Ask HN: Why didn't Slack try to kill Outlook? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why didn't Slack try to kill Outlook?

3 points_bkyr7 comments

With the Salesforce acquisition this week it brought me back to a thought I had: why didn't Slack integrate email into it's app so it was one-stop shop for ALL communication? I can't think of a reason outside of having a tagline of "killing email".

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One-stop shops rarely succeed. Most just end up doing a little of everything and being mediocre. Microsoft Office, arguably the world's most popular toolbox, is made of several smaller parts, and not one big one.

Slack is also effectively a replacement for email; my team doesn't use email to send documents anymore. We use Slack because it's all in one channel and easy to search. You can share snippets, APKs, documents, links to tickets and Trello cards. You can acknowledge someone's message without having to send a spammy "noted".

Outlook and Exchange aren't going to be killed off like that. Too many corporate customers and governments use it, email holds up in court these days as official communications. Larger users of that have it on-prem.

Think if you run IT for a large (>5000 people) company, what benefit would there be for a project to change your entire email stack? A new provider would have to check off all those compliance, governance, security, etc. check-boxes and then some. That is what Slack would be up against to get into that market.

In a way, they are killing email. A lot of communication across 3 or more people used to only be via email. Now it happens in Slack (or MS Teams I suppose)

How would that have worked? Email can be sent between organization, Slack messages cannot. If they tried, it would've just been a chat-based UI for email or something lame like that.

My view (inside of a banks innovation lab) a lot of people are stuck in their ways. You ask them "Why do you do that" and their general reply is "I was taught to do this" or "My boss asks my to send it via email". I think changing user behaviour is hard but you need to change all stakeholders in the user journey not just the direct user.

Given enough time, all tech companies try to reinvent email. The thing is, it’s never worked, and at this point there have been so many opportunities to do so that you can statistically say that it doesn’t work in general. It’s just one of those intractable problems; email is here to stay.

Likewise, I don’t understand why Google and Microsoft weren’t more successful at killing off Slack. They already had all the users via Gmail and Exchange, so chat was just a feature.

A product that focuses on something is going to be better than something that's treated as "just a feature" in something else. And for "chat" they already had (not great) messenger offerings, but didn't make the jump to group chat. And Slack had benefits from being able to position itself as a cool new alternative, and from not relying on already-existing central infrastructure: it could establish itself at the core of new companies that e.g. didn't use exchange and it could easier be sneaked into large orgs as a grassroots thing - just signing up your team for Slack was probably easier in many places than getting IT to give you an extra feature to the central infra.

And now that Microsoft is paying attention, it's doing very well at fighting Slack, despite Teams' weaknesses. (They also tried to buy Slack first) But it took Slack to show them that a new group chat product was needed and valuable.

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