Business Messaging Service Slack Says It's Going To Replace Email and is as Necessary as Electricity in Its Pitch To Investors (cnbc.com) 200
Business messaging service Slack briefed investors on Monday, as the company expects to go public with a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange later this year. From a report: The service, which primarily caters to businesses, said it has more than 10 million users as of January. Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack, made the case to investors that replacing email with Slack changes the way employees of a company communicate. "This shift is inevitable. We believe every organization will switch to Slack or something like it," Butterfield said in a presentation. He also pitched Slack as a software-focused company that believes the world is "only at the beginning" of its reliance on software. In that essence, Butterfield likened Slack as eventually becoming a utility, similar to the internet or electricity.
ROFL (Score:5, Interesting)
Slack, aka a new web based IRC where all your data are belong to them. Oh AND belonging to the producer of every integration. Oh yes, businesses love sharing private client data willy nilly all over the internet.
What is disturbing is the possibility of business people believing this nonsense and not realizing what a steaming pile of security nightmare slack is.
sadly, only a single word answer is needed here (Score:3)
"Dropbox"
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Why is that disturbing? It seems to me like an excellent way to weed out businesses run by idiots.
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I'm not sure it would be all of a sudden. If Slack ceased to exist, people are reasonably clever and would figure out how to talk to each other. If Slack started (continued?) leaking business secrets, we'd just end up with more competition. Presumably the businesses not run by idiots would gain a competitive advantage and take over.
Now, Slack as a public utility, that's a bit scary. Imagine you had to use Slack to file your taxes.
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Probably because most businesses appear to be run at some level by idiots, ...
And ... s/businesses/countries/g -- some, notably, at the top level(s).
IRC or XMPP? (Score:3)
I thought Slack XMPP wrapper, not IRC wrapper.
Re: IRC or XMPP? (Score:2)
It doesn't wrap anything. It's proprietary bullshit.
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Slack, aka a new web based IRC where all your data are belong to them. Oh AND belonging to the producer of every integration. Oh yes, businesses love sharing private client data willy nilly all over the internet.
What is disturbing is the possibility of business people believing this nonsense and not realizing what a steaming pile of security nightmare slack is.
Yeah, the defense contractor I work for would be thrilled with Slack...
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Demolition man, for the slow of cultural reference.
Re:ROFL (Score:4, Interesting)
The security implications aside, email is a nice way to communicate. You send a note, go off and do something and if you get a response, you can either pick it up at the mail beep, or if you turned your mailer off to get some peace, the next day.
Slack, near as I can make out, is for people with the attention span of gnat who simply cannot believe they aren't in a meeting to fill any dead air with their intellectual musings they think are such gems that everyone should enjoy them.
It's a shame we cannot use social media masquerading as "business tools" for a game of whack-a-mole. Hell, we could even make it an electronic game. Turn the game on during lunch and when the mole bounces, representing some precious note, bounces around your screen and you get to shoot a electronic pistol at it. When you hit the bouncing meme, a note gets sent back to the sender explaining in precise terms what you thought of them...and that their message will remain unread until the day after eternity.
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Somebody, somewhere is almost certainly playing buzzword bingo [wikipedia.org] based on interoffice communications even as we type. They just have to be smart about not actually keeping score where the bosses can see it.
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I guess Slack is like "Discord for businesses".
I wonder why is Slack even a thing anymore, when Matrix [matrix.org] with the Riot.IM [about.riot.im] client....
provides such similar communication and chat history capabilities, but in addition there is End to End encryption.. Protocol bridge capabilities to other Chat systems and servers And Matrix is decentralized, so users don't depend on a single entity's business policies [sfweekly.com] --- people can have your own Synapse nodes on premise or in the cloud, since thats open source with Deb [github.com]
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I only tried the Riot web UI, so forgive me if that's not a representative example of the system's full features, but it failed the first test I threw at it: Riot won't let users edit sent messages.
FYI, here is the list of feature requirements I use when evaluating chat software for work:
- can send code without it being parsed to smileys
- can attach files to a message (and can paste an image from the clipboard) and have an attachment preview visible in the chat client
- being able to edit sent messages for a
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Riot won't let users edit sent messages.
