Is Slack dead? unironically. Does it have a future? With Teams, etc. coming out, it seems most companies do not want to go the Slack route
Teams especially, is something I loathe using every day. Everything about the UI and UX gets in the way of what I’m trying to do, rather than assisting in or even enabling it. It’s like it doesn’t want me to communicate - it wants me to react and offer as little useful information as possible.
Speaking of which, I'm going now to buy more Microsoft shares.
Does it really though? In my experience teams has a buggy integration with other things in the stack.
And Teams itself ia massively buggy and a resource hog for the whole time I've used it.
I don't think anyone was sad that slack didn't integrate with the other MS services "stack".
(Teams still can't copy images, instead you get a massive base64 block of text iirc)
Honestly, bugged me a few times before I just switched to using the snippet tool. I use it all the time anyways and this felt natural.
Eventually the list will grow so large that we could probably attach a 5-figure dollar amount to it, if it hasn't already.
Since then, they have hit 2 home runs on top of their basic chat functionality:
1. Slack Connect: Being able to share channels between workspaces is simply amazing. Most of our customers are on Slack, and having a Slack connection to them makes it much easier to communicate with them and get their feedback as we improve our product. I don't know any other tool that even comes close to how important Slack Connect has been to product development in my startup.
2. Canvas: They rolled this out last year as notes or something, and I was pretty underwhelmed with the experience at first. But very recently (within the past month I think) they reintroduced this as "canvas" with really tight integration with threads. We have moved all of our planning and synchronization activity to a canvas that we set up every week.
Although these features are not difficult for Google or Microsoft to implement on a purely technical level, their product organizations don't seem to understand the network effects of chat the way that Slack's product organization does.
Slack is certainly not dead today and they are showing the savvy to stay alive well into the future.
And besides that, the UX of Teams is miles behind Slack.
I haven’t regularly used teams in about a year, but I would legitimately consider passing on a job offer where they used it.
In a thread where many folks are talking about using the best tools for a job, teams is never the best tool for any form of digital communication.