I haven't really used Slack, but I had an immediate, negative, and surprisingly-visceral reaction when I saw one of their animal-ads on Youtube... Can you spot the moment it all goes horribly horribly wrong?
The lion-manager is gazing out a window, has a passing thought about "flying umbrellas". Naturally, he instantly sends a mass-broadcast, interrupting and disrupting the work of the entire office. (Who all, of course, leap joyously to implement his brilliant vision.)
Now, this makes a lot of sense if you want to sell copies of Slack, since it appeals to the managers with the power to approve-purchases and mandate-adoption... But it implies Slack is going to either become the latest tool-of-oppression at a dysfunctional company, or that managers are going to buy Slack with the idea that they can use it to micromanage everybody.
Further on, as the Slack team adds features, guess what kinds of features are going to get priority? The ones that sell. Which ones are those? The ones that lion-managers love and other-employees hate.
Looking back into when Slack really took off, it took off primarily because development teams were adopting it internally, and then in many cases evangelizing it enough to get organization wide adoption. To emphasize the point, developers were the primary ones driving Slack adoption at that time.
In order for Slack to move beyond the smaller companies and larger startups where developers have the power to do the above, Slack has to start targeting the people who have the power to change how a 10k person corporation communicates. To those people, usability and integrations are nice-to-haves, but more important are metrics and "process". The issues you have with this commercial are the exact kinds of things that high-level executives will think about when they want to get a new communications tool. "This will let me keep track of who's doing what", "this will let me reach whoever I want, whenever I want", "this will let me centralize ALL company communication".
For better or for worse, Slack is growing up and trying to target the biggest, and most traditional corporations, and some of that will look a bit ugly to its comparatively granola hippy early adopters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6sSa5NpqUI
The lion-manager is gazing out a window, has a passing thought about "flying umbrellas". Naturally, he instantly sends a mass-broadcast, interrupting and disrupting the work of the entire office. (Who all, of course, leap joyously to implement his brilliant vision.)
Now, this makes a lot of sense if you want to sell copies of Slack, since it appeals to the managers with the power to approve-purchases and mandate-adoption... But it implies Slack is going to either become the latest tool-of-oppression at a dysfunctional company, or that managers are going to buy Slack with the idea that they can use it to micromanage everybody.
Further on, as the Slack team adds features, guess what kinds of features are going to get priority? The ones that sell. Which ones are those? The ones that lion-managers love and other-employees hate.