As someone who runs the product team for a 1000+ person company, the concept of intransigent minorities should be of interest to you. [1]
The gist of it is that an intransigent minority can often dictate the choices of a flexible majority. It is unwise to make decisions based solely on majority rule, as stubborn minorities can affect complex systems in ways that you do not expect. The phenomenon can be verified in a variety of situations across history.
To put this into context for Slack, I believe technical users have been particularly important for the app. Tech users were early adopters for Slack - I'm sure a lot of corporate accounts started out with engineering teams. Tech users wrote the chat bots and integrations that Slack is known for. They got people to use Slack, and they can get people to stop using it.
Let's say you're changing the way a certain feature in your application works. The majority of users are happy or indifferent about the change (but weren't particularly bothered by the old behaviour). A minority of users not only reject the change, but are vocal in how much they hate it. They will not tolerate the new behaviour, and will try to get other users to abandon your product unless you resolve the situation. What do you do? You can ignore them for now, but can you predict the long term effects of turning your back to the intransigent minority?
And I'd add that inclusion is especially important for a tool that's supposed to connect everybody in the company. Thinking that one can ignore a chunk of the audience because they have no choice but to keep using your product is at best confused, and at worse displaying enormous arrogance. It's the sort of enterprise-grade nonsense that Slack was initially seen as an antidote to.
I get that things that want to be popular quite often shiv the early adopters as they become mainstream, as a) that particular orange has been well juiced, and b) satisfying early-adopter needs really can get in the way of that holy grail, maximizing revenue.
But here I don't think there's a big conflict. There are a bunch of ways this could have been done to make everybody happy. It could have been opt-in for a while and then opt out. Or as others point out, there are apparently good WYSIWYG experiences already out there. With a market cap of $12 billion, Slack could afford to buy one, or at least the team behind it.
The only explanation I see is that it was rushed out the door to meet some executive's goals. Which suggests that Slack is becoming the sort of clueless, sales-driven, user-contemptuous company the initially aimed to overthrow.
The gist of it is that an intransigent minority can often dictate the choices of a flexible majority. It is unwise to make decisions based solely on majority rule, as stubborn minorities can affect complex systems in ways that you do not expect. The phenomenon can be verified in a variety of situations across history.
To put this into context for Slack, I believe technical users have been particularly important for the app. Tech users were early adopters for Slack - I'm sure a lot of corporate accounts started out with engineering teams. Tech users wrote the chat bots and integrations that Slack is known for. They got people to use Slack, and they can get people to stop using it.
Let's say you're changing the way a certain feature in your application works. The majority of users are happy or indifferent about the change (but weren't particularly bothered by the old behaviour). A minority of users not only reject the change, but are vocal in how much they hate it. They will not tolerate the new behaviour, and will try to get other users to abandon your product unless you resolve the situation. What do you do? You can ignore them for now, but can you predict the long term effects of turning your back to the intransigent minority?
1. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...