Also worth checking out the history of MindAlign [0] corporate group chat software. It's been around since pre-2000 (originally built in house by UBS) and has supported channels, offline chat history, bots and embeddable status widgets for years. So it's true, Slack isn't all that innovative - although they've done a much better sales job as MindAlign was only ever used (and still is) by a tiny number of companies!
The fun thing is that Microsoft bought the product back in 2007 and sold it again pretty quickly but not before taking a bunch of the code and using it in their own group chat product (never as effectively as the original app, perhaps until now Slack have come along and shown them how valuable a product like that can be...)
The fun thing is that Microsoft bought the product back in 2007 and sold it again pretty quickly but not before taking a bunch of the code and using it in their own group chat product (never as effectively as the original app, perhaps until now Slack have come along and shown them how valuable a product like that can be...)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindAlign