Fair enough. Slack Huddles exists as a feature within Slack, which means you can’t use Huddles to send a Zoom-like link or invite them to a scheduled video meeting. Huddles also caps the number of participants—to 50 people in the business version of Slack, or just two for free Slack users.
That leaves Slack, which was acquired by Salesforce last year for $28 billion, teetering between diving into the videoconferencing market and trying to stay outside it. “That’s a market with a lot of big dominant brands—Cisco, Zoom, Microsoft. And it’s tricky being in an adjacent market,” says Mike Gotta, a research vice president at Gartner who analyzes workplace collaboration and employee communication software. “Once you start offering some of those features, well, then you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that.”
One of the more befuddling aspects of the new Huddles is why, if it was already such a success, Slack would want to mess with it. There is one obvious answer: because Zoom and Teams actually are competitors, and Slack wants to draw users back into Slack as much as possible. It’s also possible that Slack may eventually charge big businesses more for certain Huddle features, though Desai Weiss says that the full experience is available on all three of Slack’s paid plans and that it has no plans to change that. The company built the new Huddles, Desai Weiss insists, because users were “enthusiastically asking” for the original version to be extended with new features.
Still, there seems a real risk of bloating Huddles, which, as one WIRED editor put it, could be akin to attaching a Conestoga wagon to a race car. If Huddles is one of the closest things we have to spontaneous, swing-by-your desk communication at work right now, why bog it down with videos and chat boxes and reaction emoji? Video apps like Zoom have become an actual lifesaver during a time when our real-life interactions were forced into virtual spaces. But they’ve also made us less mobile, and cognitively exhausted.
Slack says Huddles will still support impromptu conversations, living one click away from any channel or DM starting in audio-only first. And at least Slack will not attempt to detect its users’ fatigue from their facial expressions or voice tones in Huddles. Zoom has recently come under fire for a feature for sales teams that tries to infer a person’s engagement and patience during calls. When I asked Desai Weiss about this, he replied, “Honestly, until you asked that question, I had never even thought about that, and I can safely say we have no plans or intentions of doing anything in that vein.”
Until people start using the new version of Huddles, the better-or-bloated debate won’t be settled. And even if Huddles is the future of work chats, the future of actual, physical work spaces still hangs in the balance. Slack is betting that the office of the future is hybrid, with some in-person days, some work-from-home days, and more teams scattered across time zones and space. “Now that we’re 27 months in [to the pandemic], we’re seeing that this new normal isn’t a snapback to the five-day work week,” Desai Weiss says. “The new normal is embracing the flexibility that it turns out people always wanted, but never had access to before.”
That’s certainly one way to position another video chat app, which might make even the most office-averse worker yearn for the days of IRL huddles.