Well.. changing a message once sent into a conversation is a shenanigan that amounts to
rewriting history or changing evidence that ought to never be allowed.
By design cannot do that with a Slashdot comment, E-mail message, IRC, or MOST chat systems either.
Although in Matrix it is possible to send a new message and for the previous one to be redacted from the history through
moderation / message removal.
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Slack, aka a new web based IRC...
As a very long time -- and current -- user of IRC (and Slack), I'm always disappointed to see this attitude.
Slack has some killer features IRC doesn't have that strongly differentiates it. The main killer feature, in my opinion, is server-side history, so that you can connect and disconnect to your heart's content, using a different device each time if desired, and you still won't miss any important conversation while you're offline. And, no, znc is not a good solution, because it requires you to run your o
Re: BeauHD is a pedophile (Score:5, Insightful)
The problems you are describing with exchange... that isn't everywhere. That is just you. Exchange is not broken in the manner you describe everywhere.
MS and Slack are going down a seriously wrong path for most companies I've worked for in that they are SAAS which is nice for billing but a third party having all our data is a definite no no at most companies I've worked with.
The first time a plaintiff in a lawsuit subpoenas Microsoft and/or Slack for evidence in discovery instead of the company they are actually suing, bypassing the shredders, these private companies will flee in droves.
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The first time a plaintiff in a lawsuit subpoenas Microsoft and/or Slack for evidence in discovery instead of the company they are actually suing, bypassing the shredders, these private companies will flee in droves.
And you don't think that's already been attempted already? Microsoft has always ran Office 365 with the principle that they don't hand over someone else's data. The reason why you haven't heard of data being handed over from Microsoft in a lawsuit is because when lawyers have tried, they've been denied.
Re: BeauHD is a pedophile (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason why you haven't heard of data being handed over from Microsoft in a lawsuit is because when lawyers have tried, they've been denied.
Refusal to comply with a lawful subpoena valid according to the rules of federal civil procedure will Only work for so long.
Eventually: Microsoft is bound to face a plaintiff whose attorney has the balls to escalate the matter and ultimately up that
all the way to criminal sanctions against MS management, if necessary.
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The first time a plaintiff in a lawsuit subpoenas Microsoft and/or Slack for evidence in discovery instead of the company they are actually suing, bypassing the shredders, these private companies will flee in droves.
Shredding discoverable evidence is already a HUGE no-no and really is not possible with the current email-based exchanges. A thread saved on someone's computer will be enough to cause a major amount of pain for the attempted evidence tampering.
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It's still a real problem in practice during lawsuits, where the person doing whatever caused the lawsuit tries to cover his tracks before the company discovers who he is. Clever companies will do a backup and turn on tracking of deletes, then send out the emails saying "any data related to such-and-such must be preserved". Watching who then deletes a ton of emails lets you find the guilty party.
I used to work on an email forensics product that offered that service as a feature.
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"Shredding discoverable evidence is already a HUGE no-no and really is not possible with the current email-based exchanges. A thread saved on someone's computer will be enough to cause a major amount of pain for the attempted evidence tampering."
Not really, it can all be edited. A thread saved off on someone's computer will be illegal stolen company documents. Not only can you "shred" but you can also alter what any of it says. There are also headers but you can edit, inject, and remove those as well.
Email
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"In the developed world, it is very uncommon to use shredders when a discovery request comes in."
But then, it isn't like you'd know so that is an unsupported assertion.
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I was going to refute that by mentioning Enron, but I reread your statement more carefully.
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Sure... the developed world is most of the nations that are industrial and post-industrial with a high HDI:
except the United States. So you see... not only was Enron a rare exception: technically that may have occurred outside the developed world.
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but a third party having all our data is a definite no no at most companies I've worked with.
Oh? You must work for some small tiny little shops. Fortune 500 companies are gobbling this shit up like you would not believe. Hell I work for one of the 10 largest companies in the the world and all our 100000 employees now have Microsoft accounts.
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"Of course for those who do follow the law it's great"
Pfffffffffffffffft omg thanks a lot. Now I'm going to have to clean sticky coffee off my monitors. Companies who do follow the law. That's the best one I've heard all day.
