I’ve worked at companies where (first) Skype and (then) Slack were the principal means of keeping employees in touch with each other. In between, I worked at Facebook where *literally* Facebook was used to keep employees collaborating.

This latter, worked. The others were shit.

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Among several key differences, the primary one was “most communication was essentially a blog post” hybridized with “there is a search function for blog posts”. It must be admitted that when Facebook took Workplace to market it was an abject failure, but I see that as a consequence of the user base having moved to a chat paradigm and not wanting to give it up.

But that doesn’t mean that the chat paradigm is an efficient one, it just means that it is popular at the moment. Where we are is in a chat based trend where everything is either Slack or Discord, and then we have to deal with the fact that the announcement of some new API project to frob your JavaScript widgets in a hoopy new way… is about 400 screenfulls back in your chat history and you have to wade through all of the occasional mentions until you get to the actual announcement which had the wiki hyperlink you want.

So of course you want some personal Google AI chatbot thingy which has consumed the entire content and can reference it all at an instant.

Because search is an essential.

But on the other hand at least with Slack you can add a dancing banana emoji reaction to the CEO’s announcement of quarterly earnings.