This Is Why You Won’t Be Saying Goodbye To Email Anytime Soon

October 21, 2019

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Days before Slack was listed on the NYSE, Slack cofounder and CEO Stewart Butterfield shared his beliefs on the future of email in a CNBC interview.

He said, “Over the next few years, certainly over the next five to seven years . . . conventional email will phase out,” and he went on to explain that companies will begin to prioritize messaging methods where employees can collaborate and direct message each other—as opposed to sending emails back and forth.
This is the big narrative the company has been using from the very beginning as its “guiding mission.” And for a company valued at $13.77 billion, it makes sense: a nimble, consumer-friendly messaging application overthrowing email—the age-old behemoth that has been around since the dawn of the internet. That’s an exciting narrative that investors, employees, and customers can all get behind.But it’s only telling one side of the story.Slack is an incredible product, and the founding story is entrepreneurship at its finest. Butterfield, one of the founders of Flickr (which was later acquired by Yahoo), was originally working on a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, called Glitch. As the story goes, Glitch ended up not gaining much traction, and Butterfield had to accept the venture was a lost cause. However, instead of formally closing up shop, he whittled the team down to a bare-bones staff and doubled down on the one thing they had built that showed promise—an in-house messaging platform they’d used all throughout development: Slack.Read full article

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