That's like companies that don't allow sales people to give kickbacks and bribes. Of course, they set sales goals and closure requirements that would take that sort of activity but they have strict zero tolerance policies and will flay you if caught! Next up, companies who don't allow o
Subject Line Change (Score:4, Insightful)
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I will second this. I've been responsible for a couple of dozen Exchange installs since 2000, and it's generally been very reliable, or at least no less reliable than some of the shitty hardware platforms I've been forced to deal with.
2010, IMHO, was the peak of manageability. 2013 was kind of a train wreck until some of the later updates, but a lot of that had to do with the bad web GUI which hasn't gone away. 2016 is kind of just an improved 2013.
I was never too impressed with DAGs, I thought it was a
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Yeah, your sysadmins or whoever set up Exchange for you are morons. Or they keep screwing with internal DNS which fucks Exchange hardcore.
If they actually read the documentation or set it up correctly you'd have a lot fewer problems.
Source: Was Exchange admin/architect for many years. Hated it but learned quickly if you stray outside of best practices then you are in a world of hurt.
Re: BeauHD is a pedophile (Score:4, Insightful)
To be honest, your situation is entirely your own fault. Macbooks are great for people who don't actually need to use their computer, like your grandmother. If you're trying to use Macs in a managed business environment then you're going to be spending a great deal of your paycheck on booze as a result.
Re: BeauHD is a pedophile (Score:2)
Ok, but if you don't join the domain, then you shouldn't be complaining when single sign-on doesn't work for you. That's all anyone's saying. If you choose a Mac, you've chosen to not interoperate with business software.
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Found the security risk to their organization (2 posts up) --- this is when management needs to send some IT Staff toward Apple training and get a custom solution for managing the security of the OS X devices, Then get the ISE solution and 802.1X fully deployed on all networking gear so that no devices which are not properly in the IT MDM or Desktop management systems are able to get network access..
Re: BeauHD is a pedophile (Score:2)
You blame MS Exchange when you could just as easily blame Apple Macs. MS works well when you use all MS-based products. It's actually pretty similar to using an Apple product. If you haven't bought into the ecosystem, you're going to have a sub-par experience.
Re: BeauHD is a pedophile (Score:4, Funny)
97% of the employees are on Macbook Pro because Windows 10 is unusable
Perhaps you should close the business and start a new one that hires capable people.
Slack is not goong to replace email (Score:5, Informative)
Whatever it is good for, it is a particularly poor substitute for email. The Slack groups I'm in seem to spend most of their time discussing what time to try and get everyone in Slack at the same time. Real communication used to happen when the group used email. Not anymore.
Re:Slack is not goong to replace email (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't use Slack, but another IM-ish tool. However most of the folks in IT at my company with real skill (devs, DBA's, ERP gurus, and so on) end up turning off IM because they, like myself, find it being used by end-users and managers as a way to short-cut the line.
With email you can properly sort and prioritize responding. Some emails get immediate responses, others can wait until later in the day, or often after work and at home. Some emails require some careful researching of code before you can give an answer, and some require a cooling off period so you don't fire off a termination-worthy response.
With IM people think that their one quick question isn't a big deal, not caring about the 999 questions from other folks that I am getting, or the costs of context switching etc. One of the best people I used to work with went a step further and did all of his 'real' work in the morning, and only answered emails after lunch. I wish I had that sort discipline, but fear of increasing email counts keeps me on the Pavlovian schedule. Funny thing is, by waiting many of the stupid questions were resolved by the sender in the interim so he actually had less to do, at least so he said. And uniquely, for actual urgent tasks, he was available by (gasp) phone. My hero.
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If everybody but you is stupid an incompetent, it's not everybody but you who is stupid and incompetent.
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You'd say that to an anon, but you wouldn't say it to Don Knuth, who's gone off email back in 1990.
If he's claiming that everybody but him is stupid and incompetent, yes, in fact, I would. (He's not, so your troll is stupid. And incompetent.)
Now have Mummy change your diaper, or no cookie for you.
Needs less vodka in their Kool-aid (Score:4, Insightful)
They clearly need to put less vodka in all that Kool-aid they're drinking. There is so much wrong with the assumptions behind that statement I don't know where to begin.
