Slack's product roadmap looks to Twitter, Google Docs for inspiration

An increasing number of the enterprise focus software companies, like Dropbox, Convo, Google, and Microsoft, are building products that allow people to collaborate.

Now Slack, a conversation platform for businesses, is building up its own collaborative features with its recent purchase of Spaces, a tool that lets people work in the same document simultaneously and remotely.

Slack was founded in 2009, but didn’t launch officially until this past January. The company has raised $60 million since its birth, but Spaces is its first acquisition. Though it is primarily a communication tool, its tag line “everything in one place” indicates higher aspirations.

Slack boasts the ability to integrate with Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, “dozens” of other services. Now with Spaces, it’s inching towards competition with Google Docs and Microsoft 365 in the digital documents arena.

“It’s the perfect tool for working on plans and specifications, conducting product reviews, sharing files, and creating delivery schedules, just to name a few examples” a representative for Slack said of the recent acquisition. In many ways, this is just Slack’s latest collaboration.

Slack has seen a lot of growth this year. The company has roughly 200,000 users, 60,000 of which are paying, according to the Wall Street Journal. But facing off against giants like Google (with Google Docs) and Microsoft (with Microsoft 365) is a pretty tall order. As it is, the company already has plenty of competition as a communication platform with Convo and Yammer, which is also owned by Microsoft.

To gain better visibility, Slack may be positioning itself as the more modern company by taking cues from hip products like Google Docs and Twitter. Slack tells us lightweight message threading (similar to what Twitter does), which would allow you to reply to/comment on/quote a message, is planned for development soon. Though threaded conversations aren’t new. Convo and Yammer both offer threaded conversations as well and offer document support.

But the acquisition of Spaces is more than just document support, it’s a documents platform.

One more thing to keep in mind: Earlier this year Slack raised $42 million in funding. So this may just be the first of a series of acquisitions to help Slack build an “everything in one place” platform.