Slack
Team chat that became the default layer for work comms; switching means migrating channels, bots, and ritualized workflows.
Lock-in Stage 2
Users are retained through switching costs, data, network effects, or ecosystem dependency.
Slack delivered real surplus for distributed teams—searchable history, integrations, humane defaults. Today the lock-in is organizational: your company’s memory lives in threads, and competitors can’t easily replay years of context. AI upsells and pricing tiers add extraction pressure, but the core story is stage 2.
