People always point at everything and go 'this stuff existed!' - even if all Slack did was pull everything together into a single cohesive environment, that's useful to people, it provides value. I'm shocked people are shocked by that idea.
Some of the most important work in the tech industry is highly valuable and not one bit innovative. CRUD apps that bridge data from two different parts of an organization are amazingly valuable and amazingly important, but have no innovation. There's nothing wrong with that CRUD app—but there's nothing making that app better from another CRUD app that also bridges those two departments.
None of this thread is saying that Slack is bad. It's not criticizing Slack. It's not saying people are wrong to use it. It's just saying that people can jump ship very easily because there's nothing innovative.
Slack is great. I use it daily and love it. But the things I like about it aren't tied to Slack the company in any way, and it would be easy for me to love Microsoft Teams (or some hypothetical open-source, competent-at-UX, mobile-enabled version of IRC) every bit as much. Slack doesn't seem to realize that.
More precisely, I hope that if Microsoft builds a vastly better product, that they kill Slack, and if Slack builds a vastly better product, that they kill Teams, and if someone else builds a vastly better product (maybe Ryver stops arguing on Twitter and focuses on product? maybe everyone realizes that Zulip has been awesome all along? maybe Mattermost builds great mobile apps?), they kill both Slack and Teams. And I hope Slack does not get complacent about the product they have built and how hard it is to build a vastly better one, because I am currently using Slack and invested in it. I hope this because competition is a good thing. Is that wrong?