In my experience, that's because corporate mail/groupware (especially anything by Microsoft) is configured so that it is completely non-productive, and so people seek out alternatives. Slack isn't as configurable, so can't be made as bad, but it's still pretty bad and builds in assumptions that make trying to use it asynchronously a major pain.

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scarface_74 4 days ago | parent [-]

How much easier can it be to work asynchronously than to use Slack? For the most part people don’t expect an immediate response. You can sync it with your corporate calendar to see when people are in meetings or on PTO, it tells you other people’s time zones and when there are on PTO and thier status. Most importantly, you can schedule messages.

There are times where I’m running errands during the day or traveling and working late and I schedule a message for 8:00 or 9:00 their time.

	▲	aragilar 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Decent email is significantly better than slack at the actual asynchronous part, but if you wanted something chat-like zulip is decent though I'd argue the whole chat-like sphere is never any good at asynchronous. The issue isn't people being in a different timezone in a one-to-one setup (that's easy to do), and if direct answers from a group are needed then it's not too different, but having any kind of sensible asynchronous discussion on slack is basically impossible (having suffered through far too many). Email (and to a lesser extent forums) are far better for this.