2016年经济学人 Slack一代 职场通讯工具如何取代其他沟通形式（在线收听）

Business Office communication The Slack generation How workplace messaging could replace other missives

商业报道 办公通讯 Slack一代 职场通讯工具如何取代其他沟通形式

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.

通讯工具公司Slack的老板斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德（Stewart Butterfield）在一些创业经历中上可谓因祸得福。2002年，他和一群同事创办了名为“游戏无止境”（Game Neverending）的网络视频游戏。该产品并未成功，但他们用来设计游戏的工具后来却发展成为互联网首个广受欢迎的照片分享网站Flickr，后于2005年被雅虎收购，据称出价达3500万美元。

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，巴特菲尔德试图创办另一款名为Glitch的网络游戏，同样以失败告终。但巴特菲尔德和他的团队在创业过程中开发了一个内部通讯系统用于协作，奠定了Slack的基础。在硅谷，这种战略上的转变被称为“转型”，要是放在其他任何地方都会被称为运气。今天，Slack已成为上升最快的创业公司之一，融资5.4亿美元，估值约为38亿美元。“我想这给我们的经验是，追逐梦想，希望梦想失败，这样你就可以做点儿别的了。”Slack的首席技术官卡尔·亨德森（Cal Henderson）说道。

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 It is casual and reflects how people actually communicate, eschewing e-mail's outdated formalities, says Chris Becherer of Pandora, an online-music firm that uses Slack.

办公软件很少能唤起什么情绪，除了厌烦之外。但有人对Slack赞不绝口，称其简化了办公通讯。Slack不是把电子邮件都堆在一个收件箱里让人处理，而是按话题（称为“频道”）组织文本对话，便于公司中的团队实时沟通。这种形式较为随意，反映出人们的实际沟通方式，并且避免了电子邮件那套过时的形式，在线音乐公司潘多拉（Pandora）的克里斯·贝赫勒（Chris Becherer）说道，该公司就使用Slack进行办公通讯。