You're thinking about it the wrong way. First ask yourself what's wrong with email and why does it need to be disrupted? What problem are we actually trying to solve by replacing email.
Email is a powerful tool for asynchronous communication and it's here to stay. The way in which we interact with email may change over time as user interfaces change. We've gone from desktop to mobile and soon there may be some other dominant platform.
To answer my own question. In large corporations email is typically still used to announce or notify at scale. So what we're really looking for is a way to strip out this notification aspect. That's basically just an enterprise version of twitter with an opt-in model for streams which allows you to keep track of what everyone's doing in the organisation without having your inbox spammed. Notice I'm not talking about the collaborative use of email since that's already being solved by tools like Asana, Slack and Atlassian.
To your point, I think we've already see a lot of products that chip away at email, but we're unlikely to see full replacement. Email is the lowest common denominator way of sending something over the internet. Lots of my tasks started with email but moved into other products: keeping in touch with old friends (Facebook), sending/collaborating on spreadsheets (GDrive), asking coworkers a question (Slack).
does Slack have an on premise option? because I think many corporate customers would definitely pay for it, despite all the cloud/saas hype. there are still orgs out there that dont want their comms outside their premises.
Having used team chats based on Jabber, IRC, Slack (in that chronological order), there is a huge difference. Jabber and IRC have always been pure chats, whereas Slack is the first chat platform where people actually use integrations and bots to a large extent. (Also, Jabber/IRC doesn't have /remind, my personal killer feature about Slack.)
Comments
You're thinking about it the wrong way. First ask yourself what's wrong with email and why does it need to be disrupted? What problem are we actually trying to solve by replacing email.
Email is a powerful tool for asynchronous communication and it's here to stay. The way in which we interact with email may change over time as user interfaces change. We've gone from desktop to mobile and soon there may be some other dominant platform.
To answer my own question. In large corporations email is typically still used to announce or notify at scale. So what we're really looking for is a way to strip out this notification aspect. That's basically just an enterprise version of twitter with an opt-in model for streams which allows you to keep track of what everyone's doing in the organisation without having your inbox spammed. Notice I'm not talking about the collaborative use of email since that's already being solved by tools like Asana, Slack and Atlassian.
To your point, I think we've already see a lot of products that chip away at email, but we're unlikely to see full replacement. Email is the lowest common denominator way of sending something over the internet. Lots of my tasks started with email but moved into other products: keeping in touch with old friends (Facebook), sending/collaborating on spreadsheets (GDrive), asking coworkers a question (Slack).
does Slack have an on premise option? because I think many corporate customers would definitely pay for it, despite all the cloud/saas hype. there are still orgs out there that dont want their comms outside their premises.
Zulip and Mattermost are alternatives that can be hosted (they're both open source software).
[0] https://about.mattermost.com/ [1] https://zulip.org/server.html
It's called IRC/Jabber + whatever web/GUI/CLI UI is desired. Many companies deploy it internally.
Having used team chats based on Jabber, IRC, Slack (in that chronological order), there is a huge difference. Jabber and IRC have always been pure chats, whereas Slack is the first chat platform where people actually use integrations and bots to a large extent. (Also, Jabber/IRC doesn't have /remind, my personal killer feature about Slack.)