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Business Office communication The Slack generation How workplace messaging could replace other missives
商業報道 辦公通訊 Slack一代 職場通訊工具如何取代其他溝通形式
STEWART BUTTERFIELD, the boss of Slack, a messaging company, has been wonderfully unlucky in certain ventures. In 2002 he and a band of colleagues created an online-video game called “Game Neverending”. It never took off, but the tools they used to design it turned into Flickr, the web's first popular photo-sharing website. Yahoo bought it in 2005 for a reported $35m.
通訊工具公司Slack的老板斯圖爾特·巴特菲爾德（Stewart Butterfield）在一些創業經歷中上可謂因禍得福。2002年，他和一群同事創辦了名為“游戲無止境”（Game Neverending）的網絡視頻游戲。該產品并未成功，但他們用來設計游戲的工具后來卻發展成為互聯網首個廣受歡迎的照片分享網站Flickr，后于2005年被雅虎收購，據稱出價達3500萬美元。
Four years later Mr Butterfield tried to create another online game, called Glitch. It flopped as well. But Mr Butterfield and his team developed an internal messaging system to collaborate on it, which became the basis for Slack. In Silicon Valley, such a change in strategy is called a “pivot”; anywhere else it is called good fortune. Today Slack is one of the fastest-rising startups around, with $540m in funding and a valuation of around $3.8 billion.“I guess the lesson should be, pursue your dream and hope it fails, so you can do something else,” says Cal Henderson, Slack's chief technology officer.
四年后，巴特菲爾德試圖創辦另一款名為Glitch的網絡游戲，同樣以失敗告終。但巴特菲爾德和他的團隊在創業過程中開發了一個內部通訊系統用于協作，奠定了Slack的基礎。在硅谷，這種戰略上的轉變被稱為“轉型”，要是放在其他任何地方都會被稱為運氣。今天，Slack已成為上升最快的創業公司之一，融資5.4億美元，估值約為38億美元。“我想這給我們的經驗是，追逐夢想，希望夢想失敗，這樣你就可以做點兒別的了。”Slack的首席技術官卡爾·亨德森（Cal Henderson）說道。
It is rare for business software to arouse emotion besides annoyance. But some positively gush about how Slack has simplified office communication. Instead of individual e-mails arriving in a central inbox and requiring attention, Slack structures textual conversations within threads (called “channels”) where groups within firms can update each other in real time. It is casual and reflects how people actually communicate, eschewing e-mail's outdated formalities, says Chris Becherer of Pandora, an online-music firm that uses Slack.
辦公軟件很少能喚起什么情緒，除了厭煩之外。但有人對Slack贊不絕口，稱其簡化了辦公通訊。Slack不是把電子郵件都堆在一個收件箱里讓人處理，而是按話題（稱為“頻道”）組織文本對話，便于公司中的團隊實時溝通。這種形式較為隨意，反映出人們的實際溝通方式，并且避免了電子郵件那套過時的形式，在線音樂公司潘多拉（Pandora）的克里斯·貝赫勒（Chris Becherer）說道，該公司就使用Slack進行辦公通訊。
