Stewart Butterfield, on Medium, regarding the “innovation” that Slack brings:
But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity.
We at Plain have been using Slack day-to-day since their preview release. We love it and I can personally testify to Slack changing the way a company can work together; whether you work remotely or you are all in the same room.
For us Slack has changed the way we communicate in three very measurable ways. First, it has effectively eliminated internal email. Most of our team members don’t even need to open their email on a daily basis. Second, it has all but eliminated the dozens of notification emails we get from other services we use since we now have all of those funneled into a #notifications channel in Slack. And third, it has made file transfers even easier than using Dropbox (though we still store data there).
I recommend reading the entire internal memo which Stewart published openly on Medium.
