Nope, totally wrong. Slack moved in at the exact right time for Slack to have moved in. The world needed a chat app that was easy to jump into and could be separate from their private world. Gchat was not and could never be that, because Gchat was associated with personal accounts.
It's been a while since we've had a decent chat client that we could use for work (no, you would not get designers, marketing and sales to use IRC), and Slack came up at just the right moment to make the rounds, and they know it. You can see it in the enormous marketing push they're making. They want to seal the deal and seal it quick, because, damn, it's not that hard to replicate that platform.
No, Gchat was not Slack before Slack. It was just another chat client that was limited by its auth scope.
It's been a while since we've had a decent chat client that we could use for work (no, you would not get designers, marketing and sales to use IRC), and Slack came up at just the right moment to make the rounds, and they know it. You can see it in the enormous marketing push they're making. They want to seal the deal and seal it quick, because, damn, it's not that hard to replicate that platform.
No, Gchat was not Slack before Slack. It was just another chat client that was limited by its auth scope.