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Slack has announced an extension to one of its most popular features that could put it on a serious collision course with companies like Zoom.
At Dreamforce 2022, parent company Salesforce’s annual conference, Slack announced that its impromptu meeting feature, Huddles, now supports video calling.
Designed to simulate casual office conversations, the Huddles feature moves away from its original audio-only format and into something more complete. Not only will users now be able to enable video, but they will also benefit from multi-person screen sharing, emoji reactions, and more.
Eat or be eaten
Since the start of the transition to remote and hybrid working, the collaboration and video conferencing software market has exploded. Among the biggest beneficiaries were companies like Zoom and Slack, as well as Microsoft and Google, both of which provide comprehensive ranges of productivity software.
The challenge for companies like Slack and Zoom, which don’t offer the same set of first-party functionality available with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, is to justify the extra expenditure beyond what customers are already paying for their office software bundle.
In Zoom’s case, the company is expanding into new corners of the market to provide customers with a more complete collaboration service than just video conferencing. The arrival of video support for Huddles could be interpreted as a sign that Slack is at least thinking along the same lines.
However, according to the company’s Chief Product Officer, that is not the case. Speak with TechRadar Pro for Dreamforce, Tamar Yehoshua explained that Slack is “not interested in ticking boxes”.
“Slack has always been very customer-centric; we work closely with customers to create together what we think they need,” she said. “The addition of video to Huddles is something that customers have told us they need.”
Pressed about whether Slack feels pressured to expand into new use cases, based on the market dynamics already described, Yehoshua suggested that the company examine its performance through a different lens.
“The pressure we feel is to show a high return on investment (ROI) for Slack,” she told us. “That’s what we focus on: making sure the value we create has far more value than the cost of the service.”
Whether Slack lives up to the word of CEO Stuart Butterfield, who likes to say the platform is “1% of the software budget that makes the other 99% more valuable,” customers decide for themselves. But more rich first-party functionality certainly wouldn’t hurt either.