Slack's "Open Letter" Misfire
17Wow. I like Slack well enough as a user. As a verbose copywriter, though, I’m afraid this kind of thing gives long blocks of text a bad name: https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft-8d20965d2849#.jqpfywcco
(And they printed it as a full-page New York Times ad!)
Since I’m up late working, and hence up late procrastinating, let me blather on a minute about how bad this piece sucks.
The phony “Wow. Big news! Congratulations! Here’s some friendly advice from your friends at Slack” smarm is presumably meant to be funny and edgy, but comes off as insecure smirking past the graveyard.
Then it shifts right into the dullest, most vapid kind of cubicle lorem ipsum: paragraph after paragraph of ugly pseudo-profundities like “critical business processes and workflows demand the best tools”. Throw in a few effete slaps at Microsoft and some supremely grating humblebragging, and you’ve got one truly limp publicity stunt.
How could this happen? How could an apparently smart company issue something so bad? Hmm… the jarring tonal shifts, the marketing sloganeering, the fake “riskiness” that doesn’t commit to taking any actual risks… it’s obvious how this happened. This was written by committee.
Let it be a lesson to you, Slack: sometimes there’s such a thing as too much workplace collaboration.
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pseudo-profundities Is my favorite new word(phrase?) of the day. Of course I had to look up profundities.
This is why the beef with Microsoft, in case anyone is wondering: https://blogs.office.com/2016/11/02/introducing-microsoft-teams-the-chat-based-workspace-in-office-365/
It’s supposedly basically Slack but the Microsoft version.
A committee of Millennials. God save us all!
/giphy Millennials
@Mehrocco_Mole
That entire “open letter” is motivated by fear.
NEVER TALK SHIT ON YOUR COMPETITION. I’ve long espoused a policy that discussing the competition, especially voluntarily (such as in a sales engagement), is a bad idea. I prohibit the practice within my own company.
Denigrating the competition only serves to bring attention to them, adds credibility to their position, and gets the person thinking about them. You might even reinforce reasoning for using them instead of you.
@Pavlov I agree. Where I work, we rarely talk about the competition. It’s sometimes mentioned in a meeting, and that’s it.
@Pavlov @RiotDemon The Streisand effect aside, don’t-shit-talk-the-competition has another aspect too – do they have any dirt on your company? That can have much much much greater consequences to the extent that makes the original shit-talking peanuts in comparison.
It’s a reason why VW’s diesel cheating scandal wasn’t called out by other companies – because other automakers weren’t exactly 100% clean themselves either.
That was painful to read.