
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here (2014) - tim_sw
https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d
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physcab
"By that measure, Slack is a real and large innovation. It is not as eye-
catching as self-driving cars or implantable chips — it is not basic
research-y kind of stuff. But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be
a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the
team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate
to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity."

Slack is cool and all, we use it, I know lots of people that use it. It
doesn't suck and doesn't make my computer crash. But let's be honest here --
there hasn't been a dramatic shift in communication or how my time is spent
for the better. I can set up channels now and put gifs into my chat, which I
then promptly disabled because it was annoying as fuck as everyone in the
company began doing the same.

Personally I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with all the chats I have to
maintain. There's Slack, because its pushed on me by my IT department. There's
Skype, which I have for legacy co-worker interaction. There's GChat, which all
my friends and family use. There's Facebook, which all my non-friend
acquaintances use. In any given day I have 5 windows up, not counting the
distractions from SMS and E-mail itself.

Nothing gets replaced...I just have to maintain more. Now I feel like its
having the opposite effect. All this communication is actually making me
_anti-social_.

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gfodor
The point of slack is that it is more than group chat, it's group chat that is
easily extendable to your teams workflows. At my company we've extended it to
support deployments, busting caches, executing jobs, etc. We've molded our
project management processes onto it. It reports tweets about our company and
it also reports errors in our infrastructure.

It's basically like a much-easier-to-extend IRC that is accessible to the mere
mortal.

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temuze
> The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change
> in human behaviour.

It just goes to show you - even if it's not a "new" product (group chat
existed before) - really understanding an area and making the best product in
a vertical _is_ innovation.

Every time I hear "don't compete, make something new", I think about the fact
that before Google, there was Alta Vista. Before Facebook, there was
Friendster and Myspace.

If a product us enough of an improvement for customers to spend time and money
on it, it's successful. That simple.

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antidaily
Meta Lab designed this post.

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andrewmwatson
this is from a long time ago. why is this up here again?

