"By that measure, Slack is a real and large innovation. It is not as eye-catching as self-driving cars or implantable chips — it is not basic research-y kind of stuff. But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity."

Slack is cool and all, we use it, I know lots of people that use it. It doesn't suck and doesn't make my computer crash. But let's be honest here -- there hasn't been a dramatic shift in communication or how my time is spent for the better. I can set up channels now and put gifs into my chat, which I then promptly disabled because it was annoying as fuck as everyone in the company began doing the same.

Personally I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with all the chats I have to maintain. There's Slack, because its pushed on me by my IT department. There's Skype, which I have for legacy co-worker interaction. There's GChat, which all my friends and family use. There's Facebook, which all my non-friend acquaintances use. In any given day I have 5 windows up, not counting the distractions from SMS and E-mail itself.

Nothing gets replaced...I just have to maintain more. Now I feel like its having the opposite effect. All this communication is actually making me anti-social.