[Part 1] EMAIL vs SLACK — Who wins?
It’s been around since 1979, yet we are still addicted to email for work, at least. But Slack, the insanely successful messaging start-up now even used by the likes of NASA, Sony, Yelp,… maybe the company that kills Email!
The power of Slack!
February 2014: Slack is launched publicly.
In the six months since launch, Slack has been growing at a breakneck pace. Over 125,000 people use the app every day, among them 13,000 teams at companies as large as eBay, Sony, Yelp, and NBC Universal. Slack is now worth over $5 billion after $250 million cash injection led by Japan’s SoftBank
Slack helps professionals significantly reduce email clutter, there by enhancing productivity. The Slack users reported that using Slack reduced their daily inbox size by 50% to 80%.
Communication in Slack is more real-time and collaborative than email, making companies want to adopt it as at least a partial email replacement. Most Slack customers have moved all within-the-team communication to Slack, while communication external to the team and to the organization is still conducted via email.
Slack comes pre-integrated with tools and apps that are frequently used in the office, providing workers a one-stop interface to use almost any work-related application such as Dropbox, Google Hangouts, SoundCloud, GitHub, Jira, or MailChimp. In addition, the company offers APIs that allow developers to integrate custom apps with their company’s or customers’ Slack accounts.
Slack maintains a searchable archive of all communication and data in the cloud. Slack’s search functionality is often cited to be “Gmail-like”. Besides the obvious benefit of spending less time searching for stuff in email, this also enables workers to search for keywords in their colleagues’ non-private inboxes, resulting in better onboarding for new employees and stronger collaboration across the organization.
Slack is available for instant download and comes with best-in-class UX and design features (e.g., walk-throughs, animations, screen overlays, speech bubbles, etc.) to on-board new users. This means little incremental time and effort spent by IT teams in setting up and maintaining Slack accounts for employees.
It shows: Slack is clearly emerging as a digital winner for now!
Email is not dead or dying; in fact, it’s still very much alive.
All of us rely on email heavily throughout the work week. Contrary to what is often suggested in the press, email usage is still very much on the rise. Users trust it, are familiar with it and leverage it all day, every day, in their business and personal lives.
Radicati’s most recent Email Statistics Report estimates that by 2019, the number of worldwide email users will exceed 2.9 billion — that’s up 10 percent from 2015. Additionally, the number of business emails sent and received per user per day is also projected to increase, suggesting global email will rise 14 percent over the same period.
Ironically, so-called “email killers” like Slack, Yammer, Skype… still rely on email
If a user forgets his or her password for any of these platforms, a reset link is typically sent via email. And while public communication tools and social media platforms like Twitter have integrated direct messaging features in an effort to eliminate the need for email, users find it difficult to facilitate any kind of external contact without an initial email introduction. This is the reason why Email makes organization out of chaos!
Additionally, email is the most trusted, reliable source for record keeping in the workplace, perhaps because it has been around for so long. It’s the first thing a company gives you upon starting in their employ. From there, it becomes the tool in which most of our daily tasks and business transactions are recorded, therefore storing sensitive and valuable information.
While email is a reliable protocol, it isn’t owned by any one company, and its existence isn’t tied to a single provider. Email is inexpensive, only requiring an internet connection. There is a real risk associated with embracing proprietary communication tools: If Slack or Dropbox went out of business tomorrow, what would happen to the records residing in that system? Open email standards like SMTP, and the robust email marketplace, provides assurance that makes email a safe bet for years to come
Email is not dead or dying. But Slack is clearly emerging as a digital winner for now. There is a civil war between these technologies.
(To be concluded….next week)
