In 2016, entrepreneur Sean co founded a small technology company headquartered in London with others. Like many other companies, Sean and his team rely on e-mail as their primary communication and collaboration tool. He recalled: "We used to use Gmail mail." At that time, he heard that a powerful instant messaging tool called Slack , claiming to simplify communication in the office. "Because of the strong publicity, we decided to try." After the team switched to Slack, the speed of message sending and receiving was significantly faster. Later, after a demanding customer insisted on using Slack to communicate directly with Sean's team, the team's communication pressure reached its peak and soon felt exhausted, even two engineers resigned. In desperation, Sean stopped using Slack in the company. At present, although this matter has passed for a long time, they still remember Slack's ubiquitous message notification sound. Sean said, "The sound makes me shudder."
lately, Salesforce It proposed to acquire Slack at a price of nearly $28 billion. From a financial point of view, this transaction may be reasonable. After Slack entered the field of office communication and knowledge sharing, many companies quickly accepted this tool. At present, Slack has millions of users, and the revenue of last fiscal year exceeded 600 million dollars. During the COVID-19 epidemic, the rapid development of telecommuting further enhanced the value of Slack. However, many people, including Sean, are exhausted from Slack. For example, the American media The New Republic published an article lamenting that the Slack platform has turned the American workplace into a "dystopian micro" Twitter The world ". Casey Newton, a well-known journalist in the technology industry, said on Twitter: "Salesforce wants to spend 28 billion dollars to buy an app, but people will turn it off when they really want to do something." There is no doubt about the usefulness of Slack, but it is also annoying. Users rely on Slack, but they can't stand it. However, if you think that people's response to this kind of trouble is just complaining about the latest communication method, it is totally wrong. Looking closely at Slack, we can see more far-reaching trends and potential impacts on economic development, which will make the price of $28 billion insignificant.
If we want to understand Slack, we must first understand the development of network communication. In the 1990s, the widespread use of e-mail fundamentally changed the characteristics of office work. At first, e-mail was just an upgrade of inefficient asynchronous communication tools such as voice mail system and fax machine, but it brought a new cooperation mode, that is, point-to-point, non-stop messaging. This shift to continuous interaction is reasonable to some extent. On the one hand, this new model is very convenient. For organizations, it is easier for employees to solve problems in real time through e-mail compared to specific business processes and workflows. On the other hand, the cost of doing so is lower. Since email attachments and digital memos can also be done, why spend extra money to develop network applications for information management?
In the 2000s, with the continuous growth of professional communication, e-mail, which helped create the super information world, also found it difficult to keep pace with the development of the times. E-mail is designed to send and receive several messages a day. If the number of messages increases to dozens, problems begin to appear. In the mountains of emails, information is easy to lose, and emails classified by subject have proved inefficient in supporting topic discussions. In 2014, Slack was officially launched, seizing the opportunities brought by these pain points. Slack wants to optimize the workflow initiated by email. This tool replaces a single inbox with different chat boxes, turns emails classified by subject into continuous chat, and makes all discussions searchable. For the team troubled by email, Slack is like a good medicine, which solves many pain points at once. Only six years later, this effect pushed Slack's valuation to astronomical figures.
The problem brought about by the development of Slack is that no one stops to think about the premise of everything: whether it is reasonable to optimize such a working style. Although Slack optimizes the shortcomings of email in the era of high information, it also enlarges the frequency of interaction. The data collected by RescueTime, a software company, shows that employees who use Slack check communication tools more frequently than others. On average, they check communication tools once every five minutes. This frequency is absurdly high. Neuroscientists and psychologists tell us that human attention is single threaded, and constantly switching attention from one goal to another is not conducive to work efficiency. While actually completing the work, it is impossible for us to continuously focus on the unpredictable communication flow at the same time. Work was interrupted due to communication. This problem was introduced by e-mail, but was pushed to the extreme by Slack. We both love and hate Slack because this company has developed a powerful tool to promote a totally wrong way of working.
It is here that people see opportunities. If Slack has been valued at tens of billions of dollars due to the optimization of the flawed collaboration model, it can also be imagined that the value created by solving potential defects. In 1999, Peter Drucker, a master of management, pointed out that in the 20th century, as we took a smarter approach and explored a better way to produce products, the efficiency of manual labor in the manufacturing industry increased by 50 times. In contrast, until the end of the 20th century, there was almost no similar self-examination and optimization in the field of knowledge. From this perspective, Slack is just a small step on an important road. This is equivalent to studying how to make the waterwheel run faster in the field of knowledge sharing. In the current environment, the research in this direction does have its own use, but it is far less influential than the invention of the steam engine.
People don't hate Slack. More frequent interruptions of attention create problems, but e-mail also has its limitations. Therefore, if some organizations take point-to-point messaging as their core organizational principle, it is reasonable to try Slack. As for the best collaboration mode in the digital era, if Slack is the epitome, there will be problems. It is likely that Slack is just a transitional product. This is the first time that mankind has tried to optimize high-tech professional fields in the short term, so more substantial changes are likely to occur in the future. The future of office work is not to make messages sent more smoothly, but to find ways to avoid sending so many messages at the beginning. (Viking)
