FWIW I did the opposite leap and felt the opposite way- I really disliked workplace’s stream of seemingly randomly sorted information compared to e-mail lists I could filter, control, and search better. I really dislike workplace as a store of institutional knowledge. The chat was definitely way better than hangouts chat though.

I also felt like a lot of the developer tools looked nicer than their google counterparts at the surface but had major reliability problems under the hood where you would need to do a lot of turn it off and on again style operations.

I do really like Workplace, I think it provides a much better information architecture than docs/slack alone.

It’s possible to run a really disciplined Slack where updates go in a ready-only channel, and people broadcast their work appropriately - but it’s really hard. Most people default to non-discoverable DMs and then stream-of-thought in public channels, which are both bad for discovery in their own way.

Posts end up being a bit more considered than a slack message, but still lightweight, and more discoverable than docs.

Shame Google nixed their “Google plus for workplace”, I would love to see this workflow used more widely.