If they arn't careful Microsoft is going to eat their lunch with Teams. And that's just one bit of competition they didn't have before. On the OSS side RocketChat is looking pretty good.
Also throw in that massive screw-up of theirs last year, their reputation isn't nearly as stellar as they think it is.
If you run your business like a fire drill... (Score:5, Funny)
Your ideas... (Score:2)
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Re: If you run your business like a fire drill... (Score:2)
The company I work for. We're only about 50 people though. Not exactly lots of room for hiring.
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The proverbial "rags to rags in three generations".
First starts it & makes kids work/study hard. Second generation builds on the base & expands it but spoil their kids, who then proceed to fuck it all up.
Slack, or something like it (Score:3)
The first thing I thought when I read the headline was how ridiculous the claims were. My second thought was that the journalists were merely sensationalizing what was actually said. At least I only had to read the summary to realize that was the case. Believing Slack will replace email is not the same thing as believing software such as Slack will start replacing email for corporate communication.
It isn't that absurd to believe the industry will start moving away from email. Moving business processes away from email is a big part of many of the operational efficiency projects I have in my project pipeline right now. Email will stick around for a long time, perhaps "forever", but I sure hope it isn't as integral to communication in the near future as it is today.
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"It isn't that absurd to believe the industry will start moving away from email. Moving business processes away from email is a big part of many of the operational efficiency projects I have in my project pipeline right now."
Yes, but how many decades has that been the case for? The problem isn't that email does something fantastic, you can whip up a protocol/application that does the same job and does it better effortlessly and slack wouldn't be what it looks like. The problem is every company you interact
Re: Slack, or something like it (Score:2)
True every company is using email, and slack or something like it won't replace email by itself.
The real replacement will be a unified open source communications that can spend and connect email, text, (slack like groups too) voice and Video chat. It will need full calendar intergration.
My biggest issues revolve around intergrating email, calendar, and project status. Heck email still hasn't come up with a decent group inbox and task assignment method. You have to use 3rd party tools that work medicore at
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In order for such a platform to rule the world it has to work for both users and business which have a very direct conflict. Specifically, encryption. Anything that works for users prevents man in the middle decryption while business wants to snoop on the communications that go through the platform.
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Yes, which is why they need to be decentralized peer-to-peer end-to-end encrypted with the keys held only by end users. In order to make undermining the 4th amendment on any sort of scale something which is out of reach. The best way (only way?) to make sure the government and business respects our requirement of individual freedom is to remove their option to do otherwise.
Slack and nothing like it (Score:2)
Believing Slack will replace email is not the same thing as believing software such as Slack will start replacing email for corporate communication.
Yes it is. Slack will be used my a small minority of companies for which it makes practical sense. These companies will continue to use email as well because EVERYONE uses email and there is no chance that everyone uses slack. My company does not use slack. None of our vendors, sales reps, customers, or distributors use slack nor are they likely to start. Slack does not solve the sorts of problems we deal with. (we're in manufacturing) I'm sure it works great for some companies and I have nothing aga
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Email will stick around for a long time, perhaps "forever", but I sure hope it isn't as integral to communication in the near future as it is today.
Asynchronous text messages sent over a network where an instant response is not expected (but I repeat myself) turned out to be a great idea.
I doubt it will go away, even if technical implementation details and nomenclature change.
Re:Slack, or something like it (Score:4, Insightful)
Email is the text equivalent of the answering machine. Now a person eight time zones away can send a message during their waking hours and the recipient can receive it in theirs.
"E-mail" will go away only when it is supplanted by something that incorporates its utility and ALL of its features. As one of those features is "controllable by the owner" anything that requires a 3rd party message storage automatically fails.
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Sure would be nice to have more (optional) workflow built into it, though, for how it's used today. Instead we have clumsy systems on the endpoint that try and do issue tracking, and stupid machine-learning and rules-based things that try to prioritize stuff.
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Email will stick around for a long time, perhaps "forever", but I sure hope it isn't as integral to communication in the near future as it is today.
Why?
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Moving business processes away from email is a big part of many of the operational efficiency projects I have in my project pipeline right now.
