comes to court, how is Slack going to be seen from then on?

I mean, I grew up with ICQ. It was a great tool. It wasn't in the browser like Slack, but from what I recall, it did nearly everything that Slack does (chat, group, send files, etc), minus the 'oversight' of having a central place to export communications. Private really meant private.

All in all, it looks like a nice tool but smells like a new cover slapped on an old book. Having an eccentric Philosphy PhD at the top makes for good press, sure. I'm interested to see where Slack is in 5 years.

> After some more looking around, it does seem like Slack has some built-in Compliance functions regarding preservation of data. That's useful. Regarding the 1+ million users, I wonder how many treat their Slack communications with the same level of evidentiary legality as email? As in, when a case finally comes to court, how is Slack going to be seen from then on?

I'm a member of a casual/friends slack group that has the retention policy set short (2 weeks iirc). It lets us treat Slack more like Snapchat, knowing our messages will be deleted.

Ah, interesting. I've been in several corporate environments where the retention policy is more like 5-7 years. I suppose Slack can be deployed in such a fashion, but if it's used as a disposable conduit then I think other questions may arise during the course of a legal test. I'm curious to see how things turn out in this regard.

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