Slack-ification of Whatsapp & Facebook

(Oh I seem to have developed a taste for commenting on strategic decisions of companies. After MS-LI acquisition, now this. Well, as long as I have a Medium account, a computer and an Internet connection, who can stop me. Let me go on, whether this gets read or not)

UPDATE:

I was pretty sure that Ben Thompson was going to write about this in the Free Article of the week this time around :) Before his thoughts influence mine, I wanted to pour out what I thought so this article. Now, he indeed has written about it. Read this for a clearer, more refined take on what I have written below.

ORIGINALLY:

For some reason, Facebook seems to have developed a sort of Slack-envy.

First the news came of ‘Whatsapp Group Chat’ enhancements (after the launch on Web app & Mac app a little before) and now the Facebook @ Workplace.

Arguably & likely, Whatsapp & Facebook are separate teams and both have their own roadmaps without interfering with each other. Also arguably, Whatsapp changes to Groups are just enhancements towards consumer use. With Groups usage exploding, they just wanted to make it better for consumer groups though the sort of new features (like @ replies) are very Slack-like.

Even if we ignore Whatsapp enhancements, Facebook wants to be playing a real big role in ‘Enterprise’, hence the Workplace product. To me, that sounds not a great idea to focus on. There are several consumer problems it can solve (no doubt they are doing those too but then why get distracted)

I fully believe that the next set of Enterprise companies are going to be ‘Consumer Like’, in the sense of ‘You need not (or It is not enough if you) please the CIO anymore. You need to please the actual user of the product, so you need good UX…’. But that does not mean any company that has a good B2C product will be able to build an Enterprise product easily (even if it is Facebook).

Even Microsoft (which is an Enterprise company in the traditional sense — of pleasing the CIO) has struggled with ‘Consumer Like’ enterprise apps. The acquisitions of Yammer, Skype etc. are not doing that great — Skype For Business gets used because the CIO puts it there, not because employees love it. Their LinkedIn acquisition as well will go down the same route, as I argued earlier.

I do not have really convincing set of reasons for why Facebook will not do well but some random thoughts here:

• Culture of the company that builds it — It is not easy to change the culture of the company, the way product decisions are made, tech design, release cycles etc. And the minor nuances of building an Enterprise app would get missed in the process. Like ‘Desktop First’, ‘Cloud First’, ‘Mobile First’, I believe there is something called ‘Enterprise First’ which Facebook is not.
• Culture of the company that uses it — Though the CIO is lesser in charge, there is someone ‘like a CIO’ who approves usage of such products. It could even be a division/team lead. To them, it is easy to approve usage of a new product (like Slack) than approve usage of a primarily consumer app (like Facebook), even if it is the ‘Enterprise’ version.
• Actual User Behavior — In my own limited experiments where I have tried to create employee groups for messaging, link sharing etc., the actual usage has been higher in places like Yammer, Slack etc. than on Facebook Groups — the consumer version (or even LinkedIn, for that matter). Most people do not want their bosses as their Facebook friends or as LinkedIn connections. The separation between work life and personal life is critical.

So who will then win this game? My belief is, it is going to be a new set of companies that have completely focused on “Consumer Like Enterprise Apps” that will win. Not the “Traditional Enterprise companies which try to build/acquire consumer like apps” (e.g. Microsoft) or “Traditional Consumer companies which try to build Enterprise apps” (e.g. Facebook).

Companies like Altassian (Jira, Confluence etc.), Slack, Asana etc. have the head start. So it could be them or someone like them that will come up soon.