This makes sense. Use e-mail for generalized communications. Don't use e-mail as Ad-Hoc LOB software for organizing and managing business processes.. For example: if you are in IT, then your Inbox/Outbox is not the ticketing system.
Email Is Eternal (Score:4, Interesting)
Slack won't actually replace email but rather provide functionality somewhere in its software suite that's so close to classic email as makes no real difference. A longer-form textual communications format that sits quietly in a virtual box without bothering you unless and until you damn well feel like looking at it will always have its place in the sun. Integrating classic email functionality into a wider suite that offers easy search and indexing is still useful, though, provided that Slack doesn't unnecessarily clutter up the user experience for simply reading a block of text.
Honestly, I now feel like Captain Obvious. Did this really need to be said? Probably not. -_-
As someone who uses slack at work... (Score:2)
hahahahahahahahaha, LOLs & roffle.
No. Slack will be replaced by some other must have web-based thing decades before email is retired.
replacing email with Slack ... (Score:3)
Yeahbut (Score:2)
Google docs, dropbox, OneDrive, not to mention half of the world's government infra either already on, or planning to migrate to AWS/Azure?
So long Open Source, and thanks for all the fish :/
I like my hair long (Score:2)
"I like my hair long, so just fuck off already!"
--
Me, to a barber.
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“If you don’t want your hair to be cut, don’t sit down in barber’s chair” - Confucius
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Like he'd know - he was bald, wasn't he?
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Maybe that's why he said it - a bad barber experience which led to lifelong traumatic baldness.
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I've noticed this before - sometimes things just don't make sense and then you put your finger on it and it all just drops into place. That's a talent that not many have.
Internet Utility Protocols are on RFC-Editor (Score:2)
I quick a quick search for SLACK on RFC-Editor and found zero results.
SMTP, on the other hand shows 81 results and is used by every internet enabled human to some degree.
Slapping together IRC and Collaboration Web Sites isn't going replace the simplicity or adoption of email.
Should companies use email to track projects? Probably not for anything even mildly complex, but then state that as your scope. Claiming to replace the utility of email just makes it sound like you don't understand the landscape.
Still in Relatively Unknown and is Treated as Such (Score:3)
My university has adopted Slack for its employees. You can create your own channels, but there are plenty of people in the General channel and that's where a lot of idiocy happens. I've seen people talking shit on other university employees in that general channel. I've seen people sharing of privileged communications like they're talking with their buddies in a private chat client. And everyone has to use their real names!
People here treat Slack as if it's their own little chat service with little acknowledgment that EVERYONE can see what they type... not to mention to the channel maintaining a fully searchable history.
Fragmentation of communication system (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the main problem these new fancy communication systems have is that they are way too fragmented with no interoperability. That is why email keeps on sticking around.
I work in a university so I have colleagues in my department, in my college, in other colleges, in other universities, or in labs, or in the industry. And everyone one is part of a team where the workflow and communication flow is different. Adding one more only enables me to reuse the classic xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
I have colleagues who want me to ping them on skype, I have colleagues who want me to ping them on hangout, I have colleagues want me to call them on bluejeans, some use webex. I have colleagues whose team work of basecamp. Some only work out of slack. An other group of colleagues do work out of github. Some are on piazza. And classes are run on canvas. You end up having teams who put todos in a google calendar, some are putting them on trello, some are github issues.
It's all over the place. I can not check 10 different systems regularly. But all these people use email as a backup communication system. And that's why I think email is not going away anytime soon.
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Where I work there is a very rigid formalism to submit proposals and have them approved up and down the chain.
We originally did this on paper. That was some years ago.
Then it was Word DOC files. This was about the time that email became popular, and each application had its informal email chain ferrying it about the approval process.
Then it was the worst software I have ever used, hands down. It was a plug-in based web application. It was supposed to make the email chain go away. The software was so ba
(n)talk, irc, Y!, AIM, MSM, iMessage, Slack, ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Having used every one of those in the past (dating back to 1992, and CompuServe's version before that), the only reason we seem to switch is because one service gets too noisy or starts to get unreliable or there's just a trendier new one.
So, maybe the idea of real time interaction is as useful as electricity, but no one service is indispensable and will be replaced by another at some point.
