(单词翻译:单击)
But even if you don’t use Slack, or something like it, you live and work in the world Slack helped create.
但即使你不使用Slack或类似的东西，你的生活和工作也是在Slack帮助创造的世界里。
It’s a world where openness and transparency are prized;
这是一个崇尚公开透明的世界;
where work is something we are always kind of doing;
在这个世界中，工作是我们一直在做的事情;
where who we are at the office and who we are outside it are closer than ever before;
在这个世界中，我们在办公室里的身份和在办公室外的身份比以往任何时候都更接近;
where all of these dynamics mean that sometimes things go very wrong, especially for people in power.
在这个世界中，所有这些动态意味着有时事情会非常糟糕，尤其是对掌权的人来说。
Slack is probably the first enterprise software in history to convince people that it’s cool.
Slack可能是历史上第一个让人们相信它很酷的企业软件。
Its founder, Stewart Butterfield, became famous in Silicon Valley after starting the beloved photo-sharing site Flickr, which he and his partners sold to Yahoo for more than $22 million in 2004.
其创始人斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德(Stewart Butterfield)在创办了深受欢迎的照片分享网站Flickr后，在硅谷声名鹊起，2004年，他和合伙人以2200多万美元的价格将Flickr卖给了雅虎。
He vaped and swore and majored in philosophy and had been born on a commune in British Columbia.
他抽着电子烟，发誓，主修哲学，他出生在不列颠哥伦比亚省的一个社区。
He was funny, but the way he talked about software was almost tender. The tech press absolutely loved him.
他很风趣，他谈论软件的方式几乎是温柔的。技术媒体绝对喜欢他。
In 2012, Butterfield and some friends were working on a video game, Glitch, that never really took off.
2012年，巴特菲尔德和一些朋友正在开发一款电子游戏《Glitch》，这款游戏从未真正走红。
But the team had become so enamored of the chat platform they’d built in the process that they decided to spin it off into the company that would become Slack.
但这个团队倾心于他们在开发过程中建立的聊天平台，他们决定将其独立出来，成立公司，也就是后来的Slack。
In an industry that fetishizes constructive failure so much that it repurposed a word for it, this was a spectacular pivot.
在一个如此迷恋积极失败以至于为它重新命名的行业，这是一个惊人的转折点。
“We were like, ‘Well, we like working this way,’” Ali Rayl, a Glitch alum who is now Slack’s vice president of product, told me.
“我们像是，‘嗯，我们喜欢这样的工作方式，’”曾在Glitch工作过的阿里·瑞尔(Ali Rayl)告诉我，他现在是Slack的产品副总裁。
“‘And maybe other people would like working in this way too.’ That was it: ‘Let’s try to make something that makes money so we can keep doing this thing that we like together.’”
“‘也许其他人也喜欢这样的工作方式。 那就是:‘让我们试着做一些赚钱的东西，这样我们就可以继续做我们喜欢的事情。’”
Slack was explicitly an antidote to email—the formality, the clunkiness, the crush of useless messages, the bottomless reply-alls, and the chirpily false I hope this email finds you well.
Slack显然是电子邮件的解药—— 正式、笨拙、充满无用信息、无尽地回复所有信息，以及欢快的虚假话语“我希望你收到此封邮件时一切都好”。
It organized information by subject (like a message board), not conversation (like email), and its architecture encouraged users to share knowledge broadly.
它按主题(如留言板)组织信息，而不是按对话(如电子邮件)组织信息，其结构鼓励用户广泛分享知识。
Everything was saved by default, so all the flotsam and jetsam of daily work was captured in a sort of running ledger.
默认情况下，所有日常工作中的零碎信息都被记录在一个运行的分布式总账中。
It worked on desktop and phone, and made switching between the two seamless.
它可以在台式机和手机上运行，并在两者之间实现无缝切换。
“As soon as you were in, it was like, ‘Oh, this is better. This is what it’s going to be for everybody in five years,’” says the tech executive Anil Dash,
“你一进去，感觉就像是，‘哦，这个更好。这就是未来五年每个人的生活，’” 科技高管阿尼尔·达什(Anil Dash)表示，
whose company at the time, ThinkUp, was one of Slack’s very first customers. “I was pretty evangelical about it.”
达什当时的公司ThinkUp是Slack最早的客户之一。 “我对此非常热衷。”
Part of the appeal was the way the software felt.
部分吸引力在于软件的感觉。
The company’s name was a wink, a self-aware joke, a sensibility: a hint at the kind of casual, effortless culture the companies that adopted it early seemed to be hoping to cultivate.
这家公司的名字是一个眨眼，一个自知的笑话，一种情感：暗示了早期采用这个名字的公司似乎希望培育那种随意、轻松的文化。
The product itself was bubbly and bouncy, with a kindercore color scheme and a little cartoon robot that showed you the ropes.
这款产品本身是活泼的，充满活力的，采用了儿童核心配色方案，以及一个向你展示诀窍的小型卡通机器人。
New messages announced themselves with a swoosh-tap-tap-tap that was inspired by jazz percussion and is, as the sound designer Josh Mobley told me when I called to ask about it, “Pavlovian,” “iconic,” and “very clever.” He added, “I wish I’d made it.”
用“嗖嗖嗒嗒嗒声”通知新信息，这是受爵士打击乐的启发，正如音效设计师乔希·莫布里(Josh Mobley)在我打电话询问时告诉我的那样，这是“巴甫洛夫氏的”、“象征性的”和“非常聪明的”。 他补充说，“我希望我能做到。”
The interface supported GIFs and emoji and offered upbeat, cutesy messages as it booted up.
当它启动时，该界面支持GIF文件和表情符号，提供欢快、讨喜的信息。
“It just felt like it wasn’t something made by, like, Microsoft,” Dash told me. “It just had a soul to it.”
“感觉它不是微软做的东西，”达什告诉我。 “它有一个灵魂。”
Slack is work software that insinuated itself into our lives precisely by feeling unlike work software.
Slack是一种工作软件，其通过让人感觉自己不像是工作软件而渗透到我们的生活中。
Slack was the beneficiary of good press and word of mouth—when its preview version debuted in 2013, 8,000 companies signed up within 24 hours—but also of a larger trend.
Slack受益于良好的媒体宣传和口碑——2013年其预览版发布时，有8000家公司在24小时内注册——但这也是一个更大的趋势。
From the dawn of the office to the mid-2000s, the tools people used to do their jobs were largely dictated from the top down.
从办公室诞生之初到2000年代中期，支配人们用来完成工作的工具在很大程度上是自上而下的。
But as technology became a consumer product—and especially after the first iPhone was released, in 2007—rank-and-file employees began doing work on their personal devices, using whatever software they wanted.
但随着技术成为一种消费产品——尤其是2007年第一部iPhone发布之后——普通员工开始使用他们想要的任何软件在他们的个人设备上工作。
And so workers installed Slack’s free, low-feature version on their work-issued laptops and started chatting, until eventually they converted enough people that leadership had no choice but to pay for a professional license.
于是，员工们在他们的办公用笔记本电脑上安装了Slack的免费、低功能版本，并开始聊天，直到最终他们使足够多的人转变习惯，以至于领导层别无选择，只能花钱购买专业许可证。
Soon enough, and without advertising at all, Slack was a perk, if not a shibboleth, for a certain kind of employee and a certain kind of company.
很快，在完全没有广告的情况下，如果特定类型的员工、特定类型的公司不守旧的话，那Slack对他们来说是一种福利。
