Everyone praises Slack here but I find e-mail + IM completely sufficient and I work in a very large company.. Something urgent? Use IM. Something can wait? Use e-mail. It's that simple.
Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed at you and/or actively ignores the channel.
I don't see how that's all that different from people having a discussion in a physical office. Someone might be annoyed people are chatting about sports, some might put headphones in so they don't hear.
Out of curiosity: how do you manage to get any work done with IM on? I get like 40-50 _emails_ a day (very low number by the industry standards) and if I don't close my Gmail tab it's a huge distractor during periods when I do long stretches of coding.
We don't do much email in our company, so that's not a distraction (it's <10 people in the company).
If everyone agrees to use a single chat service, like OC (like most large enterprises), then you don't have to search anything but the company directory, so the comparison doesn't seem to make sense. What you're saying is that IM is sub-optimal because everyone uses different services, but Slack is better because everyone is forced to use it?
Things that "you get with technology X" by having to do 10 extra steps and have everybody else on the team do the same to get the same benefits do not count.
This was a new term for me so I looked it up and quite frankly that sounds like a terrible overload of info.