I started using Slack in 2015 and thought it was a great product.
Since then, they have hit 2 home runs on top of their basic chat functionality:
1. Slack Connect: Being able to share channels between workspaces is simply amazing. Most of our customers are on Slack, and having a Slack connection to them makes it much easier to communicate with them and get their feedback as we improve our product. I don't know any other tool that even comes close to how important Slack Connect has been to product development in my startup.
2. Canvas: They rolled this out last year as notes or something, and I was pretty underwhelmed with the experience at first. But very recently (within the past month I think) they reintroduced this as "canvas" with really tight integration with threads. We have moved all of our planning and synchronization activity to a canvas that we set up every week.
Although these features are not difficult for Google or Microsoft to implement on a purely technical level, their product organizations don't seem to understand the network effects of chat the way that Slack's product organization does.
Slack is certainly not dead today and they are showing the savvy to stay alive well into the future.
Since then, they have hit 2 home runs on top of their basic chat functionality:
1. Slack Connect: Being able to share channels between workspaces is simply amazing. Most of our customers are on Slack, and having a Slack connection to them makes it much easier to communicate with them and get their feedback as we improve our product. I don't know any other tool that even comes close to how important Slack Connect has been to product development in my startup.
2. Canvas: They rolled this out last year as notes or something, and I was pretty underwhelmed with the experience at first. But very recently (within the past month I think) they reintroduced this as "canvas" with really tight integration with threads. We have moved all of our planning and synchronization activity to a canvas that we set up every week.
Although these features are not difficult for Google or Microsoft to implement on a purely technical level, their product organizations don't seem to understand the network effects of chat the way that Slack's product organization does.
Slack is certainly not dead today and they are showing the savvy to stay alive well into the future.