Slack: The Bulls are typing...

-It wants to serve the broadest range of real-time engagement use cases well to appeal to the customers who need everything to just work, but faces competition from more geographically and use-case focused competitors.

In Levie’s telling — and he also wrote a blog post about the Slack sale — it all comes down to sales. The idea that workers would someday choose all their own tools was always a fantasy, he told me, in part because most workers don’t event want to think about their tools. In such a world, the winning app will almost always be one with a giant, er, ... See more

And yet if there’s a lesson of the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got the company about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design. In its open letter, Slack famously told Microsoft: “You’ve got to do this with love.” In 2020, looking at Slack’s size, the idea seems laughable. What’s lo... See more

Slack made the opposite trade. They gave up some speed, but they’ve built in network effects and switching costs.

We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works fine).  That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation.  What we are selling is not the software product — the set of all the feat... See more