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Take a moment to ponder this: Almost every institution today — from governments to global organizations — is characterized by large groups of people who connect and coordinate across geographies; people who communicate.
Communication has always been at the centre of our history, shaping people’s lives and humankind’s progress. Today, we don’t just rely on communication, but count on it being concise and quick — a fact highlighted perfectly by the indisputable significance of Messaging.
Although Messaging has redefined what it means to stay connected; beyond the realm of everyday communication, it is fast becoming a key component of enterprise efficiency, as well as a core around which whole new businesses are taking shape. But if Messaging is to keep pace with its own growth and serve its new-found purposes, it needs to evolve — right down to its fundamentals.
That’s why, at Mitter, we are re-imagining
Messaging for the future — starting with its infrastructure.
Driven by the rise of the internet, messaging has come a long way. What began as Email, is today an immensely more efficient system: Instant Messaging. Since its commercial launch in the 90s, IM has witnessed an incredible rate of adoption — initially as a new way for people to connect, and then as the primary way for global workforces to collaborate.
Although IM services have long been used to communicate within workplaces, they were never really built for an enterprise environment, where collaboration takes more than just basic conversation. While almost every IM service facilitates group messaging or file-sharing, the system falls apart when its use-cases take on even the slightest complexity.
Two significant attempts at filling this business-shaped gap came in 2013. In May, at their annual I/O event, Google launched Hangouts; and later that year in August, Stewart Butterfield gave us Slack; or as its lesser-known name goes — Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.
Hangouts was a culmination of the Mountainview giant’s multiple attempts at tapping into the lucrative messaging space — from the widely popular Google Talk, to the ‘Hangouts’ voice/videocall feature in Google+. However, alongside pitching Hangouts as the savvy, fresh-from-Mountainview messaging service to connect with all your friends and family, Google went a step further and positioned it as a collaboration tool that professionals and teams could use. Today, although widely used, Hangouts is yet to hit that mark.
Which brings us to Slack — the king of messaging-led collaboration services, and one of the youngest upstarts ever to earn the ‘Unicorn’ status. Slack’s namesake product was just eight months into the market when the company hit a US$1 billion valuation. What gives?
Slack wasn’t just pitched as a
collaboration tool — it was designed as one.
It fully embodied the ‘collaboration’ identity and arrived brimming with functionality that truly enabled teams to better work together. Apart from a host of features that helped members stay organized, what really drew businesses’ attention to Slack was the programmatic access it offered to build in customized integrations that significantly amplified productivity — Slackbots. Despite its low abstraction, it was this customizability that defined Slack’s success. In fact, Slack was never a messaging service; it was a ‘workplace collaboration software’ built atop messaging. Where instant messaging — including Hangouts — allowed for communication, Slack allowed people to work together by coupling messaging with business processes and workflows.
Another significant example of messaging’s foray into the world of business comes from Facebook-owned WhatsApp. With a billion daily active users, WhatsApp serves as a crucial way for small businesses to connect with customers — whether that’s a local bakery sharing the day’s menu, or a grocer taking orders through messages. The opportunity here had been obvious for years, and on January 19th, 2018, WhatsApp Business was unveiled — completely free, with a basic feature-set built specifically for small and medium-size businesses to better connect with their customers.
The rise of services like Slack and WhatsApp in the business realm signifies that messaging is now primed and ready to lead a paradigm shift in how enterprises and their teams operate. The world is fast beginning to see that there’s more to enterprise messaging systems than use cases like customer support and internal communication. As messaging percolates deeper into enterprise ecosystems around the world, it will find itself at the center of unprecedented use cases involving complexities that existing messaging solutions cannot cater to.
These changing paradigms present a clear need for a whole new generation of messaging apps — ones built around a cloud-based, unassuming messaging platform that not only provides developers and enterprises the building blocks to create incredibly tailored messaging solutions, but one that allows them to do it in about a hundred lines of code and a few hours, over a weekend.
At Mitter, that’s how we’re reimagining messaging — by reengineering it right from the core, in order to give more power to developers, more customizability to enterprises, and a new life to digital communication.
