There are use cases where a group chat is important and crucial but almost every chat product out there has a proper group chat. Even with weaker APIs than Slack they are still ok to use. Moreover:
- Slack is the huge distraction and greatly improves ADD
- The admin UI is like a forest full of trees, slow, crowded, littered with settings and options, has more pages than Wikipedia, finding the right setting is a ten minutes task if you are not used to Slack; this is my major gripe with Slack which drives me nuts every time
- Why do I have to create new accounts with email verification with every new Slack channel?
- While people post a lot of crap on Slack (memes, gifs, jokes) important stuff is still handled over email or respective ticketing systems; so now I have many topics in Slack, email and Trello
- Slack is def. good for socializing but again--every other group chat is good enough for socializing
- Ok there is second use case: echo chambers for token ICOs and obviously there are many at the moment
- As a side note: 95% of startups and SMBs use G Suite/G Mail as their mail server which includes Google Chat which has group chat and all the features 95% of us need, which is integrated in everything (such as the address book or search works seamlessly with chat and email messages); why aren't folks just using this? Why the hassle of setting up another tool, setting up roles, team members in the horrible admin pages of Slack? Just to have an ADD powerhouse called Slack in the company? I really don't get it and if I miss something please enlighten me, I want to understand why I need Slack
With their market share and their API they have reached a nice network effect without a doubt. But the question is, is it a winner-takes-it-all market and will they ever find somebody who will buy them at that valuation.