February 12, 2014
Slack team messaging launches
Stewart Butterfield's SlackA team messaging app — channels, integrations, and the default chat layer for many companies. launched publicly on February 12, 2014 — a channel-based chat app born from a failed game startup that replaced email for engineering teams.
What it was for
SlackA team messaging app — channels, integrations, and the default chat layer for many companies. integrated GitHubA platform for Git hosting, pull requests, and CI — the center of open-source collaboration. commits, JiraAtlassian's issue tracker — workflows, boards, and JQL queries for software team project management. tickets, PagerDuty alerts, and `/giphy` into searchable channels — IRC for enterprises with OAuthAn authorization framework — lets apps access user data without sharing passwords. bots and threads. It normalized async work chat alongside Zoom standups; Salesforce acquired it for $27.7B in 2021. Developers still joke about notification overload, but SlackA team messaging app — channels, integrations, and the default chat layer for many companies. became the town square of modern software orgs.
Why it's here
SlackA team messaging app — channels, integrations, and the default chat layer for many companies. replaced internal email and IRC for millions of software teams.
Why it mattered
Integrations turned chat into the notification hub for CI, deploys, and incidents.
What it solved
Email and ad-hoc IM could not keep distributed engineering teams aligned in real time.
Media
- ImageSlack (software)
Slack Technologies, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Related
- Microsoft Teams launches worldwideMarch 14, 2017
- Discord chat for gamers launchesMay 13, 2015
- GitHub launchedApril 10, 2008