If that's your thing, that's your thing and go do it. But it's not a lot of peoples, and that's why Slack is so popular.
But that's not what I'm doing.
Company A does really good semantic analysis. Company B does chat, say Slack. Company C file storage. Company D does search.
Now, I'm spinning up or using a current server. In this case, lets do IRC to Company Chat, B (bidi bridge). I connect to Company B with my user, and a user on IRC. Logging is turned on and saved, to Company C.
Whenever messages are sent, they are run through API from company A, checking semantics and feel. Score applied personally to help devs be more humane.
While all this is happening, search D is going through files presented and making a searchable DB of date/time, channel, user, and text.
And, I just created a new product.
That's exactly the point. Is this what your day job is paying you to do?
Someone set up Slack for the company. The same person could have set up an internal IRC server.
I'm also one of the leads for IoT rollout. In essence, I look at many sectors and areas at the same time, and determine how it can be used in our org.
I was looking at message passing using IRC as a form of command and control. The hackers have used it successfully for controlling a force of DDoS clients; why not a server farm? I know that Ansible, chef, and others exist. But IRC is human readable, meaning status messages can be passively read.
Pretty much, I have a dream job. I can get funding for pretty much anything I want, have access to petabyte FS, access to 3 supers(HPC, not clusters), multiple clusters, and more. And then I'm asked, "what can you make with that?"
You learn quick in those situations.