Slack gets closer to killing work email forever with cross-company messaging
Gmail's worst nightmare... Almost exactly a year ago, Slack went public with the goal of killing company email forever. It hasn't been able to do that completely because of one big roadblock: you're still emailing people outside your company. Slack is almost exclusively an internal messaging tool. But with its latest development, Slack might be able to drive the nail into all of work email's coffin:
- Slack Connect: Tired of that 40-page long email thread with your marketing partners/clients? Slack Connect allows up to 20 orgs to collab over Slack.
- Shared channels: It's a magnification of Slack's "shared channels" idea, first tested in 2017 to allow multiple companies to work in a (you guessed it) shared channel. It is inter-office communication ā but 100X more ping'able.
Nothing like a Nando's name drop... to seal the value statement. Slack believes Connect is for more than just project-based communication. Over 1M users have already tested it.
- Mention: UK chicken icon Nando's has been using it to communicate with its food delivery partner. Others are using it for customer support, and some doctors are even using it to share COVID-19 experiences.
- Flex Mention: Slack humble bragged that it used Connect to coordinate its (super low-interest) $800M convertible bond offering. The law firm, the consulting firm, and the i-bankers... all in one channel.
Consumer messaging could be Slack's next frontier... Slack is 100% focused on business communications. Now, it's expanding its focus from pure intra-company to cross-company. Microsoft just launched a personal version of its Slack rival, which is called Teams, to communicate with friends/family. With the "Connect" platform already built out, Slack might not be far behind.