#Slack- from the scratch..
I am sure that many of us do not know about SLACK. Well, it is basically a chatting program used as an internal tool of communication by the company, Tiny Speck… We will get back to its origination story later, lets now start with my story.
I came across slack when our Entrepreneurship prof. Mr Sijo Kuruvilla introduced it as a mode of communication in class for this course. Initially when slack was introduced I was a bit reluctant to use this platform. But gradually it became interesting to use as it was easy to get the entire topic discussed in class at one place, where we would post whatever resources we discussed in class and also Decks (containing notes and resources) were formed by our Professor which would also be posted in Slack. It’s a platform where everyone can put their views at the same time and also it engages teams with a new perspective.
Use of slack during the course was not only for the formal discussion or things related to the syllabus. It also provides an informal environment to chat, where batch mates could be sharing their perspectives on different topic even the doubts and clarification with the faculty. And the reason I found slack more interesting because I believe professionalism is important but if we get friendly environment or platform to share our views then we interact much more than the formal e-mails.
Story behind slack
The inspiration behind slack was the need to eliminate the gap of team communication which was discovered during developing a game company called glitch. Everyone knows about Slack, but very less people know about the company behind it called, tiny speck, it was actually a failed game company.
Glitch was a browser which was based broadly on online game. This was available in 2D cartoonish, open-world where players could:
· interact with each other
· collect points
· customised and develop their avatar
Stewart Butterfields who has spent several years trying to make a game which didn’t work. Glitch was comparatively victorious in engaging a public but they choose wrong platform that is Adobe Flash. As most of the users spent their time on iPhone and Android, interest in flash gaming crashed. And closed in 2012. But there is proverb all ends are new beginning. And then he decided to make software called slack and the idea was change the way team communicate. This helps to communicate everything in one place. According to Slack’s co-founder “Email will be the cockroach of the internet,” when asked whether Slack will kill email. He said it will take another 30 or 40 years to eliminate emails. Even though almost everyone hates email but email system survives because Emails are considered as the lowest common denominator for official communications. But it’s very difficult to manage internal communication.
The company was founded in August 2013 and was available publically in February 2014 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. If we see till now the company has more than 2 million active users per day In the beginning they raised $330 million as a funding which is now valued to more than $2.8 billion. It also involves huge number of third-party services to communicate at one place. Slack is inter-office software that helps team member to communicate more efficiently.
In conclusion, I loved my experience and would continue to use it with my batch mates.
