Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago.<p>This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company&#x2F;&#x2F;startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again.<p>Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. It fosters a &quot;Always on&quot; culture, where irrelevant chats are exchanged publicly to advertise how much work is being done. If you shut down Slack and appear as Offline people assume you are not working.<p>It also seems to me that now that Slack became the norm for communication, I almost don&#x27;t receive well written emails with well-argued technical discussions anymore. Everything is now a &quot;Chat&quot; that dilutes the technical discussion because it needs to be responded &quot;directly&quot;.<p>I would expect 2018 to be the year where people start questioning the utility of &quot;Slack everywhere&quot; and not blindly jump on the Slack bandwagon because that&#x27;s what great startups do.