Slack Leads Bottom-Up Evolution in Corporate Tech

As Slack Technologies Inc. flips a switch later Thursday and becomes a public company, it’s another sign of how far the world has progressed beyond the old times of corporate technology. What’s different now is that it actually matters what you want.

Until the last decade or so, the technology that workers used in office jobs was largely chosen by bosses far above them. The computer at the desk, the email system, the software that workers used to keep track of expenses or crunch a business unit’s finances were all imposed on them. And it was frequently terrible, because ease of use wasn’t necessarily an important quality to sell software.