Those are really interesting points. I also thought about investor-driven approach.
Slack had to justify massive funding it took over the years. It has 1500+ employees for a chat app. In comparison, Notion has <50 employees and they seem to release more stuff than slack (though it might not be a fair direct comparison).
Having said that, 28 Billion is a great success by any metric. It's just that Slack had lots of potential to upsell and solve lots of adjacent problems around project management & collaboration which could have made it more valuable and increased its Market. But for some reason, they just didn't move fast enough and build/experiment more.
I don't think it's Microsoft. Slack became too stagnated. They build a great product but didn't evolve.
They didn't seem to address the distraction part. It has created a culture of ASAP everything.
It just create too much anxiety with so much going on. It feels busy but not productive. It just seem the same product as it was 4 years ago.
Also, it never felt like that they cared about our work-life. Slack took away all the structure from our work and left fragmented chatter. It never felt like they cared for our work-life.
It's UI is still limited and searching for something is painful even though search is it its name - SLACK. It started as chat but stayed as chat and did nothing to fix issues that comes with chat. With mail, you have one inbox. With slack, you have so many random inbox.
All messages are treated equally..from lunch chatter to some important announcement? How do I decide what to mute or unmute? Why can't there be a better way? If it's an FYI, don't send me notification. If my response is needed on something make those messages different. I mean there has to be a better way then just a single chat only fit for picnic planning.
I don't know, I just feel that slack could have become a huge independent company if they had cared more about the problems of users. Everything starts in a slack message but slack did nothing to helps us achieve it. Instead, it just became a mess of emojis and random time-sucking chatter.
Yes, that would be super interesting. Not sure about the specifics but it would be a great place where people could come and collaborate on projects (maybe in future).
It's also such a great teaching tool for kids.
Just curious, is it a personal hobby project? How do you plan to sustain it?
This is definitely one of the most interesting project I have seen. Thanks for building it :)
This is so cool and exciting! I have always been fascinated by the idea of making a virtual world where you can build test actual machines so the cost of experimentation is really low. It would enable so many people to experiment innovate in the physical world.
It has changed from treating them as sacrosanct and precious (although some of them are), to treating them as a collection of blog post and articles.
So now whenever I start reading a book, I just try to skim through it initially. If there's an interesting chapter or concept, I will read it thoroughly. Yes sometime, you might miss some interesting concept while skimming but that's ok. It's rare and pros outweighs cons.
I feel there's so much abundance of knowledge out there that it's important to curate what you read. Sometime you can read the entire book in a day. Sometime even a single page might take you days to read and understand. So it's also about the density of knowledge and content in a book.
Also, sometime, I will read multiple books in parallel based on my requirements or mood. One thing that does help is your highlights/notes (both digital/physical). Having some system to refer back in future always help.
Yes, you will still forget a lot of what you have read but that's ok. We tend to remember the important stuff. And in future if we want to gig deep, we can always come back and read again.
Some of these concepts are also explained by Naval Ravikant in one of his interviews. So you can also watch them.
Having said that, 28 Billion is a great success by any metric. It's just that Slack had lots of potential to upsell and solve lots of adjacent problems around project management & collaboration which could have made it more valuable and increased its Market. But for some reason, they just didn't move fast enough and build/experiment more.