The Arc of Collaboration - kwokchain

Slack serves three functions:

Messaging, it turned out, appears to be a better center of gravity than documents. And while Dropbox (barring significant traction in its new products) seems to be fading in its centrality, what’s striking is that Slack’s victory seems hollow as well.

In the last few decades we have seen tremendous technical breakthroughs in the latencies and tooling possible to remove these constraints. Across the world, whether in productivity apps or in national governance, there will be a transition period as our norms and processes adapt to this tightening of the collaboration feedback loop. But perhaps I r... See more

Active users of Discord have it on all the time, even when they are not playing games. It’s a passive way to have presence with your friends. And when your friends start playing games it makes it easy to with one click go join them in the game. Bringing your actual social graph across all games. Finally, voice chat makes it possible to talk with yo... See more

And Figma is not alone. More and more apps in all categories understand that collaboration should and must be built in as a first party if they want to best serve their customers. Notion, Airtable, etc all understand this. The feedback loops of collaboration get so short that they become part of the productivity loop.

Slack’s importance is inversely tethered to the rate at which functional workflows within companies become legible and systematized. Both at an operational level, and long term at the meta-strategic level.

A new generation of functional apps have risen, with messaging and collaboration built directly into them as first parties. And with them it becomes increasingly clear that Slack isn’t air traffic control for every app, it’s 911 for when they fail.

- **Watercooler.** Slack is a social hub for co-workers. This is very important, and full of gifs.

It’s not that Slack is too distracting and killing individual productivity. It’s that your company’s processes are so dysfunctional you need Slack to be distracting and killing individual productivity.