Slack has evolved from a pure communications platform to one that enables companies to link directly to enterprise applications without having to resort to dreaded task switching. Today, at the Salesforce World Tour event in NYC, the company announced the next step in its platform’s evolution where it will be putting AI at the forefront of the user experience, making it easier to get information and build workflows. It’s important to note that these are announcements, and many of these features are not available yet. Rob Seaman says that rather than slapping on an AI cover, they are working to ..read more

Weeks after laying off 1,300 people (or 15% of the staff), Zoom is introducing new features to compete with numerous companies including Slack, Calendly, Google, and Microsoft. These features include AI-powered meeting summaries, prompt-based email responses, and whiteboard generation along with video “Huddles” and a meeting scheduler. The company wants you to shift more of your work tasks to its tools. To that end, Zoom is opening up its email and calendar clients to everyone. The video conferencing company started testing these tools last year in a big explore area beyond meetings. There are ..read more

Teams, Microsoft’s Slack rival, has always had a bit of a reputation for being slow and resource-hungry. Given that it always felt like Microsoft hurried the service’s launch to respond to the success of Slack, that’s maybe no surprise. Now, that’s changing, though, with the preview launch of the new Teams. Microsoft calls this a “reimagining of Teams from the ground up” and promises that the new application will feature twice the performance, all while only using half as much memory as before. With this, joining meetings should now be 2x faster, while switching between chats and channels will ..read more

Feishu, ByteDance’s workplace collaboration app, surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year, Xie Xin, the chief executive of Feishu, told staff Thursday, according to a person familiar with the matter. In late 2021, the workplace tool became one of the firm’s six individual business groups, meaning it was given the same strategic importance as other BGs at ByteDance, which include TikTok, Douyin, Dali (the education BG), BytePlus (B2B AI and data infrastructure) and Nuverse (video games). The milestone was first reported by the Chinese tech news site 36kr, just a few days aft ..read more

It’s hard to develop a personal note-taking habit. Many folks just resort to using a default app like Apple’s Notes app or sending something to themselves on Slack. It’s fine if you just need to jot down a note or two, but it becomes hard to organize and search for them later. Stashpad is working on a solution for that issue — especially for developers and product managers. Stashpad is an app that runs on all desktop platforms (Intel and M1 Mac, Windows and Linux). When you first launch the application, it has a minimal learning curve for getting started — you can just start typing in notes. Y ..read more

How hard is it to do things? Often it turns out to be pretty hard. There’s an infamous Hacker News thread about Dropbox that crops up whenever there’s a conversation about how difficult it would be to build a replacement for a well-known service. The forum note, which you can read here, comes from back in 2007, when Dropbox was a “YC app” that had a very simple pitch: “Throw away your USB drive.” The poster argues that what Dropbox built at the time was something potential users could replicate “quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN o ..read more

We’ve heard an awful lot over the past couple of weeks about the executives who are leaving Salesforce, but not a heck of a lot about the woman who is taking over for Stewart Butterfield as CEO at Slack when he takes off to spend some time gardening. It’s time we changed that. Her name is Lidiane Jones, a woman with a deep background in enterprise software. (I requested an interview with Jones for this piece, but the company was not making her available to speak with the press.) Surprisingly, many of the analysts I confer with about Salesforce knew little about her, but that could be because s ..read more

It’s been a pretty rough week for Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff and the folks at his company: Three talented executives — co-CEO Bret Taylor, Tableau CEO Mark Nelson and Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield — announced their resignations in quick succession. It’s fair to ask what exactly is going on at Salesforce to lose three accomplished people so quickly, but it’s also important to parse each exit to determine whether they are part of a political battle or just some odd confluence of unconnected events. The news seems to have spooked investors, with the company’s s ..read more

Just days after Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor announced his resignation, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced that he will be stepping down in January. Business Insider first reported the news. TechCrunch has confirmed the news with Salesforce by email. The company also announced that Lidiane Jones, who has been the executive VP and GM for digital experiences clouds at Salesforce, would be taking over for Butterfield, leaving a succession plan that had apparently been lacking when Taylor surprised everyone by stepping down last week. “Stewart is an incredible leader who created an amazing ..read more

Itay Dressler and Itzik Ben Bassat, who’ve held various software engineering and executive roles at startups together over the years, are accustomed to exchanging brief messages. Ben Bassat has ADHD, and for that reason prefers to keep texts on the shorter side. But as he and Dressler were faced with wrangling an increasing number of tools at their employers, they came to realize they weren’t the only ones who could benefit from more succinct updates. So they founded TheGist with the grand mission of “simplifying information consumption in workplace communications and data” through instant hig ..read more