Amazon licenses Slack for workers as Slack adopts AWS video-call tech

Slack clearly is the superior IM product. However, I am skeptical about this move as I'm concerned about the brain cycles that need to go into 'managing' my Slack. I have used Slack only in a limited capacity—for personal projects and public chat rooms, so I might be a little off here, but Slack seems to come with a lot of overhead than most other IM tools.

Chime, for all its shortcomings, was a traditional chat solution. It didn't set out to replace email. It's an ambitious goal, but you'll never replace email in a large enough place like AWS. This means I now simply have one more place to answer questions or respond to trivial things that can be looked up.

I'm pretty indifferent to this. I've used Slack a few times for open-source projects and customer contact - it's fine, but I haven't seen anything which sets it apart besides mindshare. Hopefully access to the paid features will change my stance.

Chime gets a lot of flak, but frankly it's the best video conferencing tool I've used, so I'm glad that part will stay. The main downside to Chime as a chat tool is also IMO its biggest positive - the fact that no-one else uses it. I never had to be too mindful in Chime rooms about speaking out of school, but with Slack as the default for both internal and external communication that might have to change.

Still curious how this got pulled off even with the "cross-selling" of Chime involved.

Could this be the flirt before a possible acquisition offer?