Here is a quick thought.
IBM, the big blue that represented dominance in tech when my parents were teenagers, has been using Slack as a mode of communication within a lot of teams for multiple years now.
News now is that, it’s extending the tool across all its 300k+ employees. IBM could have easily used its home-grown tools. In fact it has been selling such tools to organizations for decades.
So why are they not doing it?
Couple of reasons, I imagine
- First, maintaining an enterprise scale software requires efforts, and sales. With Slack in the mix, a lot of organizations are increasingly ditching legacy software in favor of more hip ones. IBM wants to focus on its core strengths, which definitely is not enterprise chat apps anymore.
- Second, and probably most importantly, IBM wants to stay, and appear relevant, reinvented, young. They can’t be running org-wide Lotus Notes and calling themselves “agile”. They are all for modernizing the 108-year-old behemoth. I’ve spoken to 6 different people at IBM, who’ve all loved using Slack. And you wouldn’t want to just take away a tool which was lovingly adopted by a lot of people.
No matter what the official statements by IBM say, it all comes down to Slack’s appeal to the employees, and IBM’s intention of being a part of the modern folklore.
hendrix's army 