Slack turns one year old today. In its short but fascinating history, the startup has managed the remarkable feat of actually getting people excited about enterprise communication software. The company has more than 500,000 daily active users, and it’s adding tens of thousands more every each week.
“That’s our primary metric,” founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield tells Quartz. “If you’re not using Slack every single day, you’re not really using it.”
The chart above shows the peak number of daily active users every week in the last year. Minus the big drop off around the holidays, the company has been quickly gaining steam since August—around the time Wired published a big profile. Slack relies primarily on word-of-mouth marketing, helping keep costs low.
Impressive stats, and I really like the metric that they have chosen to represent their growth. Not ‘registered users’ or ‘organisation domains represented’ but real users that are actually using the platform as it is intended to be used. ((And given Slack is not traditional enterprise software, they’re not indicating licences bundled with renewals for other products either))
I access Slack from my Mac and multiple mobile devices every single day, using it for the team that runs Social Connections, plus multiple other communities. I have to say, no other tool I’ve used in the past year has had such a dramatic impact on my own personal productivity. As I mentioned in my IBMConnectED post, I’m surprised that IBM hasn’t tried to counter the rise of Slack in any direct way.
However, other enterprise vendors have taken this on, and whilst I can see Slack continuing its impressive rise, it will be interesting to see how that chart continues over the next 6-12 months.
For me personally, it’s been an almost career-long fixture that has led from a couple of hops to Berlin for Lotusphere Europe, through to more than a decade of crossing the pond to Orlando for the real thing. I was telling someone just last week that I’ve missed only two events since 2004. The first was in 2006 when I’d temporarily left the Lotus space to venture into other technologies. It was partly reading the news from the event whilst trying to get my head around HP OpenView systems management products that made me jump back into the Lotus partner space within a few months! Then in 2008, my employer decided at the last moment to cancel my ticket – the last straw in a long debate about the importance of collaboration technologies to their business. Having handed in my notice, Lotusphere 2008 coincided with my first week of running my own business.
So why this now? The future is bright, but is it not always that bright? Would we want to go forward if the future was bad? So I am a realistic optimist, we need to start to iterate. To take baby steps. It’s not just tools, it is also about people who need to change, too. But that takes time. In the mean time, it should become easier to collaborate. It should be a goal to break the unnatural boundaries of the current products out in the marketplace (and yes, I dream of looking beyond the “one” supplier). The current boundaries make it hard to see how this will end up.
In case of IBM Connections and IBM Notes this is clearly the case. But that’s not unique in the marketplace, by the way! Products have been dealt with by different groups. Notes is a 25 year old product and on the other hand Connections is just 7 years old (ok, the roots of the products can be traced to internal projects, but still). So it’s not weird that the products have their own ways and create their own habits. And believe me e-mail is not dead, not by a long shot. So over time other mail clients appeared in the marketplace, like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Apple Mail. All in all THE most common way to collaborate is through e-mail and documents. For both within organizations and beyond, it’s simply the least common denominator in most cases. Collaboration based on e-mail has run into many issues over the years and fixed them. The standards lack precision so there are issues between technology implementations. e-Mail is still not secure from end user to end user after 25 years+. Attachments get bounced because of size. Calendar items are handled differently by everyone. This causes lots of problems in everyday worklife. Who has not dealt with calendar problems, file size issues (it’s just too big) and security worries (viruses and unencrypted mail traffic)?
When you ask adoption consultants what the problem is most of them will tell you that it’s a training and habit problem. So you just need to educate people more, teach them where to do their tasks more efficiently and how to collaborate more efficiently. Thus the movement of “Zero eMail”. But lots of tasks still happen in e-mail and people just have plain bad habits. But to be honest, the tools to communicate and collaborate don’t help you… In the last 5 years we have seen more and more options to collaborate to work differently. And yes, we just gave people yet another option to worry about, we added a channel, we called it a “social platform” (Connections). So basically we just added one more channel to their daily work habits. What do you think, did that help? It depends, it all depends on who you ask.
of exchanging e-mails with individuals, fragmenting the discussions. You can involve your whole team, they can all see and comment on work items (aka documents). Thus you build on each other’s knowledge (
So this is the context of most enterprise organizations that have started down the route to become a more social or a more connected enterprise. Some start with a clear vision of a more collaborative future of the work environment, where people can collaborate seamlessly with others, where leadership recognizes that they need to differentiate themselves from their competitors. There are different strategies to reach those goals of course. But as we all know culture eats strategy for lunch. In large organizations it is very hard to change culture . Strong leadership is needed. But even if you have strong leadership and a great vision of the future, even if that’s there that’s not a recipient for success. Why? Well leadership changes. The change of culture is difficult. The payoff takes a while. Value is not immediately apparent. People resist change. And tools are flawed. But, but, but, in time this will all be fixed. If we just switch to a tool that works? Or it will work the tools will become better and work seamlessly. Tools are simple to change, it is just the technology. And then people will see the benefit in the end and start working differently. And while this is all happening around us, people suffer. They are faced with an ever growing multitude of tools and choices. Choices they have to make. People have become the “integrators” between all the tools for their new way of working. And most enterprises fail to implement this better future effortlessly. Simply because you need long term leadership in place and that’s not the way most companies are built. It’s about short term and immediate return.
The Social Business Toolkit (SBT) SDK is a set of extensible tools and resources for developers who want to incorporate social capabilities into their applications and business processes. Social capabilities include features and functionality that tap into the power of social interactions, business networks, community-based problem solving, and more.
As promised by 