-Chris
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Slack does more than just simple text chat. It also allows: video chat, audio chat, group chat, sharing desktops, sharing files, sharing images in chat, sending formatted code with syntax highlighting, block quotes, searching chat history. It also has a reasonably clean and easy to use interface. Older chat clients have some of these things but probably not all (which is why Slack became so popular).
Is it revolutionary? No. Is the marketing pitch overhyped? Yes.
But all that being said it's still probably th
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Email is not going away (Score:5, Insightful)
replacing email with Slack changes the way employees of a company communicate.
While that might be true, we do not use slack and precisely zero of our customers or vendors use slack. I think email is pretty safe for the foreseeable future.
We believe every organization will switch to Slack or something like it
Never underestimate the power of an installed base and a lowest common denominator. Fax machines are still a thing even today despite them being wildly obsolete for all but the craziest of corner cases. EVERYONE has email and like it or not it works. Email is approximately free. Slack isn't nor is it particularly useful to a huge array of businesses. Even if people use slack they would have to basically replicate email within slack anyway. I'm sure it works great for some groups but the rest of us are going to happily continue to exist without it.
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Never underestimate the power of an installed base and a lowest common denominator. Fax machines are still a thing even today despite them being wildly obsolete for all but the craziest of corner cases. EVERYONE has email and like it or not it works. Email is approximately free.
Doesn't match my experience in the industry. Fax is still a thing because it provides a roll that email doesn't, which is showing a receipt of arrival. By far, the vast majority of fax I see is fax server to fax server from people's computers. It is basically email with (legal) proof that somebody got your email. Which makes your "craziest of corner cases" a great deal of legal and healthcare paperwork. While fax software is usually proprietary (and bundled with the associated software that uses it), I doub
slack observations (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah we have been using slack as a corporate communications tool for the last few years. here are my observations:
1) management types and workaholics LOVE slack, because they can get instant communication with whatever idle thought they have. Are you the type of person who likes to feel important by being CONSTANTLY NOTIFIED of things? well then slack is great for your workflow!
2) "slacker" employees love slack. Its like facebook, but you actually look like you are doing work. After all, it is a sanctioned work tool, unlike all the other social platforms. Many people have slack open all day, just chatting. I doubt even half of it is work related based on the chat histories i catch glimpses of.
3) People who actually have to do work that requires more concentration than collaboration HATE slack. It interrupts your flow if you dont turn notifications off. If you do turn them off, slack will helpfully email you, bothering you there, that you are not checking your slack enough. Fun.
4) You can put slack on your phone! so you can work all the time! and your boss can instantly reach you with whatever garbage he dreams up while drunk at 1130pm on a saturday night. yay work life balance!
In conclusion, its great for people for whom email is not annoying and instant enough. You know, the people that send you 4 emails about the same thing, 3 minutes apart and if you dont respond in the next 15 minutes, come by to talk to you about them.
Its great for social employees to pretend to be working while chatting. It IS just a slick mIRC client after all...
Everyone else, finds it a distraction that we all have to now put up with to appease the workaholics and chatterboxes. Is it here to stay? probably, until the next fad rolls in. Maybe one where you can play games instead of doing actual work.
Everything that you can do in slack, you can do in email. So I have never personally seen the point. The ads that they have in magazines always stress how FAST it is to connect with people over email. But the best part of email is that you can let it sit there and read it on your own schedule. This is the "problem" that slack endeavors to fix, making us all into neurotics that cant stay on the same task for more than 5 minutes.
IM does have a place in business (Score:3)
Everything that you can do in slack, you can do in email. So I have never personally seen the point.
Please. I get entirely too many emails, most of them are informational. Many times I will get an email, then 2 minutes later whoever sent me that email will come over to see if I had read it. IM-tools have their place, as does email. I don't think they serve the same purpose.
Not talking about Slack per se, but in my career I have seen a lot of benefit in IM-tools on occasions.
At a startup in 2005, we had our own IRC server. We used it all the time even in the office when we sat within earshot. You cou
For IPOs, the bigger the story told (Score:2)
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Slack wants to be the next UBER (Score:2)
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa
J. R. "Bob" Dobbs approves! (Score:2)
I hate slack... (Score:2)
We use slack, but we argue about whether to use threads or not.
