
Still, Slack’s wide popularity positions Butterfield as a key figure shaping the future of work. The “least constructive” use of the phrase “future of work” is “where where we're debating what will change as opposed to taking a more intentional approach and thinking about it as an opportunity to reimagine the way work.”

Meanwhile, it faces a juggernaut competitor in Microsoft, which bundles its Teams software with Office 365.

Yet Slack, which went public in 2019 and was bought by Salesforce for $27.7 billion last year, also introduced new forms of work anxiety (its “ tet-tet-tet” and “ several people are typing” alerts) and yet another set of messages to keep up with.
