> Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful.

So, the tens of thousands of teams paying for Slack either aren't having serious conversations or have decided the opposite. Here are some things I think you are undervaluing about team chat:

- It replaces many meetings and phone calls that are more interruptive. - It helps distributed teams with legitimate needs for casual collaboration. - It reduces an enormous cost of people being blocked waiting for email answers to simple questions that could not be anticipated.

The disadvantages of team chat can be avoided by discipline, but the benefits above require an assistive tool.

While we are at it, if you can't distinguish Slack from other team chat solutions, here are some things I think you are undervaluing:

- ease of onboarding for teams and individual users - scalability to large, active teams - Enterprise IT management - automatic refunds for inactive users - integration and third party app community - Dev community supporting custom integrations - strong mobile and desktop experiences

All of the above are super important for companies adopting, even though they're not about the core channel-messaging interaction you experience day to day. None of the alternatives check all of these boxes, and only teams is close.