The Arc of Collaboration - kwokchain

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

Slack is the 911 for whatever isn’t possible natively in a company’s productivity apps. And though it’s improving, there are still many structural cracks. Slack is current best solution for filling these cracks. But it doesn’t fix the cracks themselves, improved processes and productivity apps are needed for that.

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.

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.

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

- **Meta-coordination.** Slack is the best place for meta-levels of strategy and coordination that don’t have specific productivity apps. This is really a type of ‘else statement’, but one that could persist for a while in unstructured format.

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.

Slack serves three functions:

Figma has collaboration built in natively as a first party. This means the ability to comment on designs. But it means much more too. It means the ability to design together at the same time. To be able to send a live demo to someone frictionlessly and then be able to make live changes as you talk to them. It means being able to build design system... See more

- **Else statement.** Slack is the exception handler, when specific productivity apps don’t have a way to handle something. This should decrease in usefulness, as the apps build in handling of these use cases, and the companies build up internal processes.