Slack創始人的盛世危言
Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack, the communication app for office workers that has been growing like a weed, does not mince his words when he discusses the changes to working life caused by smartphones and the spread of cloud software.
近來發展迅猛的辦公聊天工具Slack的聯合創始人斯圖爾特巴特菲爾德(Stewart Butterfield)，在談到智能手機和雲軟件的廣泛傳播給辦公生活帶來的變化時，並沒有拐彎抹角。
Slack represents one response to this trend. It is a chronological flow of team conversation akin to a group chat, or a Facebook news feed. Workers post their contributions — messages, links to websites or files — into this searchable repository, organised into channels.
Slack是順應這股潮流的一個代表。它是一款類似羣組聊天或者Facebook信息流功能的羣聊時間流應用。員工們將自己貢獻的內容——信息、網頁鏈接或者文件——放入這個可搜索的、按頻道分類的信息庫中。
A rival vision is represented by Dropbox, a cloud storage system which also claims to be seeing wide adoption in offices but which puts files, not a stream of chatter, at the centre.
而Dropbox——一個同樣號稱在辦公室廣爲使用的雲端存儲系統——則代表着相反的觀點。不同於Slack，Dropbox的關注點不是聊天信息流，而是文件本身。
This view holds that workers will congregate around more static repositories of information, communicating inside or alongside the files.
該觀點認爲，員工們將以更爲靜態的信息庫爲核心，在文件內部或者圍繞着文件展開交流。
Mr Butterfield does not hesitate before delivering a characteristically curt put-down of Dropbox: “They’re probably just wrong.”
對於Dropbox的觀點，巴特菲爾德沒有猶豫，以他特有的不客氣簡潔回擊：“或許他們錯了。”
If the boss of the hottest new app to enter office life has flaws, a lack of certainty is not one of them.
如果這位當前最炙手可熱的辦公應用軟件的老闆有什麼缺點的話，缺乏確定信心絕不會是其中之一。
Slack’s headlong growth suggests he has hit on something, though at less than two years old it is still early. Mr Butterfield says the service has been growing exponentially, adding new users at a rate of about 5 per cent a week. Slack says 1.1m people use its service each day and that it has 300,000 users covered by subscriptions.
Slack的急速增長說明巴特菲爾德的觀點有一定道理——儘管對於創建不足兩年的Slack來說，這樣的結論還爲時尚早。巴特菲爾德稱，Slack的業務呈指數增長，用戶量每週增長5%。Slack稱每日有110萬人使用其服務，並有30萬名訂閱用戶。
“It’s a much more profound change than people realise,” Mr Butterfield says of the way mobile and cloud technologies are affecting work. “The endpoints are people — not documents, or files, or content, or ‘stuff’ in the generic sense. The number of people for whom data stored in the form of a file is the most important thing is getting smaller and smaller all the time.”
“這是比人們意識到的更加深刻的改變，”巴特菲爾德談到手機和雲技術對工作方式的影響時說。“它們的端點是人，而不是文本、文件、內容或者普遍意義上的‘東西’。以文件爲主要形式來存儲數據的人越來越少。”
Thoughtful and intense, as well as flip and dismissive, Mr Butterfield is acerbic at one moment and liable to dive into an extended technical explanation the next.
巴特菲爾德言語犀利，傲慢無禮，卻又富有見地和熱情。他往往這一刻還尖刻地評論着什麼，下一刻卻又投入地向人詳細闡明一項技術。
If devising the formula for a successful viral internet service is like catching lightning in a bottle, he has the distinction of now having done it twice: Flickr, the photo-sharing site he co-founded in 2004 and sold to Yahoo the next year, was one of the first signs of the social media wave that followed.
如果說成功設計出一款廣受歡迎的互聯網服務就像用瓶子捕捉閃電一樣困難，那麼他已經兩次完成了這近乎不可能的事：他於2004年與人合夥創建了照片共享網站Flickr，並於次年將其賣給雅虎(Yahoo)。Flickr是後來的社交媒體浪潮的最早萌芽之一。
Slack takes its own cue from social networking. But getting the formula correct involves much more than an aptitude for finding the right social chemistry, its boss says.
巴特菲爾德說，Slack本身是受社交網絡的啓發，不過找到正確配方，所需要的遠遠不止發現正確的社交“化學反應”的能力。
It is also about making use of what he calls the “profusion of software” inside companies. With more corporate functions being automated through cloud services — from keeping track of customer orders to monitoring IT systems — Slack is designed to integrate their output into a single stream of communication: a notification could be posted to the stream, for instance, each time a new order comes in or a customer tweets about a product.
Slack的成功還在於利用他所稱的公司內部“豐富的軟件資源”。當前，越來越多的企業職能——從追蹤客戶訂單到監控IT系統——通過雲服務實現了自動化。Slack的設計意圖就是整合企業信息輸出，將其彙總爲單一的信息流：例如，每當產生新訂單或者客戶針對產品發tweet時，信息流中都可以發通知。
That makes Slack a digital spine for a business, with a single search box for tracking both human- and machine-generated data.
