Slack isn't becoming the “central nervous system” for all the workflows of its users because it's just filling cracks left by productivity apps, not fixing them
The arc of collaboration is long and it bends in the direction of functional workflows. Tweets: @kevinakwok , @caseynewton , @caseynewton , @carnage4life , @akothari , @saammotamedi , @sachinrekhi , @willreed_21 , @apfk88 , @lessin , @rashmi , @woganmay , @dkhare , @seanjtaylor , @pzakin , @eugenewei , @shanemac , @hackpravj , and @toddg777 Tweets: Kevin Kwok / @kevinakwok : New essay up. The Arc of Collaboration. - Slack is an Else Statement - There is no distinction between productivity and collaboration - The Slack of Gaming may be Discord, but the Discord for Enterprise is not Slack https://kwokchain.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : This puts a finger on a problem with Slack that's been bothering but I didn't have a name for https://kwokchain.com/... https://twitter.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : This essay also innovates a bold new footer in Silicon Valley Medium post thought leadership: thanking people who did NOT read the post https://twitter.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Slack used to be considered the future of productivity & collaboration but now people are beginning to realize instead of bringing all of your workflows into a messaging app maybe those workflows are better off supporting collaboration natively. https://kwokchain.com/... Akshay Kothari / @akothari : “The feedback loops of collaboration get so short that they become part of the productivity loop.” Great new essay by @kevinakwok https://twitter.com/... Saam Motamedi / @saammotamedi : “For most of human history, coordinating among humans has been a slow, intractable effort. In the last few decades we have seen tremendous technical breakthroughs in the latencies and tooling possible to remove these constraints” @kevinakwok on the Arc of Collaboration https://twitter.com/... Sachin Rekhi / @sachinrekhi : Strongly resonated with this post from @kevinakwok as it mirrors our thesis with @notejoyapp: productivity and collaboration shouldn't be separated at all, but instead weaved deeply together in functional workflows. In our case, collaborative notes https://kwokchain.com/... Will Reed / @willreed_21 : “Beyond its Slack-like functionality, @discord has functionality like a social graph, seeing what games your friends are playing, voice chat, etc. These have been misunderstood by the market. They aren't random small features. They are the backbone of a central nervous system...” https://twitter.com/... Alexander Kvamme / @apfk88 : “If Slack won the war, and owns collaboration, why doesn't it feel like the war is over?” Loved this fresh take on collaboration and productivity from @kevinakwok https://kwokchain.com/... Sam Lessin / @lessin : This is a very well expressed viewpoint on the future of work and explicitly defined collaboration workflows ... our experience with Fin Analytics / measuring knowledge work points at many similar conclusions https://twitter.com/... Rashmi Sinha / @rashmi : Great essay about collaboration tools - why Slack is hugely successful but being supplanted by domain specific apps that are collaboration first, e.g. Figma for design. https://twitter.com/... Wogan / @woganmay : Excellent take. It looks like we're still a long way off from solving the productivity + collaboration loop. https://twitter.com/... @dkhare : Rings true. Many of our US-facing enterprise investments have collaboration as a core offering focused on specific use-cases or verticals, incl. @RevvSales @acceldataio @innovaccer ht @rashmi @lightspeedindia https://twitter.com/... Sean J. Taylor / @seanjtaylor : This is a nice essay about tools for knowledge work. One thing I think is missing is that good collaboration tools help *create new connections* at work. I miss Workplace (at FB) because it helped me discover projects, meet people, and find collaboration opportunities. https://twitter.com/... Peter Zakin / @pzakin : Series of thoughts that I'm just gonna leave as brain dump and maybe return to later: - https://kwokchain.com/... is, as usual, brilliant. - Don't think that the horizontal layer ^^ will be comms, which is partly why I think the discord analogy is dangerous. Eugene Wei / @eugenewei : Really love this from @kevinakwok on how different workflows make some functions endogenous to their app (like messaging). BTW this also sort of explains why school kids were messaging inside Google Docs in classrooms https://twitter.com/... Shane Mac / @shanemac : This is just an incredible read. This line “Slack is not air traffic control that coordinates everything. It's 911 for when everything falls apart.” https://twitter.com/... Pravendra Singh / @hackpravj : “Slack isn't air traffic control for every app, it's 911 for when they fail.” https://twitter.com/... Todd / @toddg777 : “The future increasingly looks like one where companies use very specific apps to solve their jobs to be done. And collaboration is right where we work. And that makes sense, of course. Collaboration *should* be where you work” Great piece by @kevinakwok https://kwokchain.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Kevin Kwok's 'Arc of Collaboration' essay lands mid-argument in a debate his own corpus keeps feeding: he contends Slack is an 'else statement' — a catch-all that absorbs whatever falls out of real productivity apps — rather than the system those apps run inside. The counter-evidence he points to is collaboration-first design tooling: Figma built its success in the browser and then pushed toward a plugin ecosystem to become a platform, exactly the functional-workflow ownership Slack lacks.
The critique has company. A Vox piece had already argued workplace messaging undermines its own productivity promise by turning into a distraction stream, and later coverage of Figma and Canva winning ground against Adobe reinforced the thesis that domain-specific collaborative tools beat general-purpose suites at their own tasks. Kwok's framing matters because it predicts where enterprise value accrues: with the workflow app, not the chat layer around it.
First-order effects
- Slack's strategic position is downgraded from hub to patch: the named alternative is Figma-style collaboration-native apps that own the actual work, leaving Slack to integrate with workflows it does not control.
- Microsoft Teams' bundling advantage sharpens the squeeze — per the related coverage on product-focused challengers ultimately disrupting Microsoft, Slack cannot win on distribution alone if it is only filling cracks.
Second-order effects
- Domain-specific vendors gain pricing and retention power: when Figma or a peer owns the workflow, chat becomes a commodity notification layer, and Slack's monetization shifts toward whatever integrations it can charge for.
- The distraction problem documented by Vox compounds commercially — buyers evaluating messaging tools weigh the productivity drag alongside the integration benefit, favoring tools where collaboration happens inside the artifact.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise software reorganizes around collaboration-first vertical applications, with horizontal chat reduced to connective tissue — the opposite of the 'central nervous system' outcome Slack's pitch implied.
- The open question the essay leaves unresolved is whether any horizontal layer can recapture workflow ownership, or whether unbundling into functional apps is structural rather than cyclical.
The trend: Work software is consolidating around collaboration-native domain applications while general-purpose chat settles into a secondary integration layer.