Slack gets too much hate, honestly. Years into it, even after the Salesforce acquisition, it remains a well-built product that does exactly what it set out to do: enable groups of people to communicate together in real time. That's fundamentally what a company is. You hire great people and you try to make things work. Of all the software a team uses in a given day, chat and email are where most of the actual work gets done, more so than Google Docs or Figma or any other tool. Getting this communication layer right matters enormously, and Slack got a lot of it right.
What I Admire
Slack nailed the core loop of real-time team communication in a way that made it the default for an entire generation of companies. The channel model, the threading, the integrations ecosystem, it all works, and it works well enough that what we've learned from Slack is honestly not to change too much about the fundamentals. The bones are right. The way people want to talk to each other in real time at work, the rhythm of channels and direct messages and threads, Slack figured that out, and the product deserves more credit than it typically gets.
Where We're Going Further
The problem with Slack is noise, and it's a problem that scales directly with company size. As teams grow, people end up babysitting Slack all day. The sidebar structure encourages a lot of errant messages, pings that don't need to happen, threads that spiral without resolution, drive-by messages in channels nobody's actively reading. The volume eventually reaches a point where you can honestly just pretend to work by staying busy in Slack without accomplishing anything meaningful, and that's not just a UX annoyance. It's a real organizational problem that affects productivity, focus, and the ability to do deep work.
The deeper structural issue, though, is that Slack has no inbox. There's no single place where you can see everything that needs your attention, ordered by importance. Instead, you're scanning a sidebar of channels, looking for bold names, clicking in and out of conversations, trying to reconstruct what actually matters from a firehose of activity. Email, for all its problems, at least gives you a list of things specifically directed at you. Slack gives you the firehose without a filter, and the result is that important things get buried alongside unimportant things with no reliable mechanism to tell them apart.
On top of that, there's the chasm between email and chat, which is arguably the most consequential structural problem in how modern companies communicate. Sales teams live primarily in email because that's where their customers and prospects are. Engineering teams live in Slack because they have no particular reason to check email during the day. When a customer reports a bug, sales copies engineering on an email thread that engineering either doesn't see or doesn't respond to in time, and that communication gap creates real cultural friction between departments, friction that compounds quickly as a company scales and cross-functional coordination becomes more critical.
Macro addresses both of these problems simultaneously. There's a real unified inbox. Emails, channel messages, tasks, and docs all flow into one feed, triaged by what needs your attention first. You don't scan a sidebar and guess what's important. The system surfaces priority across every type of content, applying the split inbox concept that Superhuman pioneered for email to everything, messages, tasks, docs, all ranked by what matters most right now. The noise problem doesn't disappear by making chat quieter. It disappears by giving you a reliable way to see what's actually important regardless of where it came from.
The email-chat chasm disappears too, because in Macro they're not two separate products from two separate companies. They're one system. When your sales team gets a customer email about a bug, they share it directly into the engineering channel. No screenshots, no “did you see my email?” It just shows up where the engineers are already working. Conversations in chat and email can create tasks directly. Documents link in naturally. The communication flows into outcomes instead of just generating more communication.
And because all of this, email, chat, tasks, docs, lives in a single system rather than being wired together through integrations, AI has complete context across everything your team is working on. It can search across all of it instantly. It understands the email thread and the internal conversation it sparked and the task that came out of it and the document it references, all without an integration layer or a sync job or hoping some third-party connection is still working. One system, shared memory, full context.
Slack proved that real-time team communication is the backbone of how companies operate, and we're not trying to undo that insight. We're trying to finish the job: chat plus email plus tasks plus docs, all in one place, with a real inbox, less noise, and AI that can actually see the whole picture.