這就使得Slack成爲了企業中的信息支柱。不論是人還是機器產生的數據，都共用一個搜索框，以供追蹤。
The aim is to create “a positive feedback loop, where the more attention you pay to it, the more it becomes something that saves time in switching between multiple obligations”.
Slack的目標是建立“一個正反饋環，你越重視它，它就越能在切換不同職能中節省時間”。
The formula has been a hit with venture capital investors as much as with users. Slack has already raised $340m in its short life, with the most recent funding round putting a valuation on it of $2.8bn — notable even in the current buoyant funding environment in Silicon Valley.
該軟件不僅廣受用戶歡迎，還是風投家們競相追逐的對象。創立時間不長，Slack的籌資額卻已達到3.4億美元。在最新一輪融資中，它的估值達到28億美元——即便是在當前融資環境一片大好的硅谷，這也是個了不起的數字。
Asked why Slack has raised so much, Mr Butterfield says: “Because we could.” With more than a quarter of its users paying for the service, Slack is “pretty much even on a cash-flow basis already,” he says.
當被問到Slack爲什麼能籌到這麼多款項時，巴特菲爾德答道：“因爲我們有能力。”當前用戶中有超過四分之一的人付費，“Slack可以說已經建立在現金流的基礎上了，”他說道。
But stashing away money in the good times could become a competitive advantage in a bust. “I wouldn’t wish a crash on anybody, but the best-case scenario for us is that money becomes harder to get,” he says.
不過要趁着日子好過時把錢存好，這樣到了日子不好過的時候，這筆錢就會成爲競爭優勢。“我倒不是希望哪家公司垮掉，不過對我們來說，最有利的情況就是，籌資環境變難，”他說道。
To justify the sky-high expectations, Mr Butterfield will have to prove that Slack is more than just the latest faddish office-messaging system. The challenge now is the one that faces all new enterprise software companies with a bright idea: to move fast enough to keep ahead of the copycats, while finding a way to steer between giant competitors that might see Slack as a rival and try to crush it.
爲了達到外界高企的預期，巴特菲爾德必須要證明，Slack不僅僅是一個風靡一時的辦公聊天系統而已。Slack所面臨的問題也是當前所有新興的、有着優秀創意的軟件公司都要面臨的問題：既要快速創新把模仿者甩在後面，又要找到辦法在可能視Slack爲對手、試圖將之摧毀的同行巨頭之間周旋。
The race to keep Slack’s user numbers growing exponentially turns on overcoming barriers to its adoption. A key product enhancement planned for later this year, for instance, would greatly simplify things for corporate IT departments that want to control the many different Slack group chats that may have sprung up inside their businesses. Slack is also adapting its service to meet different international sensitivities.
爲保持用戶數量呈指數增長的態勢，Slack着手破除阻礙用戶使用的障礙。例如，Slack計劃於今年晚些時候進行一次關鍵的產品升級。升級後的Slack將大大簡化企業IT部的工作，方便其控制企業內同時進行的不同羣組聊天。Slack還在調整服務以滿足不同的國際需求。
Avoiding head-on confrontation with the giants of the software industry, meanwhile, means not challenging their own businesses directly. “In this moment now, we have effectively no competition and we’re young and new enough that no one hates us yet,” Mr Butterfield says.
同時，要避免與軟件行業巨頭產生正面衝突，就意味着不要直接向其業務發起挑戰。“此時此刻，我們實際上還沒有競爭者。我們是年輕的新面孔，還沒有人怨恨我們，”巴特菲爾德說道。
His plan for keeping it that way is to go broad rather than deep: find millions more users for the existing service, rather than add many new functions that suck in more and more of its users’ attention.
爲保持當前局面，他的計劃是拓寬覆蓋面，而不是深化產品功能：發掘更多的客戶使用現有產品，而不是增加許多新功能吸引現有客戶的注意力。
“People are paying us between $80 and $100 a year [per user]. If we can get 100m people to do that, that looks like a pretty good business,” he says.
“（每名）用戶每年向我們支付80到100美元。如果我們能擁有1億名付費用戶，那將是一筆相當不錯的生意，”他說道。
The biggest danger of all, though, is that some new piece of software will do to Slack what it is trying to do to more established software companies: offer a service that is even more basic and easy to use, and that starts to generate network effects as groups of workers find it slots almost unnoticeably into their office lives.
然而，當前最大的風險是出現某種新的軟件，用Slack對付那些更老牌軟件公司的方法來對付Slack：爲用戶提供一種更基礎、更便於使用的軟件，當員工羣體發現該軟件潛移默化地改變了他們的辦公生活時，就會產生網絡效應。
“The thing I worry about most is someone coming up with something that is much, much simpler but delivers most of the value — like they find the magic formula so that you can get 80 per cent of the value of Slack but with only 20 per cent of the complexity.”
“我最擔心的是有人設計出一款簡單得多，卻能實現Slack多數價值的應用程序——好比他們找到了某種魔法配方，其複雜程度只有Slack的20%，卻能實現Slack 80%的價值。”
