The world's biggest social network has a plan to dethrone Slack

fuad lawal

April 5, 2017 7:35 PM

Facebook is leaving no stone unturned.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook might have figured out a way to dethrone Slack.

Mark Zuckerberg and his army are clearly not slowing down. We already told you about Facebook's plan to compete with Slack. Now, Facebook's plan has hit the second gear, and they intend to completely dethrone Facebook.

According to a statement by Facebook in December of 2016;

"More than 1,000 organizations are using Workplace worldwide, on every continent except Antarctica, and more than 100,000 groups already in use. Top 5 countries using Workplace are India, Norway, US, UK and France."

Workplace came with a pricing model that could cost companies over 10,000 strong $1/employee. That is, if you have over 10,000 employees, you'd have to pay $1 per employee every month.

That's quite a lot, especially since most users of Slack are free users.

How does Facebook want to pull this off?

They want to do it the Slack way; the free way. Now, they are splitting the Workplace options to two parts. There's going to be the "Workplace Standard", which will be free. Then there'll be the "Workplace Premium", which companies will have to pay for.

But why the turnaround now?

"Not every company wants to go through a full-scale enterprise deployment and not every company is in a position to pay for Workplace."

That's what Simon Cross said. He's Product Manager at Facebook. Workplace is trying to target smaller businesses now.

Wait, are Facebook and Workplace different?

Just a little. It's like Facebook, but where you'll normally have family and friends, you have colleagues. Your Workplace account is different from your Facebook So it looks like you're on Facebook, but you're actually in the office. Small teams create groups for tasks. You can organise events just like on Facebook, amongst other cool stuff.

When is it going to be available?

According to Workplace's website, the free version is coming soon. But while you wait, you can try out the premium version which is apparently free until September 30.

Do they stand a chance? Possibly? Most of the corporate world is already on Facebook, meaning there's less learning to do than using a completely different product like Slack (if they aren't already using it of course).

Only time will tell.

fuad lawal