Reams of VC pitch decks were made about the “Consumerization of the Workplace” thanks to Slack’s approachable design (as MetaLab never fails to remind you) and early touches like emoji reactions and bots. Slack’s original appeal was that it had a much better user experience than prior work chat/email/collaboration tools including the now-dead HipChat and Campfire. Slack Losing Its Wayĭevelopers are your canary in the coalmine for user experience - because they create the damn things! I’m here to argue that this is a strategic fumble that opened up the field to whatever will eventually replace Slack for startups (Microsoft Teams’ success is difficult to assess so I will ignore it here). I’m not here to argue that Slack lost developers because it didn’t want developers. Stewart Butterfield is like the anti- Ballmer. While literally every other company on Earth is throwing all sorts of free benefits to attract developers, Slack found developer communities growing like a weed on it, and flicked them away like so much dandruff. But how much are we talking? Further, every company understands the logic of running “loss leaders” in order to seed stickiness and future growth. Sure, I get that this was a deliberate decision. Slack lost Reactiflux bc they wanted $70k/month to support them. The obvious proximate cause of course, is that I am professionally and personally highly attuned to developer communities, and Slack has actively pushed away developer communities. I feel like this is a meaningful shift this year, and based on responses, I’m not alone. In its place, I am now active in a ton of Developer Discord channels. ![]() Those of you who live and work in Slack know how big this is - I personally went from opening Slack practically every day from 2015 - 2020, to zero meaningful usage whatsoever. ![]() A few days ago I had a sudden realization: I hadn’t been active in Slack in the 2 months since I left Netlify.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |