I don’t understand thid whole Slack glorification. I mean, really, everyone is behaving liks it’s a damn second coming of productivity! What has productivity got to do with it anyway? It’s a messaging app.
Don’t get me wrong, I championed the adoption of slack at the company I work with. I like it. But the public letters from mr. Butterfield to employees, the exceedingly sweet marketing, the out of this world promise of “something that will change your life” sounds a lot like telemarketing dressed up in haute couture advertising mayonnaise.
A messaging app for teams who put robots on Mars, Slack
Seesh! Let me give you a refresher on that:
- Slack is boring. It does not do anything spectacular other than being a fast, simple messaging app, that stores history and makes it searchable.
- Slack is barebones. I have no idea why Slack can add voice but Skype couldn’t add decent text messaging, but you don’t need a cool MIRC to put robots on Mars.
- Slack is hype. There are options other than Slack (say, hipchat) and I chose it because I was literally marketed into it.
- Slack is lazy. By itself it doesn’t do anything. Bots could be something great, but they will not do the work in your place, and you will go throught the seventh circle of setup hell.
- Slack is rude. I love the connectivity, but for an app claiming to make my working life better, I’d love a panel where I have SUPER FINE GRAINED control over notifications, for crying out loud people!!
And that means we can’t limit ourselves to tweaking the product; we need to tweak the market too, Stewart Butterfield
The thing with this idea (tweak the market) is that in time you become annoying, and you create expectations that you will never be able to meet. Tweaking the market is a trick that sells stuff nobody needs.