51–60 of 221 posts
"Every large team I spoke to had an exceptionally high bar and was unwilling to entertain Level until it was significantly more “mature.”" They all made the right decision, as it folded only a couple months later.
That kind of circular reasoning is only more maddening because it makes sense. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a prisoner's dilemma.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chat is a complement to email, not a replacement. Over time some people may take their formerly-email activities to chat, but no cutover is required. Running two chat systems side by side, on the other hand, is a huge pain. There really is a pressure to get everything migrated and the old one turned off.
Email is for outside the boundaries (outside-of-company, outside-of-division in a silo'd company), chat is for inside - there's still people who do prefer email especially in partner facing roles, but I think its fair to say that most prefer using chat if they had a choice.
The thing is Slack wouldn't be as successful as it is without some merits. I think understanding why it is so successful could be a very interesting exercise for anyone wanting to get into that market.
We actually have the opposite problem where I work. We have Slack and only a handful of people out of 50 use it regularly, all of which are remote devs such as myself. The only communication that works is face to face meetings or casual corridor conversations, so remote people are basically excluded from everything that happens. Email is generally useless too. Writing skills are not abundant here, when the emails do get answered.
Slack has a staying power that the author didn't catch: once you've got all kinds of apps reporting data directly into Slack, and all kinds of rooms set up for specific data purposes, it's even more sticky than email. Before a Slack-using company would switch, the competitor would need to support many/most/all of the integrations that the company is using. You've really only got two chances to win Slack's customers:…
Not that it'd be easy but I imagine that you can steal their customers by adding chat rooms and integrations slowly to some other type of software, rather than a more direct angle where you have to win at one of those two moments.
I mean I've done this with things I spent 3-4 years building :/
I've never been more annoyed by a basic website. Center your content!
Better to cut the cord than keep kidding yourself. Thanks for sharing!!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email is for outside the boundaries (outside-of-company, outside-of-division in a silo'd company), chat is for inside - there's still people who do prefer email especially in partner facing roles, but I think its fair to say that most prefer using chat if they had a choice.
Not necessarily true. For example the enterprise I work in doesn't allow saving chat history. This makes email better for technical discussion that needs recorded.