About features:
Calls and screen sharing work well.
Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them.
Search is poorly implemented: for some reason it's difficult to find stuff.
A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software, to give threads a name and persist them in a menu and reference them later on.
Not much money in that though.
What I find slack enables though, is technical documentation being stored in such chats instead of something more formal, like an API or an up to date README.
Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way".
How about code highlighting in markdown-style triple-backtick blocks instead of requiring snippets? Or the ability to have a separate window per workspace in the native app? Or maybe marking thread responses that echo to the channel marked as read when I see them in the channel, rather than requiring an explicit click into the Threads section? Or a huddle video feed that isn’t blurry at 4K so I can actually read the text getting shared?
I do like Slack, but some of these missing features just feel like missed table-stakes, and their focus seems elsewhere.
Aside for the Slack users I see in action... Get something useful for the long term is well... Less valuable then the cost 99% of the time... It's not version control for a software project, the signal/noise ration of information is so terrible to the point of being just garbage.
When I was working with Slack I felt that most of the communication had more depth and broadnesses and after transition to MSTeams I personally feel that the whole chatter decreased significantly and folks are more prone to start a call than to “Create a Post” with title and write down.
Teams is...fine.
Of course then we switched to teams which isnt as useful for finding anything, so that problem is solved /s.
Yes, context switching is expensive. I don't see how never leaving Slack changes that, there is enough going on there to make it hard to stay on task. Plenty of windows, DMs, channels, integrations pinging you, meetings about to happen.
I can only imagine they are starting to dream of SlackOS where everything is AI powered and you never leave Slack but you are still wasting the same amount of time, just in their product.