Some folks like threads as it hides the discussion behind a post.
Others hate threads because they can't find and follow multiple concurrent discussions.
So either it becomes an ongoing flow of everyone's consciousness (ala IRC) or it becomes a really bad live forum implementation.
And I'm also surprised when colleagues want to IM me via slack instead of skype. When I tell them that the company doesn't have visibility on the skype messages but can
It's true. I've seen it firsthand. (Score:2)
In my former job (in software) we used email all the time. We'd get 100-200 emails a day, and to succeed in your job (as PM or EM or senior IC) you'd have to stay on top of them -- it was hard to predict otherwise whether a message was going to be a pivotal cross-team communication or a dumb reply-all. Your personal email archive of all these messages was everything. Going on vacation was a disaster. It encouraged walled silos, because if you didn't have access to a different team's archive then you were an
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so you don't work in a place where a hundred retards at once in chat try to get you to solve their little chickenshit issue while you're trying to get an system that brings in $3 million a day up...
chat is good for some things, but email needs to be there. instant gratification retards need that boat anchor tied to their neck
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So now instead of staying on top of 100-200 emails which you can personally sort and filter, you need to stay on top of a constant stream of 400-500 IMs a day where sorting and filtering is the sole responsibility of the same senders who make all those dumb reply-alls. And this is an improvement how?
No, that's not how it works. The bottom line is that for me to be an informed senior architect/EM on top of cross-team issues, I used to be spending 1.5 hours/day on emails, and now it's down to 20mins/day for IMs+groups. It's interesting to ask why.
Just to be clear, "personal sorting and filtering" is a tax. Sorting and filtering isn't where I add my best value. I add that by architecting, mentoring, guiding and coding.
The key fact is that the division into (1) group-IMs, (2) 1:1 IMs, (3) group posts, (4)
Slack is okay but... (Score:2)
.. wasn't Google Wave more advanced in the functionality it provided than Slack? What happened to that in the end?
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Pump n dump (Score:2)
Sounds like the pre-IPO pump is in full swing. Watch for immediate price collapse after IPO as employees cash out.
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Yup. That's why they're doing a DPO instead of an IPO.
How many AZs are they hosted in? (Score:3)
Have they advanced to being present in more than one AWS availability zone? They weren't a year or so ago according to a presentation they gave to a conference I attended.
I was pretty amazed at the lack of capability maturity for such a well-known product, it definitely came across as a trendy interface with hipster fans built on a shaky foundation.
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Have they advanced to being present in more than one AWS availability zone?
Do you think they could afford more than one?
What a joke (Score:2)
Oh dear God no (Score:2)
Am I the only one who thinks Slack is complete and utter garbage? I fucking hate it. (And all tools like it, including Cisco Teams and Microsoft Teams.) (And I think it's hysterical that *both* of those giants gave their Slack knock-off the same name.)
Slack is not an email replacement (Score:3)
To be clear... We still need some kinds of Private, Length, Non-interruptable communications -- Documents, Etc.
It is more than just being able to send and receive them, But it is also about BEING ABLE TO ORGANIZE communications.
Last I check.... Slack is just a searchable timeline. You can't DRAG and DROP a conversation into a Folder and make a summarized thread object with a Subject line .
Award winner for "Best Vapid Corporate Speech" (Score:2)
If you change the communication system at the office ... the way your employees communicate will change!!
Replace email for what? (Score:2)
Has anyone here managed to use Slack effectively? Do you actually use it instead of email? How do you keep it from just getting in the way?
Never heard of it (Score:2)
Man, their IPO filing must have pages and pages of warnings in the SEC version.
It's not just Slack. (Score:2)
Cisco Spark (now know as Webex Team) as well.
Mattermost anyone? (Score:2)
I struggle to see why businesses would use Slack when a similar product, Mattermost [mattermost.org], is available.
Mattermost is:
1. Free (Slack can be expensive if you have more than a handful of users).
2. Open Source (so auditable for security issues).
3. Self-hosted (important if you don't want your corp comms to be hosted outside of your org).
GitLab even ships with Mattermost as well to integrate Slack-style dev comms into your org.