Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory
In the fall of 2014, Slack was the hottest startup in software. And that September, it went through a hot-startup rite of passage: It made its first acquisition.
The company it bought, Spaces, had only two employees. They’d built a tool for sharing text, links, images, and other items, which Slack saw as a useful extension of its core messaging platform. It was something like a word processor, but focused on collaboration rather than matching Microsoft Word’s kitchen-sink profusion of features.
“The pitch was like, people don’t really use documents as documents in the classic word processor lineage,” says Slack cofounder and CEO Stewart Butterfield. “They don’t need tab stops and page breaks and mail merge and stuff like that. They just want a digital container.”
Slack announced that it would roll Spaces into its own service and then . . . failed to do so. The acquisition “was a disaster, technologically,” says Butterfield. Over the following few years, the company occasionally returned to the idea of creating a flexible digital container for sharing items inside Slack, and each time the project fell apart.
