Does slack really enable good collaboration? It seems to destroy productivity in every environment I've ever been in. It is the workplace equivalent of Facebook shitposting.
Also, IRC and XMPP servers are cheap.
Also, IRC and XMPP servers are cheap.
Problem with your mac? Go to #osx-troubleshooting
Got an IT problem? Check out #IT
Want to discuss an architecture problem with dozens of the smartest people in the entire company? Hop onto #architecture
Want to share the 5 extra pies of Pizza you had delivered for an undersized audience? Go to #freefood and watch it disappear.
We also use bots to surface data into the chatroom automatically as we're doing something collaborative. It's really quite useful when you setup the correct rules.
This may be the case, but they have a cost to set up and maintain, and for companies that aren't almost all developers there's a significant overhead in terms of teaching people how to use IRC/XMPP. Client software for them is often not written with UX in mind, and with the lack of features like uploads/document embedding, using them can be more difficult.
IRC in general is such an under-used resource. Everyone automatically goes to SO, which is fine for trivial problems. They don't realise they could go on IRC and get an answer from the actual dev team of whatever they are having issues with.
A company where people who feels that it's OK to put a notification on 2000 devices to say "Good morning" or "Lunch, anyone?" can't be reprimanded is a sick company, with or without Slack.
It's important to keep in mind that these etiquettes are the same (or at least very analogues to) the ones that are required for email and especially email lists. A company where everybody puts everybody in the To: line of every email will feel that email is a destructive force, but one that cultivates decent distribution list culture and caution about CC'ing the world or replying to all will feel that it is much more useful.
As one example, to cut down on DMs, each of our team members has their own room where people can "drop in" messages asynchronously. This means there's no notification and no expectation of immediate response, but that's a good thing because we use an agile process where people should be able to focus on their daily goals without distraction anyway. DMs then become a rare & discouraged channel only for emergencies and sensitive conversations.