Reported by Samuel P. Jacobs, Time, 10/29/15
Slack’s
slick messaging software has convinced companies of all sizes they can move
past the inbox. But is what comes next better—or worse?
People
ask two questions about Slack, the interoffice chat software used by some of
the world’s most closely watched companies. The first is whether the
21-month-old startup is actually worth its $2.8 billion valuation. The second
is whether Slack is changing how much of the world works.
The
first question is easier to answer. Even in an economy that has minted at least
65 new startups valued at $1 billion since January, Slack is growing fast. More
than 1.7 million people have become daily users of the service since it was
first released in February 2014; there were 10 times as many people using Slack
in August of this year as there were during the same time last year.
Venture-capital darlings Airbnb, BuzzFeed and Blue Bottle Coffee use it. So do
Fortune 500 firms like Comcast and Walmart. Teams at NASA and the State
Department are on Slack. (More than 2,000 people use Slack at Time Inc., which
publishes this magazine and many others.) Not in a generation has a new tool
been adopted more quickly by a wider variety of businesses or with such joy.
If
you’ve used Facebook or Twitter, you’ll understand why Slack is hot. The
program–it’s not that different from the instant messengers that were popular
on the early Internet–helps different parts of a company communicate in real
time. Slack preserves every comment in one easily searchable archive, and all
those messages now skip your dreaded inbox. Slack’s users, on average, spend 10
hours each weekday plugged into the application, which means for those who are
already on it, getting work done increasingly looks like being in Slack.
From Time Magazine
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