Today, Slack announced that the team collaboration software has now been localized for the Japanese market. The San Francisco – based company, has started with English, then covered Spanish, French, and German, and now as the fifth language – it has covered Japanese.
Now, the users using Japanese as the chief conversation language for work purposes can manually change the language of the interface to Japanese, right from the ‘Preferences’ menu. Admins can also set the default language as Japanese from their respective dashboards.
Slack was founded in 2009 and now has been able to raise up to $700 million of funding, including a $250 million round, thanks to SoftBank of Japan back in September this year.
Slack may have become the first option as an enterprise-focused team collaboration tool, but it has been facing a gradual increase in competition from brands as big as Microsoft, Facebook, and Google.
Last year, Microsoft launched Teams as a part of Office 365, directing Slack to come up with a full-page ad in New York Times. Furthermore, Facebook introduced Workplace and has been promoting the same as a process. Google has also increased focus on Hangouts Chat, and Atlassian brought Stride and Hiptchat.
In order to surpass this competition and be on course to expand, Slack can bank on the Japanese established local backers, one like SoftBank. In fact, according to Slack, several Japanese companies have already been using the team collaboration service provider in English which, including the likes of Nikkei (a Tokyo stock market index) and Cookpad (a food tech company).
Having faith on these expansive opportunities, Slack would want to hope to grab hold of the potential that the Japanese market presents, which might ultimately turn out to be a game changer in the industry competition for them.
